A Brief Wondrous Post about Junot Diaz

I just finished reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz a week or so ago, and holy crap is it awesome (next stop: this. my brain is going to om nom that puppy up on my next long car trip).

This book is amazing for dozens of reasons, but the one I'd like to start off with is that this is Junot Diaz's first novel. He published a short story collection, Drown, in 1997, and a few short stories in literary magazines in the late 90's, and it wasn't until eleven years later that he came out with Oscar Wao. Diaz describes his eleven year absence from the literary world as "a perfect storm of insecurity and madness and pressure and you name it." I can't imagine how profoundly an 11-year long creative drought would shake my confidence, and yet though this novel is massive in scope it never once falters. His style is SO unique, he's always negotiating these major dualities in his characters, at times the book is laugh-out-loud funny, and he pulls it all off so effortlessly that you forget how sophisticated and complex the themes you're receiving are, and it would never occur to you that this is his first effort as a novelist. Maybe if his style had been whetted against public opinion for those 11 years, Oscar Wao wouldn't be so unique.

One of the reasons I decided to read this book was the endorsement of my friend Joel and his recollections of a talk given by Diaz at my dearly missed alma mater, Oberlin. After I read the book, I was really curious to hear him discuss his work, and I found this interview with Junot Diaz on "Fresh Air" with Terri Gross. Joel, if you're reading, you definitely didn't undersell this guy; dude is a freaking genius. Because the interview is about half an hour long and I don't expect anyone to listen to the whole thing - though I seriously would recommend letting it play while you're doing the dishes or making dinner, you won't be disappointed - I wanted to highlight a few really though-provoking points that he makes in the interview that bear repeating.

At one point, Terri asks him to comment on the role of language in his upbringing, and he notes that he was fluent in at least 4 different forms of communication (like a 21st century immigrant C-3PO) - the formal Dominican Spanish he spoke with his parents at home, the more Americanized, urban, Puerto-Rican Spanish he spoke with other kids in his neighborhood, the English he used in everyday conversations around New Jersey, and the academic English he spoke when he was bused to a more affluent school district. He also points out that even groups of friends develop their own unique forms of communication that distinguish themselves from their peers and the larger community - anyone who's been on the inside of a really close group of friends, or even co-workers, can understand what a delight it can be to become fluent in what is in some ways a codex of your own creation. He explains that he tried to express all these multiple fluencies at once in order to craft a more complete portrait of how layered an immigrant identity can be. He says that not only is it difficult to communicate the breadth of your real experience to others, but also that "it's hard to pull together a self when you have all these disparate threads running through your life when you're expected to choose a voice."

Another interesting point he makes about the role of language in the novel comes after Terri comments that many of the Spanish phrases in the book, as well as most of the comic book references, go right over her head. Junot replies that it was essential for the narrator to use phrases and references that the reader may or may not understand in order to convey an immigrant's authentic experience, not because it keeps a pulse of multiculturalism alive in all his characters, but because - get this, this is such a cool insight - immigrants rarely have the luxury of understanding 100% of the things that are said to or around them. As an immigrant, you grow up with a level of uncertainty that in some ways provokes you to always be adapting and learning, and in other ways brings you to accept that "we live in a world where not everything is intelligible to us," and that ambiguity is sometimes a part of life.

He also says that ultimately, this is a book for people who love to read, because a reader thinks of a book differently than a critic does. He says that a true reader loves the opportunity to learn and explore anything that books offer, and that a devoted reader's bookshelf will have a crazy variety of books because they love to geek out. He wanted to have his book resemble an avid reader's bookshelf, to have something in it for everyone. He definitely succeeded, this book is packed with history, humor, mad pop culture and music references - Lola wears Tribe Called Quest t-shirts while Oscar joneses after a Joy Division honey - and I've got to say, when he described one of Trujillo's generals as "the Witch King of Angmar," I got chills. If you want to get an idea of what I'm talking about, check out this annotated guide - the author of which is clearly not down with Diaz's point about being at peace with the unknown, but it's still interesting to look at.

Another thing I really like in this novel that isn't touched on in the Fresh Air interview that I would love to hear him discuss is that, even though Oscar is the titular character and the book's story arc follows his life, the real driving force of the novel is, in some ways, his sister Lola. Though the most frequent narrator is her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Yunior, I think that that is mostly a choice guided by the fact that Yunior can be an omniscient third-person narrator with a fair amount of authority when Diaz wants him to be, and a fully realized character when that suits his purposes. Diaz might feel more comfortable in the voice of a young Dominican man at Rutgers, but you're always aware that most of what he knows must have been told to him by Lola. Which makes her the real pilot of this narrative. Also, she's the only character other than the narrator to use the first person voice, so she's the only person to tell her own story. This is a huge stylistic choice to make, and I definitely think it says something. Also, a key part of most immigrant/diaspora literature is the failure of parents and their second generation children to communicate, and Junot does the whole back-to-back daughter narrative followed by mother vignette so well Amy Tan is sitting somewhere going "well hush my mouth." A lot of the dynamism and dimension of this family's story is articulated through the eyes of the women in the de Leon family, and that is really cool.

If anyone can find a transcript of the Junot Diaz talk at Oberlin, I would really love to read it. I found one kind of posted on facebook, but it cut off right before the answer to the question "why should we read literature?" If anyone can remember what he said, tell me! I so wish I'd been there. Kindly-looking googleimages Junot wishes you a good night, thanks for reading!