Revenge of the Dominan nerds

I first read Junot Díaz in the New Yorker. The story was ‘Alma,’ and I loved Laxmi-from-Guyana and its raucous, pungent style. But his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which began eight years ago as a story in the same mag, is a letdown. It’s a good read, and the brief desi and Hindi references are fun; both ‘Alma’ and Oscar Wao mention desi women the protagonists have dated (and cheated on). However, the book isn’t all that memorable and doesn’t live up to the hype. That the National Book Critics Circle Award went to Oscar Wao over Sacred Games has me scratching my head.

Oscar Wao is about a Dominican-American nerd from New Jersey who’s bright, chubby, hopeless and obsessive over women, and immersed in comic books and fantasy novels, especially Lord of the Rings. Oscar De León, the virtual namesake of a legendary salsero, survives high school and college with virginity intact, ekes out a living as a subsistence writer and comes face-to-face with the violent dictatorship back in la patria. Oscar’s homecoming will ring very familiar to anyone who flies back to summer in the desh. It gives lie to the truism that unhappy families’ miseries are unique

Every summer Santo Domingo slaps the Diaspora engine in reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can… Back home, everybody! Back home! … the picking-up of big-assed girls and the taking of said to moteles; it’s one big party… for everybody but the poor, the dark… the Haitian… the kids that certain Canadian, American, German, and Italian tourists love to rape…

The beat-you-down heat was the same, and so was the fecund tropical smell… and likewise the air pollution, and the thousands of motos and cars and dilapidated trucks on the roads, and the clusters of peddlers at every traffic light… and people walking languidly with nothing to shade them from the sun, and the buses that charged past so overflowing with passengers that from the outside they looked like they were making a rush delivery of spare limbs to some far-off war, and the general ruination of so many of the buildings…

… a whole new country was materializing atop the ruins of the old one: there were now better roads and nicer vehicles and brand-new luxury air-conditioned buses… and U.S. fast-food restaurants… and local ones whose names and logos he did not recognize… It really was astonishing how much he’d forgotten about the DR: the little lizards that were everywhere, and the roosters in the morning, followed shortly by the cries of the plataneros… the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches… the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks… the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchman standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns… the music…

Part of the success of this book, no doubt, is that it bridges two markets, fanböi comic geeks and lit fic buyers. Like everyone, fanböis love works which tell their story, but they’re also far more obsessive than the average reader.

Another part of the book’s charm is that it documents a community in New Jersey — Dominicans in Perth Amboy, Teaneck, Woodbridge, hunting grounds with desi overlap — which may not have shown up much in literary fiction. It’s worth nothing that In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Álvarez also dissected the U.S.-backed Trujillo dictatorship and was also nominated for the same literary award.

But what works in snippets fails in long form. It’s like someone who’s fascinating at a party but less interesting over a two-hour dinner. Díaz is obsessed with fucking, with declaiming the sexual prowess of Dominican men. A lot of the plot is melodrama about pointless, abusive romantic relationships. It’s charming in short burts but gets monotonous as a novel.

Despite the Sino-Dominican promise of the title, the book is laser-focused on Dominicans and isn’t actually very multi-culti, except for its polyglot slang. The eponym Oscar Wao is a Spanish-accented corruption of ‘that fat homosexual Oscar Wilde.’ There are just a handful of desi references in the book:

His two nerdboys, Al and Miggs, had… both succeeded in landing themselves girls… Al (real name Alok) was one of those tall Indian prettyboys who would never have been pegged by anyone as a role-playing nerd. It was Miggs’ girl-getting he could not fathom… Dude, you should see her, she’s beautiful. Big fucking tits, Al seconded. That day what little faith Oscar had in the world took an SS-N-17 snipe to the head… He realized his fucked-up comic-book-reading, role-playing-game-loving, no-sports-playing friends were embarrassed by him.

One of the key differences between the Dominican and desi diasporas is that Díaz’ book shows little immigrant neurosis. The motherland is a relatively short flight away, people hop back and forth often, and there’s a massive Dominican community in New York. The daughters and sons of this half-island of 10 million, less than one percent of the population of the subcontinent, still carry themselves with greater swagger. For immigrant anxiety, I point you to Gary Shteyngart’s howlingly funny The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Absurdistan.

Along those lines, almost none of the pervasive slang, rendered in Dominican Spanish, Gygaxian Nerdlish and a sprinkling of Hinglish neologisms (’ kaliblack, rekhablack’), is defined either explicitly or contextually. It’s a statement of fluency, literary style, confianza in the reader, market size — but also a point of annoyance.

Around a third of the Dominican slang and most of the Comic-Con geekery went over my head. This is a book where printing definitions directly above the words would have come in handy. The book uses footnotes liberally, not to define words but rather as elaborate, Wikipedia-style reference pieces. I appreciated reading the history of Trujillo, but the length of the footnotes pulls you out of the flow. These would have worked better as Sacred Games-style insets.

The beginning of the book is written simply. The story’s magical realism, involving a golden mongoose and the power of prayer, is more Steven Seagal than Gabriel García Márquez. But the style breaks sharply somewhere in the middle. Díaz begins using more elaborate, more self-consciously literary constructions, as if the book were written in parts, and he suddenly decided to go upmarket.

What works, works well: the novel’s confident, mashup language. An individual breaking down while his world goes to hell, like Graffiti My Soul. Sympathy for a nerdboy, like the autistic protagonist of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The slow reveal of the narrator’s identity, like Londonstani. Anita Desai liked Díaz’ work enough to help him land a teaching gig at MIT.

But it makes little sense to pick this over the vast, ambitious and better-written Sacred Games. Not only is that epic memorable, its passages on the geopolitical Great Game and its meditative bits on Vedanta put the novel in a different league.

Here’s an excerpt. Abhi was más enamorado with al kitab.

Previously: Glossary or no? The immaculate novel