The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, Riverhead Books, 2007, $24.95

By Karl Nastrom 
 
 By his own admission, Junot Diaz does not have it easy.  The international success of his 1996 story collection Drown jacked expectations higher than the hormone level at a junior high dance.  Then there is the pressure of being the Dominican-American writer.  No wonder he took 11 years to write his first novel. 
 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao does not exactly pick up where Drown left off, but it shares its predecessor’s preoccupation with the boundary layer inhabited by immigrants equally estranged from their past and present homelands of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, respectively. 

      The “hero” Oscar is a world-class nerd whose womanizing “reached its apotheosis in the fall of his seventh year” when he manages to get two girlfriends at once. But soon he must choose, and he dismisses the plainer girl because she sometimes smells “like pee” and is “puertorican”, leading his mother to bar the girl from their house.  Within a week, Oscar is dumped by the prettier girl he stayed with and dissolves into tears.  His prowess has peaked.

      By his sophomore year, Oscar is overweight, unattractive and introverted, with “none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it.”  Unfortunately, Oscar experiences no corresponding drop in his adolescent sex drive; in fact, “he was still the passionate enamorao who fell in love easily and deeply” with “the kind of curly-haired big-bodied girls who wouldn’t have said boo to a loser like him but about whom he could not stop dreaming.”  His desperate quest to get laid provides the book’s main vector, and he keeps trying and dreaming through high school and college and beyond. In his mid-20’s he makes a final trip to the Dominican Republic to rendezvous with a certain forbidden lady – a police captain’s mistress – and it is here that he meets his fate.

      Oscar plays out most of his drama in New Jersey instead of the D.R. because his mother, Beli, in the summer before her sophomore year, develops into everything Oscar later would not be.  Diaz writes, “Every neighborhood has its tetúa, but Beli could have put them all to shame, she was La Tetúa Suprema: her tetas were globes so implausibly titanic they made generous souls pity their bearer and drove every straight male in their vicinity to reevaluate his sorry life.”  Thus equipped, Beli dabbles briefly with boys her own age but soon attracts the attention of a much older man called the Gangster.  When she gets pregnant with his child, she learns via a near-fatal beating in a cane field that her Gangster is married to a sister of the Dominican Gangster, dictator-for-life Rafael Trujillo.  Against her wishes, Beli flees to the U.S., meeting on the airplane the man who will become the father of her two children. 

      While Oscar and Beli trudge indefatigably toward their own foregone conclusions, Diaz unpacks make-or-break occurrences in the lives of Oscar’s sister Lola, her boyfriend Yunior (narrator of this novel and very similar to the Yunior who starred in Drown), and three generations of “Domo” relatives who are getting shafted, literally and figuratively, by Trujillo.  Throw in the footnotes and parenthetical details of Dominican history and it’s a wonder Diaz fits it all into 335 pages. 
 Diaz reaches his ambitious goals largely because he has the writing chops to do anything he wants.  He can smack the reader in the face or whisper in the reader’s ear until the reader decides to smack himself.  In one scene he sums up Trujillo’s Dominican Republic with this memorable image: “One day you were a law-abiding citizen, cracking nuts on your galería, the next day you were in the Cuarenta, getting your nuts cracked.”  
 The profanity-laced, hyper-libidinous bilingual engine driving Diaz’s prose is made all the more powerful by his equal dexterity with slow, tender moments full of space and silence.  For instance, our time with Oscar’s family begins with Beli calling Lola into the bathroom to feel the cancer that is growing in one of her breasts.  Beli kneads Lola’s fingers deeper and deeper into her flesh, becoming frustrated that Lola can’t feel the cancer. Here Diaz writes like a poet, gambling that a handful of words and the reader’s imagination can articulate the past, present and future of both characters, as well as the terminal tensions already straining their relationship.   

      Much of what transpires in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is almost too much to bear.  The dangers and drama of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic are as absurd as professional wrestling or genre fiction, a point emphasized by Diaz: “(who more sci-fi than us?)”  Oscar wants to lose his virginity and write science fiction well enough to be “the Dominican Tolkien”; his mother just wants to survive her past and her cancer, and wishes her son would be more masculine, like the many men who have done her wrong over the years.  None of it is possible in the world of this story, often hilarious in the telling, but when it counts its as hard-hitting as unblocked blows delivered by goons in a cane field at night.  This is Diaz’s overarching point: no one gets out alive. But even for Dominicans living in Diaspora there are a lot of laughs to go with the tears.

KARL NASTROM has been changing jobs and writing for years. He has served in the U.S. Air Force, represented legal clients from Fortune 500 companies to death row inmates, and currently is teaching high school math in the Mississippi Delta. He holds a law degree from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Newcastle University, and great hopes for the future, whatever it brings.