The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
Summary
Oscar de Leon is an overweight Dominican American teenager in New Jersey who writes fantasy novels, loves role playing games, and cannot get a girl to speak to him, which in his family and community is treated as a kind of failure of nationality.
His story is narrated by Yunior, a college roommate and serial womaniser whose voice runs the whole book: Spanglish, comic book references, street Dominican and academic English at once. Yunior also insists on explaining the family curse. The de Leons carry a fuku, and to explain it he has to go back to the Trujillo dictatorship, to what happened to Oscar's grandfather and to his mother Beli as a young woman, in a series of footnotes that grow into a parallel history of the Dominican Republic.
Those footnotes are the novel's engine, funny and furious, and they make the case that a family's private disasters are political.
The best section belongs to Beli. As a teenager in Santo Domingo she falls for a man attached to the regime, and what follows in a cane field outside the capital is the wound the whole family inherits. Oscar's sister Lola, who runs away and then comes back, narrates a stretch of it herself and is the one person who sees him clearly.
The Spanish is not translated and the science fiction and comic book references are not explained, both deliberately. Neither is an obstacle for long. It is short, propulsive and one of the most distinctive voices in recent American fiction, and it is much funnier than a book with this ending has any business being. Note that Diaz faced public allegations of misconduct in 2018, which some readers weigh and others do not.
Historical Context & Significance
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was Junot Diaz's first novel, arriving eleven years after his story collection Drown, and Time named it the best novel of 2007.
The book's use of untranslated Spanish and its refusal to gloss its own references were widely discussed as a statement about who a novel is addressed to, and it became a standard text in American literature courses within a few years.
Rafael Trujillo, whose thirty one year dictatorship the footnotes narrate, is not a fictional invention, and the novel's account of the regime's violence, including the 1937 massacre of Haitians at the border, follows the historical record.
Yunior, the narrator here, runs through most of Diaz's work, appearing in the earlier stories of Drown and again in This Is How You Lose Her, so the three books read as one long portrait of the same unreliable man. In 2018 the writer Zinzi Clemmons publicly accused Diaz of forcibly kissing her, and other women described his behaviour toward them; an MIT review found no evidence warranting discipline and he kept his teaching post, though he stepped down as chairman of the Pulitzer Prize board, but the allegations remain part of how the book is discussed.