The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

Was it just last week I said I was tired of male coming-of-age stories? This month’s pick for one of my book clubs, Diaz’s book hooked me with its unusual and refreshing voice. It’s the story not just of Oscar but of his whole family: his mother Beli who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, his sister Lola, even his grandfather Abelard. Narrated by Lola’s boyfriend Yunior, their life in Paterson, New Jersey, fizzes across the page, full of the humiliations that overweight, RPG-playing Oscar must endure, the power that adolescent Lola finds, and the melodramatic scenes their mother enacts. The family is convinced that they suffer under a curse, a fuku that dooms all of their endeavours to failure.

Sure enough, each undergoes trials that bring them nearly to the end of reason. One or another retreats back to DR, taking refuge with La Inca, Abelard’s now-elderly cousin who had rescued and raised Beli. Dropping into the lives of Lola, Beli and Abelard rescued the book for me from being simply a boy’s coming-of-age story, though Oscar’s story even with its familiar adolescent-boy concerns was interesting enough to stand alone, given Yunior’s spirited narration.

Some people in my book club found the book hard to read, distracted by the frequent and untranslated Spanish phrases or put off by the occasional footnotes explaining in sometimes hilarious detail the historical or political background to some Dominican event or personage. None of that bothered me. Carried along by the raucous and witty voice of Yunior, I felt as though I had plunged into these lives that carry the weight of their country’s history, a country about which I’d known very little.

Curiously, I did agree with those in my book club who said they did not seem to care about the characters; they didn’t find themselves fretting over the characters’ bad choices or grieving over their fates as one does when truly caught up in a novel. I, too, was entertained without my emotions being particularly engaged. I’m not sure why that is. I felt that I didn’t really know Oscar and his family, which was only to be expected since Yunior did not really know them. In fact, the progression of the book is not only the events of their lives, but also Yunior’s coming to understand their significance and the family themselves. Yet, Yunior himself is not even a character for most of the book, just a shadow, an absent narrator. And Lola narrates her own section, another curious choice. She too has a wonderful voice, saying of her mother: “She stood like she was her own best thing . . .”.

These structural oddities are precisely what continue to interest me, even after the echoes of that marvelous voice have faded. I’ve certainly read many stories where the narrator is not actively a part of the story and many where he or she is, but I cannot think of another one where the narrator is peripheral to the story for part of the book and then actively present in the rest. Like the footnotes and the many allusions, these oddities and not knowing what to expect next kept me turning pages. I certainly recommend this book as a most unusual reading experience.