Fiction: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao By Junot Díaz Faber, 335pp. £12.99Sex, not politics, not money, not even religion, accounts for most of the violence that rumbles through the pages of this family saga with a difference. And there is a difference, writes Eileen Battersby.
This is the first novel from the Santa Domingo-born, New York-honed Junot Díaz, one of those writers who make the most of every tradition they are touched by. There are traces of the island, distant perhaps, but still sufficiently familiar for him to steal the energy while rejecting the nostalgia; there is the awareness of a culture within a larger black experience and, of course, he makes fantastic use of the street language - of the drugged-out, disillusioned underclass of New Jersey life. Díaz evokes the speech that draws on the most recent of US slang, laced through with snatches of Spanish.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is, for once, exactly what the hype writers promise, an eagerly anticipated first novel by a writer who has already indicated exactly how good he is through the eloquent frenzy of a number of memorable short stories. Díaz is the author of Drown, a collection of 10 urgent, pulsating stories that really did burst onto the literary scene as long ago as 1996, and seemed to say "this is how you capture both the music and the misery of the moment - when that moment happens to be now".
Loud and clear, he established the presence of a disaffected youth that was not only dissatisfied with its lot, but unnervingly eloquent, at times menacing, in the expression of that aimless disaffection. It forced language to bend over, to cower, and left everyone else feeling that bit tongue-tied, that bit more inarticulate: "I should have been careful with the weed. Most people it just fucks up. Me, it makes me sleepwalk. And wouldn't you know, I woke up in the hallway of our building, feeling like I'd been stepped on by my high school marching band." (From Boyfriend, in Drown.) For all the anger, there was also an impressive sense of absolute ease in finding the phrase, the exact image that would make any given sensation live forever in the memory. His characters tend to have the sort of dreams that blow them "out of bed like gunshot".
Díaz has spent his life watching people react to the aftershock of the emigrant experience. "Think only of today and of tomorrow." Fathers, having been reduced to clouds of cigar smoke, disappear, mothers get tough and raise the kids, sex becomes an obsession for the boys, a tradable commodity for the girls, while the arguments become dirtier and deadlier. The young and the not-so-young just want to get off the island. Once they arrive in New Jersey, they adapt to the hunger and the crime, but first they have to get there: "Papi logged most of the miles after Virginia on foot. He could have afforded another bus ticket but that would have bitten into the rent money he had so diligently saved on the advice of many a veteran immigrant. To be homeless in Nueva York was to court the worst sort of disaster. Better to walk three hundred and eighty miles than to arrive completely broke. He stored his savings in a fake alligator change purse he'd sewed into the seam of his boxer shorts. Though the purse blistered his thigh, it was in a place no thief would search." (From Negocios, in Drown.)
For anyone who had missed the Drown collection, Richard Ford recently posted a strong reminder when compiling The New Granta Book of the American Short Story. Díaz made it into that important endorsement of the state of US short fiction with Aurora, the finest story from what is a dauntingly mature debut. In that one near-perfect story, the narrator not only provides an account of his life, he speaks for an entire angry generation devoid of hope and trapped in the now that Díaz describes so well.
That said, the most obvious way to approach his first novel is to brace oneself for an explosive experience. But Díaz takes his reader by surprise. Even if the prologue of sorts introduces the notion of fuku, "generally a curse or a doom of some kind", and although Díaz does enlist as an oppressive force the dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, the tone remains curiously light.
"Our hero", presumably Oscar, is a guy obsessed with females. Unlike most Dominican males, however, he appears to have a problem - girls can't stand him. Díaz high-steps into a narrative largely voiced by a breezy character, no doubt a friend of "our hero" - Oscar - but all of this is gradually made more clear.
OSCAR HAS A sister, Olga. Race along, all ease and streetwise style, and the narrator helps us along. It's easy reading - something of a surprise coming from Díaz, but the lightness of touch will impress and it captures the essence of the sheer multi-culturalness of Spanish-speaking new America. And hey presto, old girl-obsessed Oscar has arrived at sophomore year, "weighing in at a whopping 245 (260 when he was depressed, which was often) . . . ". So here he is, a nerd, still a flop with the girls and spending his days reading himself into oblivion.
Meanwhile, sequences of snappy exchanges pass between nerd hero and streetwise sister, who advises her brother to wise up. "Don't you think I know that?" replies Oscar. "Another five years of this and I'll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me." The brother and sister are often despatched back to Santo Domingo for the summer by their battle-hardened mother, and pretty soon Oscar, in the absence of any sex, takes to writing for posterity.
JUST WHEN YOU begin to suspect that Díaz is writing his variation of John Kennedy Toole's classic A Confederacy of Dunces (1981), the emphasis begins to shift. This is a family saga, and a dark one at that, with the ever-present legacy of Trujillo lurking in the wings back home in the hazily evoked Dominican Republic. Most of the girls and women are humiliated by their sexuality, and sexual jealousy dominates the narrative. There are stories within stories, and each life is in turn explored and unravelled. Yunior, who suffers an impossible love for Oscar's sister, tells some of the tale, because it was he who shared a student room with Oscar.
The tale slides back and forth between Paterson, New Jersey and the island, but the setting is irrelevant - the theme is doomed love and dangerous sex across the generations, the dialogue resounds with sex, imagined and otherwise. Díaz does more than merely tumble a number of stories together, yet for all the life and warmth, and there is plenty of both, as well as the sheer ease of the writing, this vivid, dancing tragicomedy of a tale, with its chorus of loud, shouting voices, never quite explodes into the fully fleshed novel readers may have expected from Díaz.
But then this twinge of disappointment may be due to the seething promise of his edgy short fiction. In any case, Díaz's family saga is quite unlike any other, his characters are as likeable as they are lost, and while the narrative falters into a melodrama that drains away like so much spilt blood, it does engage as a vibrant, if unexpected, social history from the margins of yet another dimension of US multiculturalism.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
