The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz or, “The Fukú is Gonna Git You”

I’ll tell you the truth, straight-up:

Hypatia Belicia Cabral de Leon — “Beli” for short — haunted me in a dream. It was this crazy impactful noir-reality anxiety dream. I was in another place, a feverish island that was not called the USA, where I was a tourist. I took a wrong turn, and soon enough a mugger was beginning the dance of our traditional transaction by shooting me in the ankle. And there in the sugar cane field, in the dream, while my mind began to attempt to break down the complexity of my colonially touristic intentions and fears, I saw something. It was fast but unmistakable, and it was the spirit of a proud, hurt girl, who later became a hurtful mother, who later was finally whupped by the invisible beatings of her very own cells — that ultimate thug Cancer. I’m not giving anything away by telling you that. The girl was Beli, who is the mother of Oscar “Wao” de Leon in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

For the past couple years, critics and literary types have been drooling over Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This is one of those novels that, by the time it comes out in paperback, has three pages of praise-filled review quotes and blurbs stacked at the front of the book before you even get to the title page. “Genius” is a very common word on these pages; “revelatory,” “groundbreaking,” and “masterpiece” all repeat, too. I’m not sure what to make of all that.

I have read a few short stories by Junot Díaz. I’ve heard good things about his writing from all sides; I know he does great work here in the Bay Area every summer with VONA, a workshop for writers of color, and for that I respect him. But my usual approach when faced with a title that comes with such copious praise is to rebel, to not read the book at all or else to counter with “it’s not all that.” (Yes, I should probably work on that.) However, once I do start a book, I always try to give it the respect it deserves until it earns otherwise. So. Let’s talk about the dream some more.

As in the novel, in my dream Beli is not the “main character,” but her story takes over. In my sleep I relived remnants of the scene in which the fearless, attitude-throwing, newly pregnant 16-year-old is beaten and presumably raped to within an inch of her life by a group of goons courtesy of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina. As Dungeons-and-Dragons loving Oscar would say years later, she must have come within a only one or two hit points of her life. (The occasional violence in the book is impeccably written — just detailed enough so that you know and can see the severity but also not even remotely voyeuristic or exploitative.)

In my dream I didn’t actually see Beli, although I’d read her and what happened to her only hours earlier when I was awake. I saw instead what she  saw, in those crazy minutes or hours before her unlikely survival: I saw a spirit in the fields, a man with no face springing up in a split-screen jump-cut from earth beneath the cane stalks to arise, a standing scarecrow of Bad. I saw a bad spirit, in the fields, I said to my sweetheart when I awoke scared. Because, well,  yeah. I’m as lily-white as the sand beneath the Caribbean sea, and even I know it too, to be true, as told by Junot Díaz: fukú americanus.

The fukú is the curse that hangs over the family of Oscar “Wao” De Leon, the hopelessly nerdy and unlucky-in-love title character in Díaz’s somewhat over-hyped but really good novel. It hangs over the entire island of the Dominican Republic, actually, and its entire diaspora, and possibly everyone who’s ever entered or left any place that has ever known colonization.

The premise of the novel is this: there’s this family in the Dominican Republic. Because of some things having to do with the horrendous and epic reign of Trujillo, the family becomes American. It’s a big sprawling tale that spans love, death, politics, geography, and pop culture oddities, and it’s told in different sections through the eyes of the different characters themselves.

We  start with Oscar’s world, the bleak sci-fi-buffeted reality of growing up an “un-Dominican” Dominican dude in Paterson, New Jersey in the 80s and 90s. (Because he’s such a nerd and so not a ladies’ man, Oscar is always having to tell people, no, really, soy dominicano!) Then the story breaks sharply and moves on to Oscar’s sister Lola’s 1980s teenagerdom, then we veer all the way back to the island for his mother Beli’s heartbreaking pre-diaspora life in Santo Domingo. Soon a few more switches back up to Oscar and Lola’s stories, and then back to the origins of the fukú: Oscar’s grandfather’s tragic undoing at the behest of that same imperialist fucker, El Jefe.

The narrator is, ostensibly, Yunior, a fantastically voiced sometimes-boyfriend of Lola who peppers his talk with Lord of the Rings references and footnotes that draw Lord of the Rings parallels explaining the low-down on twentieth-century Carribean history for those of us readers who may not know what that’s really all about. Yunior, however, is a device by which Diaz can go very closely into the perspectives of his various characters. He’s just the scribe in this epic Modern Tragedy. Through him we access the interiors of each of the characters (some more successfully than others– I never really felt like Oscar became clear to me, ultimately.) But the characters are solid and smart, the stories are great and the writing undeniably prolific. And Beli, of course, haunted me.

However, something kind of keeps needling me about the form of the novel. I’m always on the fence when it comes to circular narration. Sometimes I feel like a writer isn’t letting me in when they switch perspectives so frequently, like I wish the author could just pick a main character and have the balls to stick to that person’s story for a whole novel. But I also think that it is one of only a few non-hierarchical approaches to narrative that have lasted in contemporary literature, as well as an interesting way of jumping around in a story that lends intrigue and complexity to a novel’s structure and content. Some parts do certainly shine brighter in Oscar Wao’s epic family adventure. But in this case, I think the hop-scotching narration is actually really appropriate. In its detached messiness, it somehow begins to hint at the weird and wondrous experience of diaspora, of displacement and disappointment and the totally ridiculous way in which the little private things you do can threaten even the biggest, baddest boss out there. And Oscar’s life is indeed brief, and possibly wondrous… and certainly worth checkin’ out.

So, if anyone out there is reading these book reviews, what do y’all think of the literary trope by which authors write in the first-person perspective (or very close third-person) of many different characters in the novel? Or even switch time periods in an extreme fashion (I also keep thinking of Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, in which the narrative skips about 30 years halfway through). Is it a trick? A cop-out? A brilliant subversion of narrative norms? Tell us in the comments!