It is easy to overlook Junot Diaz, even when he is sitting quite conspicuously in a near-empty restaurant. Diaz seamlessly blends into his surroundings. His compact limbs tend to curl inward, as if harboring his privacy. His hands tend to shield his eyes, as if deflecting unwanted contact. This is not a man who craves attention.
In recent months, however, the 27-year-old author has found himself at the center of an unrelenting literary limelight. Almost overnight, the Dominican-born writer has become the darling of New York’s publishing set. “Drown,” Diaz’s recently released debut collection of short stories, produced the sort of frenzy normally associated with a John Grisham novel.
Imagine literary agents salivating, publishing houses inciting a bidding war, a six-figure book deal, a national book tour–all for a first-time author whose graduate writing degree thus far had landed him no further than a job making photocopies at a pharmaceutical company.
What sets Diaz’s flavor-of-the-moment story apart is that he has turned the heads with complex, untidy and distinctive tales of life in a poor, but persevering Dominican family, a landscape largely uncharted by mainstream publishers.
Moreover, Diaz’s style is unorthodox. The writer deftly and generously sprinkles Spanish words throughout his English prose, neither placing those words in italics nor offering translations. Quotes and conversations appear without quotation marks. And while most of the tales in “Drown” are interrelated, they are not told in chronological order.
“The fact that anyone is reading this book is remarkable. The fact that so many people are reading it is incredible,” Diaz said. “All I wanted to do was represent a family in a different manner. I didn’t want it to be a redemption song, where things are really tough, but at the end, things are great.”
In Diaz’s work, life is gritty and endings are not of the fairytale variety.
“She sat up and looked at me,” he writes in his collection. “It was a cold-a– stare. We were just hoping. I hit a couple of girls. Stupid girls. That was a big mistake. The staff put me in the Quiet Room. Eleven days the first time. Fourteen after that. That’s the sort of s— that you can’t get used to, no matter who you are. She looked at her drawings. I made up this whole new life in there. You should have seen it. The two of us had kids, a big blue house, hobbies, the whole f—— thing. She ran her nails over my side. A week from then she would be asking me again, begging actually, telling me all the good things we’d do and after a while I hit her and made the blood come out of her ear like a worm but right then, in that apartment, we seemed like we were normal folks. Like maybe everything was fine.”
Fifteen months ago, Diaz was a recently minted graduate of Cornell University’s writing program. He had the degree, the low-paying job and the rejection letters from magazines to prove it. The goateed author’s days were filled with endless photocopies and tedium. At night, Diaz wrote, filling a blank screen with words he hoped someone might want to publish.
Someone finally did. Lois Rosenthal, the editor of Story magazine, a prestigious Cincinnati-based literary journal, discovered a short story that Diaz had submitted among the thousands of manuscripts she receives annually.
An enthusiastic Rosenthal–who “put herself behind me and changed my life,” Diaz writes in his acknowledgment–immediately called friends in New York’s publishing community about her find.
Rosenthal’s calls led to a buzz, which prompted a short story reading, which led to an agent, who put together an auction that led to pandemonium.
Eight publishing houses–fat checks in hand–played financial leapfrog to acquire Diaz’s 10 short stories. The New Yorker magazine phoned in lavish bids for two of Diaz’s tales; the magazine published the stories last summer, marking Diaz’s debut in a major publication.
By the time all was said and signed, Diaz had a six-figure book contract, a forthcoming novel and a growing literary luminescence.
The editors of Newsweek anointed him one of their “New Faces of 1996.” USA Today crowned Diaz a “Best Bet for Stardom.” Diaz even became a national idol in his homeland, the “bochinche” (talk) of the young and the old in Santo Domingo.
Writing `fictional artifacts’
What prompted such raves were Diaz’s gripping short stories, all told from the viewpoint of a Dominican male. Diaz peers into the tortured lives, loves and souls of a handful of characters as they navigate through hardscrabble lives in the Dominican Republic and suburban New Jersey. He writes about conventional feelings in unconventional ways, examining love, for instance, by swooping in on the troubled relationship of a man and his crack-addicted girlfriend.
While Diaz calls his stories “fictional artifacts,” a good part of his work parallels his own life. Much like Yunior, one of the main characters in “Drown,” Diaz immigrated from the Dominican Republic at a young age. Diaz, who was nicknamed Yunior as a child, came to the United States at age 7. Diaz’s father–like the book’s most scorned character– traveled to the United States to work and returned home some years later with the money to move his family to a low-income suburb in New Jersey. And fragments of the paradoxically close, yet distant relationship Diaz had with his mother filter through some of the women in his stories.
Diaz began writing as a sophomore in high school when his older brother, Rafa, a star athlete, was diagnosed with leukemia. Diaz, the third of five children in a working-class family, spent hours writing his brother lengthy letters. After high school, Diaz’s mother gave him a simple choice: Go to college or move out. So, Diaz enrolled at a small state college, paying his way through such odds jobs as washing dishes, delivering pool tables and working in a steel mill.
During this time, Diaz was finding his writing voice. After Diaz transferred to Rutgers University, one of his stories took top prize in a number of writing competitions and his professors urged him to go on to graduate school. Diaz applied to six Master of Fine Arts graduate writing programs; he was accepted at one. And it was during his time at Cornell that Diaz polished the stories that would become “Drown.”
Still the same guy, but busier
On this day, the short and bespectacled Diaz is an amalgam of beatnik and homeboy, sporting a close-cropped haircut, a baggy sweater and corduroys. He is more J. Crew than Jay McInerney, the stylish young author who made an equal splash with his first novel, “Bright Lights, Big City,” in 1984.
Despite his recent riches, outwardly Diaz remains as unpretentious as his characters. He quit his job at the pharmaceutical company, but he still lives with a roommate in a modest Brooklyn apartment. He hasn’t yet made any major purchases. Instead, Diaz said he is going to use his new fortune to buy his family a home in Santo Domingo.
As for the notoriety, Diaz said he’d prefer to live without it. He said he hardly ever mentions that he’s a writer to acquaintances or new friends and he often heads to his family’s house so they can “ignore” him.
Diaz’s desire to be left alone, to pass unnoticed, permeates some of the characters in his book.
“We live alone,” he writes. “My mother has enough for the rent and groceries and I cover the phone bill, sometimes the cable. She’s so quiet that most of the time I’m startled to find her in the apartment. I’ll enter a room and she’ll stir, detaching herself from the cracking plaster walls, from the stained cabinets, and fright will pass through me like a wire. She has discovered the secret to silence: pouring cafe without a splash, walking between rooms as if gliding on a cushion of felt, crying without a sound. You have traveled to the East and learned many secret things, I’ve told her. You’re like a shadow warrior. And you’re like a crazy, she says. Like a big crazy.”
In no way does Diaz sound like a man in search of a “scene,” an in-crowd or an entourage. “I’m not getting caught up in it. I know that if my next book doesn’t sell, I’m back to making copies,” Diaz said. “I just want to write. I would much rather have had a tiny, tiny book contract that would keep me going and let me write. I haven’t written in almost a year. I want to write. This other stuff (interviews) is nonsense.”
Nonsense or not, it is necessary and Diaz must prepare for his next interview. This time, it is an appearance on a local TV show. Putting on his coat for his walk over to the TV studio, Diaz becomes less animated. Within seconds, he has retreated back into the shell that surrounded him earlier when he sat alone in the restaurant.
Diaz said goodbye, then walked into the chilly, evening darkness, for the moment still safely little-known and little-noticed.
