A Brief and Wondrous Novel by Junot Diaz

October 25, 2009 · Filed under Book Review · Tagged Dominican, Fiction, Junot Diaz, Oscar Wao

Generational novels that span one family’s history can go one of two ways; they can be intriguing and provoking as a reader draws parallels between each family member’s story, or they can be incredibly, horrendously dull.

Which was my main concern when I picked up The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. There’s only so many different relatives a person can read about before they’re skipping through to the end of the book. But Díaz is a master of his craft. Though this story is not just about Oscar Wao, the stories about his other family members all play into one explanation for why Oscar is the way he is.

And what is Oscar? According to narrator Yunior de las Casas, a boy who dates Oscar’s older sister and becomes inexplicably tied up with in her family’s life, Oscar is the square of all squares. Oscar is an obese nerd who lives for RPGs and writing hundreds of pages of sci-fi novels full of chiseled heroes and galactic battle. He can write and speak Tolkien’s made-up Elvish language, and is constantly making allusions to protagonists from fantasy novels.

Oscar, in addition to holding infinite geekdom, is a Dominican with no game. Which, Yunior insists, is completely unheard of.  No game is an understatement; picture yourself at the height of puberty, burning with a crush on the girl who sits next to you in history class and all you can do is stutter and stare at your shoelaces.

That is Oscar’s love life, perpetually. And try as he might to break out of this cycle of rejection and self-loathing, he never seems to be able to do so.

But readers come to learn that this unfortunate helplessness to change may not be Oscar’s fault. In fact, Oscar’s whole family seems riddled with the worst of luck, a fact that the more superstitious Dominicans attribute to a fukú, or curse, that was put on Oscar’s grandfather and has followed the family from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey.

Readers learn about the life of Oscar’s older sister Lola, and how she must overcome her hatred of her aggressive, browbeating mother to take care of Oscar and persevere with her life. They read about Oscar and Lola’s mother, Belicia Cabral and her rugged childhood in the Dominican Republic from her abusive early years to her growth into a woman under the watchful eye of her aunt during an era of tyranny under the Dominican military dictator Rafael Trujillo.

And Díaz introduces Abelard Cabral, Belicia’s father who dared to hide his daughters from Trujillo’s hungry gaze and kicked off the fukú that ruined his family.

This isn’t just the story of a family’s history. This is a history lesson about an entire country during the era of a brutal dictator. The Dominican Republic spent from 1930 to 1961 under the reign of Rafael Trujillo, a President turned military dictator who was best known, as described by this story, for his numerous spies and his reign of violent killings throughout the nation.

Trujillo’s reign takes a central role in the lives of Belicia and Abelard, and it is through these stories that a reader comes to see the horrors of living under a dictatorship years after Hitler was brought down. Throughout the story Yunior compares Trujillo’s associates with the evil beings associated with Sauron’s reign in The Lord of the Rings.

And through Yunior’s narration his own motives are revealed. How, despite his promiscuous tendencies, he remains in love with Lola for years as Oscar’s life unfolds.  Yunior reaches out to Oscar as a favor to Lola, but even after he has thrown in the towel on trying to salvage her younger brother, his feelings for her never diminish.

Things seem hopeless for young Oscar Wao. But a fukú can always be overcome. And after a trip back to the Dominican Republic Oscar begins to understand that he may need to make his own last stand to finally find love and break his family’s curse.

From the descriptions of life in New Jersey to the intricately crafted expositions of the Dominican Republic over 60 years of change to the biting narration of Yunior complete with nerdy literary references to the completely startling but reticently persuasive idea of a family curse, Diaz has created a novel that will keep you on your toes and rooting for the underdog. But don’t just take my word for it. I mean, he did win the Pulitzer.

–Liz