The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz
Riverhead Books
340 pages

Junot Diaz's 1996 short story collection, Drown, was lauded for its beauty and subtlety, its humor and humanity. It won awards and hit bestseller lists, and inspired the phrase 'in the tradition of Drown,' which graced the back cover of more than one debut work of fiction by a  writer of color -- a testament not only to the publishing industry's lack of imagination, but also to the doors the Dominican-born Diaz's success left ajar. They have since been walked through by a succession of young, multicultural, multi-literate American writers whose work has gone a long way toward rejuvenating the literary scene. 

The general assumption was that Drown was a warning shot, heralding the novel to come. Why the literary establishment increasingly relegates story collections to the status of omens is another conversation, but the ensuing pause between Drown and the newly published The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao stretched far beyond pregnant; the novel became overdue. Perhaps adding to a 'tradition' wasn't easy. 

The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was worth the wait. The titular character is a Dominican gordo from Paterson, New Jersey.  Lonely and awkward, obsessed with reading, watching, and writing sci-fi, Oscar pines for love but seems destined to disprove the widely-accepted theory that no Dominican male has ever died a virgin. His story forms the narrative core of an expansive novel that also tells the tales of Oscar's spunky sister, Lola, their wrathful ex-beauty of a mother, Beli, and Beli's father, Abelard.  The novel toggles backward and forward in time, shifting between Santo Domingo and New Jersey.  The shadow of Trujillo, the Dominican Republic's vicious dictator, looms large over the life of the family, as does the fuku, an ancient curse that may or may not explain the misery, heartbreak, violence and mother-child conflict that have characterized their last sixty-plus years. 

Lola narrates her own story, and the rest of the book is left in the hands of Yunior, her sometimes-boyfriend and Oscar's college roommate; he bears more than a passing resemblance to the Yunior featured in several of Diaz's stories.  Yunior's identity is revealed midway through the novel, well after the question of whose voice we are reading begins to grow  distracting.  This  minor mystery is Diaz's most questionable decision, one of a few  instances in which the surgical scars endemic to such a long writing process, presumably full of  cuts and rearrangements and augmentations, flash before the reader. 

Otherwise, both narrative voices are superb, deliciously casual and vibrant, shot through with wit and insight even when the material turns dramatic: Abelard's undoing at the hands of the Trujillato, Oscar's final, tortured days, Beli's serial victimization at the hands of men.  For a novel in which fates are determined by sexuality -- Oscar's machismo-deficiency, Yunior's infidelities, Lola and Beli's overpowering allure, Abelard's refusal to allow the monstrous Trujillo access to his daughter -- there is a bit too much drooling over various female body parts, even for a narrator of Yunior's appetites. Diaz is clearly interested in investigating stereotypes about Dominican beauty and sexuality, but sometimes the attention lavished on the novel's women verges on juvenilia.  Nonetheless, Diaz's  mastery of his characters – their hearts and the heart of the country from which they come – imbues The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao with grace and soul.

The press materials accompanying the novel tout Oscar as literature's first "ghetto nerd," a long-overdue representative of an invisible group.  It is a strange claim; were Oscar to cross the bridge into Manhattan, he could soon be trading anime recommendations with Paul Beatty's Tuffy, the eccentric, portly Harlemite who starred in the novel Tuff.  From there, it is a short trip to Queens, where Oscar could discuss obesity and alienation over a beer with Anthony, the protagonist of Victor Lavalle's The Ecstatic.  Then he could hop a gypsy cab to Brooklyn and fantasize about being a writer with Dylan, the  constantly-mugged-for-his-comic-book-money future-journalist of Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude.

But if Oscar is not the first 'ghetto nerd,' he is one of the most vividly rendered, and Diaz does a masterful job of using Oscar's referential palette --  from Tolkien's Middle Earth to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Marvel Universe -- to illuminate the absurdity and horror of life under Trujillo (whose viciousness demands comparison with the villains of fantasy) and the daily strain of  American marginality.  Critics are sure to comment on the cultural and stylistic mash-ups to be found here, the fact that Diaz's narrator can switch from arch, romantic prose to flippant slang, from English to Spanish, from manga to In The Time of the Butterflies. Some will find this level of democracy unrealistic -- particularly once the novel's main narrator is revealed to be a college professor -- not realizing that this kind of multi-literacy and gleeful cross-stitching is a hallmark of hip hop generation fiction.  Others will rhapsodize over Diaz's expansiveness as if it is a bold choice, not understanding how naturally his expert mixology is derived. 

The great achievement of The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Diaz's ability to balance an intimate, multigenerational story of familial tragedy with a meditation on the larger horrors that have gripped their homeland. The past and the present remain equally in focus, equally immediate,  and Diaz's acrobatic prose toggles artfully between numerous realities, keeping us enthralled with all.

Adam Mansbach's novels include Angry Black White Boy (Crown) and the forthcoming The End of the Jews (Spiegel & Grau/Doubleday).