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That
readers will not see our hero live through the end of the
story is prefigured in this book's title. Oscar De Leon (nicknamed
Wao, a play on a mispronunciation of "Oscar Wilde") is a grossly
overweight uber-nerd, a fan of Dune and role-playing
games, who happens to be one of the greatest romantics ever
put to paper. His story is rich with heartache and desperation
as he chases women in both his native New Jersey and the home
of his ancestors, the Dominican Republic. In this supernatural
Dominican take on the untimely death story, Junot Díaz
writes with a rapper's fluidity, mixing Spanish and New Jersey
slang. The elements of his story are under tight control as
Díaz proceeds to interweave the strands of history,
family saga, and adolescent yearning that make up this unique
and highly enjoyable first novel.
As lovable
as readers may find the hero, poor Oscar's progress through
life is doomed to be stunted. Though he lives with two females—his
mother, a combative Dominican woman, and Lola, his scholarly
sister—they cannot save him from falling for girls who
will forever be far from his reach. After meeting Ana in an
SAT prep course, Oscar falls for her, producing a love that
has "the density of a dwarf-motherfucking-star and at times
he was a hundred percent sure it would drive him mad. The
only thing that came close was how he felt about his books;
only the combined love he had for everything he'd read and
everything he hoped to write came even close."
But Díaz
knows that a simple story of a teenager's burning, unrequited
love isn't enough to make a novel epic; he introduces the
far more complex (and haunting) world of the Dominican Republic
as well. Oscar's relatives—including his wise, if overly
gentle, grandmother—emerge as figures haunted by the
rule of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator who reigned over
the Dominican Republic for 30 years. Oscar's mother, grandmother,
and sister all have a chance to tell their stories in this
novel, and the results are riveting. Díaz avoids dwelling
on the calamity of their stories for too long and moves through
the events with the immediacy and urgency of an oral storyteller.
Much
of the story has to do with old-world ideas, central to them
the idea of a fukú or "curse of the New World."
Fukú is what creates a background of darkness
behind the bright and vibrant characters, constantly threatening
the lives of everyone at once. Or is that the presence of
Trujillo that looms so ominously over the story and menaces
the characters? Fukú is a pretty weak explanation
of why bad things happen, and anyone wanting to reason out
why the story ends the way it does can easily turn to more
logical explanations—bad people come into power, and
terrible things ensue. More than just doom, the characters
are motivated by conflicted feelings toward their homeland,
wanting simultaneously to connect with the past as well as
to escape it. "But if these years have taught me anything,"
says Lola, in her own chapter, "it is this: you can never
run away. Not ever. The only way out is in. And that's what
I guess these stories are all about."
Though
it evokes the presence of the Old World beautifully, Díaz's
novel is most interesting as a character study of people who
are incapable of changing, who try to reinvent themselves
and fail. Oscar spends one year living with Lola's boyfriend,
who urges him to lift weights and start jogging so that he
will not "perish a virgin," but in the end Oscar gives in
to his true self—a voracious reader and writer, whose
idea of a good pickup line is telling a girl on the E bus,
"If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen
Charisma!" He throws out the running shoes and puts up more
Lord of the Rings posters. Lola's boyfriend himself
cannot change his own ways, having cheated on Lola repeatedly
without being able to explain why he keeps doing it. Perhaps
the most intransigent character of all is Beli, Oscar's belligerent
mother, whose unspeakable beginnings were unfortunately what
ultimately shaped her life.
As F.
Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway admired Gatsby, so the narrator
of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao admires Oscar
absolutely and obsessively, internalizing the heroism that
he sees embodied in this otherwise hopelessly nerdy adolescent
from New Jersey. Though it's not made entirely clear why our
narrator finds Oscar quite so enchanting, it's easy to be
moved by this transcontinental story, which combines such
seemingly disparate elements. Popular culture blends with
old-world wonder in a work that has set a new high standard
for family legends.
(February,
2008)
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