A love supreme - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao A Novel, Junot Díaz, Riverhead: 340 pp., $24.95
Un maldito hombre. More dangerous than comic supervillains and monsters, devious and controlling, and in some cases, as with Rafael Trujillo, "the dictatingest dictator that ever lived," who wrecked the Dominican Republic for generations, stronger than prayer or God. Un maldito hombre is what Oscar Wao, the ghetto supernerd hero of Junot Díaz's much-awaited first novel, is not.
That is why his life is brief, and why it is wondrous.
Everyone will be talking about how 11 years have passed since "Drown," Díaz's first book, and why it has taken so long for him to finish this one. But this summer, I saw my first panoramic painting in Switzerland. A circular work that takes up the top story of a museum, the panoramic is designed to illuminate and educate and move people; it took years to complete this painting, which is about the aftermath of one battle on the disputed French-Swiss border and includes thousands of human and animal subjects to draw the viewer in.
"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is panoramic and yet achingly personal. It's impossible to categorize, which is a good thing. There's the epic novel, the domestic novel, the social novel, the historical novel and the "language" novel. People talk about the Great American Novel and the immigrant novel. Pretty reductive. Díaz's novel is a hell of a book. It doesn't care about categories. It's densely populated; it's obsessed with language. It's Dominican and American, not about immigration but diaspora, in which one family's dramas are entwined with a nation's, not about history as information but as dark-force destroyer.
Really, it's a love novel.
And it's narrated by a man who keeps rejecting love, not a member of Oscar's family but rather Yunior -- yes, for those who've read "Drown," I'm talking about Yunior, whose brother is gone and whose mother was raised in the D.R. Yunior is the last guy you'd expect to narrate this novel, which is why he might be perfect for the task.
So Yunior tells Oscar's story, ferociously and aggressively and with some guilt. And he doesn't care whether you, the reader, get lost. You'd better keep up, figure out the context and immerse yourself, which is the same thing I've always felt about those writers from the dominant culture who expect me to know terms and slang and references I might never have heard, considering where I grew up.
