I Meet Oscar

By one account, it’s not too hard to figure out what’s going on in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Junot Diaz is drawing an exaggerated, fantastical version of himself – a sci-fi loving, bookish boy from the Dominican Republic who grows up in New Jersey and comes of age at Rutgers University. By another account, it’s just good storytelling (not so controversial to say about a book that won a Pulitzer Prize).

I’ll leave it to the experts to tease out how Diaz limns his characters and arranges his plot; I can only testify to being a casual reader who could now talk about Oscar de Leon as if he were a kid with whom I went to high school. I have a hunch about the swing of Dominican-American life and language, and have been introduced to the late Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. I also laughed a bunch of times.

I believe the book met its aims with me. I miss Oscar and am glad Trujillo is dead.

Now, the book is crass. It is animated by sex. Its main dramatic tension is that Oscar is an uncouth nerd in perpetual virginity born into a culture that prizes male virility:

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock

Both aspects, virgin boy and concupiscent culture, are played up … constantly. But here’s what keeps it from the clutches of pornography. First, it’s a coming of age story, and it’s hard to talk about a boy coming of age without acknowledging the huge share of attention and energy that goes towards the imagined paradise of the ladies’ upper legs. Second, if Diaz is right, all the dialog involving pussy, asses, bitches and the like – i.e. fornication – is essential for conveying Oscar’s social climate. Finally, as said above, Diaz is deft. Words that would be crude in another publication are often colorful or clever in Diaz’s.

That said, a couple of the characters were over-the-top “ghetto” for me: the mother’s first boy friend as well as the sister’s main boyfriend. But then again, I’m probably not the best arbiter of what’s authentically ghetto.

Tying up loose ends, it must be mentioned that street Spanglish runs throughout the book in dialog and narration. Without looking up any Spanish, I caught on to a bit and even chuckled when I came across “culocracy” in describing the D.R. under Trujillo – a.k.a. government by pursuit of ass. That’s the one overt political message to an otherwise private tale: Diaz vents a generation’s rage against the brutal Trujillo whom he describes in unflattering terms at nearly every turn in the book. And speaking of looking up words, I had to get out the dictionary to decipher at least a dozen English (and should have done so more often). All that sci-fi reading Diaz did as a kid come through in words such as “pulchritude” (a poetic term for beauty) and “incubus” (a man or god who mysteriously ravishes a woman).

This is the point in a post where I’d normally do a Sunday school move and cleverly relate Jesus to the topic at hand. Alas, I don’t think Trinitarian metaphor in the making for this one. There are references throughout Oscar Wao cosmic curses and blessings, “Fuku” and “Zafa” in Dominican parlance, but in my humble opinion they are pretty stylized and more meant to convey a culture than to press a pagan spirituality. I think I can just let Oscar be Oscar and Jesus be Jesus.