The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz
Riverhead Books, 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 1594489580
352 pages; $24.95

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an exciting story, all of it – probably more so in the portions that take place in the Dominican Republic during the terrible reign of the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo than those telling the story of the title character – but the manner in which Junot Diaz chooses to tell the story, the literary pyrotechnics, get in its way. The story is told without continuity, jumping from the tale of one character in one era to that of another character in another era, without regard to decade or generation. Different portions are told by different narrators, and sometimes the narrator is not identifiable until well into his or her portion of the tale. It often lapses into Spanish without translation, making those who read only English feel as if they are missing half the tale.

Oscar is a nerd – a hugely overweight young man with glasses who knows everything about science fiction and role-playing games but nothing about girls except that he lusts constantly and helplessly after them. He comes from a family that has endured more than its share of tragedy, beginning with his grandfather, who inadvertently insulted Trujillo in an attempt to save his eldest daughter from rape and ruin. His mother, the youngest daughter in the family when it lost everything in the aftermath of her father’s downfall, endured an unspeakable childhood as a virtual slave until she was rescued by a distant relative. But disaster followed her in her choice of boyfriends, when she again tangled with the Trujillo family; and the curse, the fuku, even followed her to Brooklyn. She transmitted the incredible beauty of the women in her family to her daughter, who had the same sort of trouble with men that seemed inescapable. Three generations, constant horrors. It seems that the island paradise can bring no good to anyone.

Nor can Oscar escape the fuku. He can’t get laid to save his soul, it seems, and it looks very much as if he is going to die a virgin. Whenever he falls in love, which is often, it is with someone completely inappropriate, usually with a woman who already has a boyfriend, and often with a boyfriend who is downright hazardous to Oscar’s health. Women love him as a friend, but cannot see beyond the tattered copy of Alan Moore’s Watchmen that Oscar holds close to his blubbery belly. Will love – and sex – ever find him? And will he survive the experience?

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is not a happy book. You will find yourself enraged at Trujillo’s despotism (and the complicity of the United States in it), learning more than you perhaps knew about this dark history. You will be depressed at Oscar’s own depression, particularly if you yourself were a nerdy kid with glasses and a book. You will feel the power the women feel in their beautiful bodies, and the fierceness of their love and determination when they are with the men they want.

Diaz is a powerful writer, but he needs to bring all that power under control. I have no quarrel with writing that experiments with narrative, that changes focus, that plays with the reader; but I demand that the play be fair. I want to know who is talking to me: is this Oscar’s college roommate, his sister, a third-person omniscient narrator? I want to know what is being said, not have to run to my computer and get a bad translation with the Google translator when some Spanish appears that I can’t translate with the help of my single year of college Spanish. This writing has so much energy and life; now it needs direction.