7/28/2019 Junot Diaz | Review

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B  o ok  s

September 6–12, 2007 Time Out Chicago 87TIMEOUTCHICAGO.COM

Curse case scenario

Junot Díaz’s new novelpits a dictator’s legacy against a ghettonerd.By Jonathan Messinger

If you, like so many self-respecting college students often do, skip thefootnotes in Junot Díaz’s new novel,

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, you’re only cheating yourself.

Tucked into text so small only anant could love it are gems like “Youreally want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookishboy of color in a contemporary U.S.ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having batwings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest,” and “Lil’ Fuckfacewent on murdering right to the end.”

Both of these notes, oddly enough,strike at the core of Díaz’s debut novel,the major work many have beenwaiting for since his story collection, Drown, blew critics out of the water in1997. The aforementioned X-Man isthe titular Oscar Wao, an obese“ghettonerd” who downs role playing 

games, sci-fi novels, and movies likefrench fries and Coke, and who isostracized by his New Jerseyneighborhood for lacking any gamewhen it comes to women. Thoughsupposedly the protagonist, Oscarreally is just the latest in the line to betormented by a fukú, a curse his familyhas lived with for generations.

As if to demonstrate the curse’spervasiveness, the story veers off Oscar’s slow-trotting path, into the

tortured history of his mother andgrandfather in the DominicanRepublic and the struggle of his sisterin America. It’s all narrated by Oscar’s“watcher,” a former boyfriend of hissister who takes Oscar in during college after a botched suicide attempt.

But what of Lil’ Fuckface? It’s theaffectionate term the narrator uses forRamfis Trujillo, son of the brutal

Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo,who looms large in the novel, even if much of the discussion of Dominicanpolitics is kept to the margins. There’sa feeling that Oscar’s family cannotescape the oppressive reign of Trujillo,that somehow their predicament of being poor, abused (each in his or herown way) and miserable in America isdirectly related to the dictator’s ghost.In other words, he’s the oneresponsible for the fukú.

While reading Oscar Wao, wecouldn’t help but think of GaryShteyngart, author of  AbsurdistanandThe Russian Debutante’s Handbook.Like Shteyngart, Díaz has a knack fortossing his characters into a complexethnic and political context andshowing the various ways it tears atthem—while simultaneously defining them. Díaz also shares Shteyngart’sparticular interest in diaspora, thedispersal of a country’s people across

the globe. The Dominican islandbirthed the fukú, but it’s its enduranceon the mainland that holds Díaz’sattention. All of which could result insome heavy-handed fiction—the kindthat treats characters as vessels of history—to make the author’s point.

But in Díaz’s work, the charactersbreak hearts on nearly every page.And the history lessons—rapid-fire

and hilarious accounts of some of theCaribbean’s worst offenders—areslung from the narrator’s college-groomed street tongue. At one point,he dubs Trujillo a “consummateculocrat” ( culo being a Spanish termfor, in English parlance, booty).

Eventually, of course, all of thesepressures heat the stew to a boil, andwe see it in each of the main players.The mother has been mistreated all of her life, and survived cancer more thanonce. The sister has been sexuallyabused as a child and is forced toreturn to the D.R. to live with hergrandmother after she runs away fromhome and is finally caught. Oscar is anoutcast’s outcast—even when hisDungeons & Dragons pals start

landing girlfriends, they won’tintroduce him to other nerd-loving ladies. After he returns from collegestill a virgin, his fortunes change, andthe result makes his life wondrous, if still brief. We’d say more, but we’reafraid of that fukú.

 Díaz reads from The Brief WondrousLife of Oscar Wao (Riverhead, $24.95) at the Harold Washington LibraryCenter on Monday 10. See listings.

“The characters

break hearts on

nearly every page.”

CHAOTIC GOOD

Díaz’s D&D playingprotagonist is at

the whim of history.Reviews

BooksListings 88

Don’t miss! 89

Brother, I’mDyingtttttt 

By Edwidge Danticat. Knopf,$23.95.

Danticat’s first memoir—following hersupremely successful debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory(an Oprah pickin 1998), and three other books of fiction—farms more of her backgroundas a Haitian-born American immigrant.

She sets up a natural push-and-pullof happiness and sorrow by relating 

how her father was dying frompulmonary fibrosis in New York at thesame time she found out she waspregnant. The tale of her father’s deathruns parallel with one from herchildhood, when her parents left her atage four in the care of an uncle as theysought a better life in America. Uncle

 Joseph and his wife, Tante Denise,raised Danticat for eight years untilher parents were able to send for herand her younger brother.

Things aren’t easy in America. Sheand her brother struggle to fit in with afamily they hardly know: There aretwo American-born younger brotherswhen they arrive, and their parentsseem like strangers or figments of foggy childhood memories.

Danticat’s beautiful prose reads asthough you’re sitting at her knee,hearing a favorite story told again.Warm and inviting, she makes Haitiseem like a second home to the reader.That’s not to say Danticat waxessentimental. Full of controlled angerand grief, the author strips her family’shistory bare.—  Beth Dugan

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