The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao by Juot Diaz

At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, obese teenagers (see She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb) and repressive Central American regimes are two subjects that I do not particularly enjoy reading about. Obese teenagers depress me and repressive regimes highlight my ignorance regarding world history in a manner that makes me uncomfortable. But Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao describes the politics of the Dominican Republic so clearly, and is so compassionate and funny regarding Oscar and his dieting woes that neither of my hang-ups got in the way of the intensely moving experience of reading this book.

Somehow, family myth and political repression become one in this story, leaving Oscar strangely, yet effectively, peripheral. Narrated primarily by Junior, Oscar's sometime-roommate and Oscar's older sister Lola's sometime-lover, the book tells the story of the de Leon family and their "fuku," the family's word for, as Junior describes it in the novel's first pages, "the Curse and Doom of the New World."

The thing about the novel is that while it is, in many ways, the family saga you'd expect, the emotional impact is epic even beyond the extensive scope of the plot. Though it is about a family, to me this book is really about the de Leon women: their legendary beauty, their guts, their bodies, and their minds. Junior's casual, macho, street-smart voice, along with his persona as a self-professed womanizer make the stories of these formidable yet seemingly cursed women overwhelmingly powerful. Junior uses women in his life with a blatantly casual disregard, but he tells the stories of Lola and her ancestors with palpable respect.

Through Junior's frame narrative, it becomes clear that he is telling the story of a family to which he does not belong because its stories have impacted him enough to bring him to change his life entirely. It is his voice, and the seeming incongruity between his world view and the stories of the de Leon women, that is so unexpectedly moving. Paradoxically, Diaz manages to use a man's voice to give the women in the novel the real power.

This entry is about three years late, I guess, but I hope that my initial resistance to the novel underlines just how highly I recommend it.