The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Riverhead Books, HK$214
At one point in this book, Junot Diaz's overweight, serially lovestruck supernerd rhapsodises in a letter home: 'So this is what everybody's always talking about! Diablo! If only I'd known. The beauty! The beauty!'
The beauty, the beauty. Ignoring for the moment the context of Oscar's exclamation, the same cry can summarise the public response thus far to Brief Wondrous Life, Diaz's first novel and first published major work since his short-story collection Drown.
Brief Wondrous Life tells the story of a Dominican-American young man with two great loves: women and science fiction. After a short-lived reign as neighbourhood stud at the age of seven, 'when he had two little girlfriends at the same time', Oscar grew wide as he grew older - 'sophomore year [of high school] Oscar found himself weighing in at a whopping 245 (260 when he was depressed, which was often)' - and found himself mooning over, but never quite capturing, sister Lola's hot friends or the girls in his classes. The fact that the 'dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light sabre' didn't help matters.
'Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers' cars,' college roommate Yunior reveals, 'he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova and Heinlein ... moving hungrily from book to book, author to author, age to age.'
Through a meticulous fragmented narrative and shifting voices, Brief Wondrous Life illustrates Oscar's existence from youth to death. Diaz shows us Oscar holed up in his mother's house in New Jersey, and later his dorm room at Rutgers University. He takes us home for a visit to Santo Domingo, laundry-listing a dense, purple tangle of experiences familiar to many first- and second-generation emigres, like Oscar 'being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten).'
But Brief Wondrous Life serves as more than a biography of a nerdy Dominicano in 1980s to 90s New Jersey. The novel unpacks the history of a family and nation under the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo. The stink of Trujillo is unavoidable in this book. Through chapters and subsections and footnotes, the predominant voice we find out later to be Yunior rocks us back and forth through time.
He tells us about Oscar's feisty older sister Lola, who narrates a chapter in the first person; about Lola and Oscar's mother, Hypatia Belicia Cabral, whose pains came long before her lingering cancer; about Beli's family with poor patriarch Abelard and how the family's misfortunes all boil down to fuku - 'the Curse and the Doom of the New World'.
Diaz's storytelling is exceptional. There may be confusion as to why Yunior should be the one telling most of this story, but it is near impossible to linger long on Brief Wondrous Life's few questionable aspects when generations of Cabrals live history the way Diaz relates.
What is it to be Dominican, American, Dominican-American? During Oscar's first week at Rutgers University, 'the white kids looked at his black skin and his afro and treated him with inhuman cheeriness. The kids of colour, upon hearing him speak and seeing him move his body, shook their heads. You're not Dominican. And he said, over and over again. But I am. Soy Dominicano. Dominicano soy.'
And there must be recognition of the refusal 'to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves the whisper that says You Do Not Belong.'
We do not always see what we should see, in history or in our own families. And that is Junot Diaz's subtle lesson.