The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
By Junot Diaz
Riverhead, 340 pages, $24.95
In some throat-clearing before he lets us move on to a book he has completed, a Dominican-American who lives in Perth Amboy, N.J., and teaches writing at a community college explains that it was the Admiral (one Cristobal Colon, a.k.a. Christopher Columbus) who brought a demonic curse to the Antilles and the entire New World, where he became “both its midwife and one of its great European victims.”
Yet Dominicans lived not only under the Admiral’s curse but with a modern incarnation of it, a death-dealing “hypeman of sorts, a high priest, you could say,” the country’s dictator-for-life, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina.
The name for this doom-luck, fuku (pronounced foo-KOO), looks curiously like a copulative epithet in standard American English, and it figures heavily in Junot Diaz’s street-slangy, lit-punning, Caribbean-American novel of race, post-colonialism, brutality, family and love, not to mention extended virginity, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”
Whether Trujillo, a modern-day Faust, was the spell’s “servant or its master, its agent or its principal” remains in doubt. But Diaz’s narrator, known only as Yunior, reports, “It was believed, even in educated circles, that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fuku most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond.”
The lives Yunior chronicles fall well within that genealogical spread: brother and sister Oscar and Lola de Leon, who grew up primarily in New Jersey but summered or otherwise spent time back in the Dominican Republic; their mother, Belicia Cabral, who left the Dominican Republic for America at 16 after an attempt on her life by Trujillo strongmen; and those who never left Hispaniola, maternal grandparents Abelard and Socorro Cabral, and Nena Inca, a sturdy soul who served as surrogate mother-aunt to Beli and abuela (grandmother) to Oscar and Lola. Abelard was a noted surgeon and intellect, but as Yunior points out, “The Reign of Trujillo was not the best time to be a lover of Ideas,” and when the good doctor ran afoul of “El Jefe,” or “the Chief” (one of the more polite appellations applied to the dictator), it was to disastrous consequence.
As for Yunior, who denies being “old-school Dominican” (he grew up in the Dominican Republic but has spent his adult life in New Jersey and in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan), he may well be writing in expiation of his own behavior. He had been a roommate, with limited patience, of the depressive Oscar back in college (Rutgers in New Brunswick) as a favor to Lola, whom he dated. Yunior’s lack of sexual fidelity — a defining trait of Dominican males by his account, which only intensified Oscar’s shame as a strikeout king — ended things with Lola. Yunior confesses that for years afterward he woke up with night sweats over a dream in which “I’d finally try to say words that could have saved us.” He has some emotional ballast to unload and wonders if his book might be, “My very own counterspell.”
What is ostensibly a question embedded in “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” — Choice or curse, free will or fate? — turns out to be something of a shuck by Diaz, in his clever use of Yunior. His narrator has a stake in the answer, after all, having characterized the book at its outset as “a fuku story.” Late in the novel, after Oscar has survived a left-for-dead beating by police thugs in the canefields of the Dominican Republic, we have only Yunior’s word that “it dawned on [Oscar] that the family curse he’d heard about his whole life might actually be true.”
As Yunior would caution, “Negro, please.” The intrusions of his persona in the text is classic amateur-author shtick and tongue-in-cheek cheeky. “[I]f this was Dickens she’d have to run a brothel,” Yunior writes of Trujillo’s sister, only to reflect within the same sentence, “but wait, she did run brothels!” He mocks “those epiphanies us lit majors are always forced to talk about,” and admits to changing a locale between drafts of his book even as he asserts “this is supposed to be a true account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Elsewhere he points out that his story “ain’t no Marvel Comics,” although he refers to himself more than once as a Watcher, one of the extraterrestrial race that hails straight from the old Marvel Comics science-fiction serial. Would you buy a used car from this man?
