Last week I posted BookRiot’s list of “socially conscious page-turners” on Facebook and highly recommended Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle as a must read. Unfortunately, I never wrote a review of it, just made everyone else read it. I briefly contemplated re-reading the novel and declaring this the year of the re-read (see The Handmaid’s Tale) but decided there simply wasn’t time. So I offer an alternative from 2008, Napoleon Dynamite meets Paul Beatty in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz.
There has been plenty written about Díaz’s novel. Poor Oscar has been described as a fat nerd, uber-nerd, and a ghetto-nerd. Oscar is not the all American boy, he’s the fanboy in the corner reading comics. Nor, is Oscar a good stereotype of a Dominican. His love of science fiction and role playing games and his inability to get a date makes him stand out as oddball in the New Jersey Latinx community where he grows up with his mother and his older sister;
While the novel is primarily Oscar’s story, we do learn quite a bit about his family, Lola, Oscar’s devoted sister and Beli, the reckless teenage girl from the Dominican Republic who ends up a single mom in Paterson, New Jersey. Writing about Beli’s youth; “This was a country; [the Dominican Republic] a society that had been designed to be virtually escape-proof. Alcatraz of the Antilles. There weren’t any Houdini holes in that Plátano Curtain. Options as rare as Tainos and for irascible darkskinned flacas of modest means they were rarer still."Sophomore year Oscar found himself weighing in at a whopping 245 (260 when he was depressed, which was often) and it had become clear to everybody, especially his family that he’d become the neighborhood parigüayo. Had none of the Higher Powers of your typical Dominican male, couldn’t have pulled a girl if his life depended on it.
Yunior, the principle narrator, tells Oscar’s story with a fluid combination of English, Spanish and urban slang. The writing and Oscar’s inescapable nerdiness conjure up a most peculiar comparison. Think Napoleon Dynamite meets Paul Beatty. I haven’t loved a geek this much since Napoleon hit the big screen and Díaz’s controlled and exuberant writing, bring to mind the poetic language of Beatty’s, The White Boy Shuffle.
If you are familiar with Junot Díaz’s writing either fiction or non-fiction you’ll understand why this is a resistance read. Much like The White Boy Shuffle, Oscar Wao is a socially conscious coming of age story that examines racial and gender issues. These concepts run through all of Díaz’s fiction, “[i]n my books, I try to show how these oppressive paradigms work together with the social reality of the characters to undermine the very dreams the characters have for themselves.” Díaz is a very public writer and you can find interviews and lectures online including these from the Boston Review on writing about race and gender in The Search For Decolonial Love (Parts I and II) and creating political art, “Junot Díaz on Political Art and the Immigrant as Sauron,” in Vox. And then there are the footnotes on the history of the Dominican Republic and Trujillo dictatorship fact checked by the New York Public Library in 2010.
