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Writer Spins A 'Wondrous' Mishmash

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By KEVIN WALKER | The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 12, 2007

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz (Riverhead, $25)

It isn't that Junot Diaz is the only contemporary author with literary aspirations who mashes high and low culture into an entertaining mix. It's the fact he does it so well, and also, yes, the fact he was born in the Dominican Republic and now lives in the United States, which gives him a very different set of cultural references than, say, fellow mashers Michael Chabon or Dave Eggers.

"Oscar Wao" is about all the things that make life go — love, family, power, money, sex — but Diaz, in his first novel, filters it through lonely, fat, nerd Oscar de Leon, son of a Dominican immigrant growing up in New Jersey. Oscar is into Dungeons and Dragons, "Akira" and "The Lord of the Rings."

He's not a geeky outcast in his neighborhood. He is the geeky outcast in his neighborhood. And, poor soul, he's a romantic, falling in love often and hard. This is a problem since the guy clocks in at more than 300 pounds and no girl will go near him. He suffers, feeling he has descended into a "moronic inferno."

Oscar is heading for trouble. Diaz plants the seed when he mentions the "curse and doom put upon the New World" with the arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean. "We are all of us its children," he writes, "whether we know it or not."

The novel's midsection revolves around the childhood of Beli, mother to Oscar and his sister, Lola, in the Dominican Republic. Here Diaz begins not only mixing cultural references with the deftness of a high-end literary bartender but also language itself, mixing Spanish phrases with English (perhaps a metaphor for the modern smashing of cultural barriers, or perhaps because this is how many Hispanic-Americans speak in their own neighborhoods).

There are gangsters, corrupt politicos, bloodshed and plenty of drama in this section. Diaz also turns out phrases that might make Gabriel Garcia Marquez smile, such as this, describing Beli's co-workers in a Dominican restaurant:

"And then there was Lillian … whose rancor against the world turned to glee only when humanity exceeded in its venality, brutality and mendacity even her own expectations…and Indian Benny, a quiet, meticulous waiter who had the sad airs of a man long accustomed to the spectacular demolition of dreams."

In the third section, the narrator, Yunior — who to this point has compared himself to The Watcher, a comic character who observes but does not interfere — gets into the act, becoming Oscar's roommate at Rutgers. While the story somewhat sags, Diaz pulls the reader through with the sheer compulsive nature of his writing. While he explores mature themes, he also finds interesting ways to reference such seminal fantasy/science fiction as Stephen King's "The Stand," the comics of Jack Kirby and, most significantly, "The Watchmen," a comic series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons quoted near the novel's finale.

It took Diaz years to write this novel. Let's hope now he can be as prolific as the genre writers he so obviously admires.

Kevin Walker is a writer for TBO.com and the Tribune

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