Yunior laces his account liberally with obscenities in Spanish and English, which will be no surprise to readers of Diaz’s decade-old story collection “Drown,” which first brought him recognition and in which several of the stories were narrated by a Yunior. This time out Yunior’s tongue is every bit as profane (street cred!), but he is also far more knowing in a cultural sense, compared with his predecessor. Pop references abound, from “Dune” and “Star Wars” and “Planet of the Apes” to multiple invocations of Tolkien (Trujillo “dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor”) and even the godlike, leonine Aslan from C.S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia.”
That makes sense, given Oscar’s devotion to sci-fi and genre literature, to role-playing games and comics. But Yunior, with his education, won’t slight high literature as he spins out his tale. He tips his hat to Melville (Beli, for whom Nena Inca had secured a scholarship at a posh school, chases a white-skinned boy “with the great deliberation of Ahab after you-know-who”), to Proust (a tropical smell is “more evocative than any madeleine”), to Yeats (“a terrible beauty has been born,” Yunior says of Beli in describing her sexual maturation). The name Oscar is tagged with by Yunior’s friends, “Oscar Wao,” is a tweaking of Oscar Wilde. One suspects, too, that the novel’s title is meant to echo Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”
Such literary splash would make Diaz’s novel seem playful if it weren’t tempered with so much darkness. Yunior writes in retrospect sometime after 1995, but in shifting time frames the book ranges over the preceding half-century, back to 1944, and surveys police-state repression, racism, poverty and good old intrafamily tensions, be it in the Dominican Republic or the U.S.
“I was [Beli’s] only daughter, the one she had raised up herself with the help of nobody, which meant it was her duty to keep me crushed under her heel,” Lola says of herself at 14, before she ran away from home, when she was a “punk chick” whom the Puerto Rican kids called “Blacula.” Of Beli, Lola says, “You could call her an absentee parent: if she wasn’t at work she was sleeping, and when she was around it seemed all she did was scream and hit.”
Life itself haunted Oscar, who was intent on becoming a science-fiction writer but remained almost preternaturally a social outcast. Having left for college a virgin, he completed it one as well. After college he returned to his old high school as a substitute teacher, where daily “he watched the ‘cool’ kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular . . . and in every one of these clashes he saw himself.” No wonder he attempted suicide (failed there too), explaining afterward with a shrug, “I didn’t know what else to do.” When he falls in love with a prostitute, her advice is, “Travel light.”
Diaz has risked running a three-legged race in “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by tying together what could have been either an extremely potent political novel or an extraordinarily moving family drama. One is left feeling that each potential impeded the other, competing for the author’s attention.
It is an energetic and at points startling book nonetheless, engaging in technique as Diaz — outside the flow of plot — attempts to evoke the horrors of living on the “Alcatraz of the Antilles” under “the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated,” by footnoting Dominican political and cultural figures and history. Much of the footnoted material, which attenuates in frequency as the novel draws toward a close, forms a fascinating foil to the fiction hovering above it on the page, and includes thumbnail profiles of Trujillo cronies and successors. Trujillo’s “[o]utstanding accomplishments,” readers are reminded, include a 1937 genocide against Haitians and the Haitian-Dominican community; being “one of the longest, most damaging U.S.-backed dictatorships in the Western Hemishere”; and creating the first modern kleptocracy (“Trujillo was Mobutu before Mobutu was Mobutu.”).
The possibility of recovery from trauma is a strong theme in the book. When Oscar asks Nena Inca what had destroyed his mother’s hopes (La Inca is a patron saint among Diaz’s characters and the one who had saved young Beli), she replies:
“What always happens. Un maldito hombre” — a damned man.
She could have Trujillo in mind, and perhaps Yunior has himself in mind, but she is specifically addressing Beli’s early love, a gangster. He drove Beli to an oath she kept: “I will not serve.” It was Oscar’s thinking, too, whether cursed or not. And Yunior may have reached a similar conclusion. It is too early to tell, although he insists, “I’m a new man, you see, a new man, a new man.”
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Art Winslow is a frequent contributor to the Tribune.
