57th Street

For Christmas “Santa” a.k.a. my mother got me Junot Diaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

It’s about what one could only describe lightly as a fat Dominican nerd in ghetto New York during the ’80s. I’m always cautious of new fiction, nomatter how much praise it gets, and was even more so with this novel being as Oscar’s life is like a more pathetic version of mine. (If that’s possible.) But I have to say, it grew on me.

Our boy Oscar longs for two things: First, to be in love with someone, and second —a close second that is— to be the next J.R.R. Tolkien. He’s totally obsessed with scifi and fantasy.

Oscar had always been a young nerd—the kind of kid who read Tom Swift, who loved comic books and watched Ultraman—but by high school his commitment to the Genres had become absolute. Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers’ cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents’ eyes, he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein, and even the Old Ones who were already beginning to fade —E.E. “Doc” Smith, Stapledon, and the guy who wrote all the Doc Savage books—moving hungrily from book to book, author to author, age to age…Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic.

If that’s not enough, Oscar is also cursed literally and figuratively. The only success he has in life is his willful incursions into fantasy and scifi. Oscar isn’t smart, brave, classy, charming, attractive, funny or any other card that you could win a game of poker with. It’s all horribly depressing.

Somehow though, Junot Diaz writes in a way that keeps the reader interested. Maybe this girl will be different. Maybe this time Oscar will have some good luck. No and no. He does get close to girls but only in the friend sense (situations all too familiar to me).

…Oscar fell in love with a girl in his SAT prep class…Her name was Ana Obregon, a pretty, loudmouthed gordita who read Henry Miller while she should have been learning to wrestle logic problems. On about their fifth class he noticed her reading Sexus and she noticed him noticing, and, leaning over, she showed him a passage and he got an erection like a motherfucker…Ana was a talker, had beautiful Caribbean-girl eyes, pure anthracite, and was the sort of heavy that almost every Island nigger dug, a body that you just knew would look good in and out of clothes; wasn’t shy about her weight, either; she wore tight black stirrup pants like every other girl in the neighborhood and the sexiest underwear she could afford and was a meticulous putter-on of makeup, an intricate bit of multitasking for which Oscar never lost his fascination.

But Oscar’s luck just never seems to change. Anybody who’s had a hopeless crush on a girl has had moments like these:

It was during one of those little chats that Ana let slip, God, I’d forgotten how big Manny’s cock was.

As I made it through the first third of this novel I deeply considered why my mother would give me such a sad, although highly lauded, tale for my leisure. I have to admit though, despite the horrible story Diaz weaved, the writing is good. It’s in the style of a fairy tale in that everything is exaggerated. In describing one character related to Oscar (literally), Junot leaves a lot up to the reader’s imagination.

Every neighborhood has its tetua, but Beli could have put them all to shame, she was La Tetua 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. She had the Breasts of Luba (34DDD). And what about that supersonic culo that could tear words right out of niggers’ mouths, pull windows from out their motherfucking frames? A culo que jalaba mas que una junta de buey. Dios mio! Even your humble Watcher, reviewing her old pictures, is struck by what a fucking babe she was

The book is covered with footnotes of science fiction/fantasy and Dominican Republic references. Even I, a geek if there ever was one, was unfamiliar with some of them. But that didn’t really strike me as a huge impediment for reading Oscar Wao.

One mystery that this book never reveals is why Oscar never changes. I mean he does change, he tries to become more attractive by losing weight and losing the glasses and afro. That doesn’t make a difference. He never tries to hide his passions. They’re an ingrained part of him, even if it only makes things that much harder.

Oscar’s life is plagued by tyranny that he can hardly handle, much less ignore. There are happy moments and Oscar eventually does find love. Here’s the part that stuck with me most. He ponders why it took so long and had to be so painful for him to finally find love. The response?

He wrote that he couldn’t believe he’d had to wait for this goddamn long. (Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.)

As a writer, Diaz isn’t your average white guy who writes a half-decent prose. He’s very much the son of an immigrant Dominican family, like Oscar. To get a better sense of the author, watch this video below, I mean, if you’re that bored…