Junot Diaz Redefines Macho

An interview with the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel,The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz, who immigrated with his family to the United States from the Dominican Republic when he was 6, teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His new novel,The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award [Editor’s Note: as well as the Pulitzer Prize, after ITT went to press] in fiction, tells the story of Oscar, a freakishly overweight young man fixated on computer games, Marvel comics and science fiction. He’s ignored by women but obsessed with sex. His life is chronicled by Yunior, the novel’s macho narrator, who tries to help Oscar while having an on-again, off-again affair with Oscar’s sister, Lola.

Praised for its narrative inventiveness and virtuosic language, the novel shifts deftly between the lives of these teenagers in contemporary New Jersey and the experience of Oscar and Lola’s mother, Belicia — who, 50 years earlier, growing up in the Dominican Republic, was brutalized by a series of men associated with the former Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.

Diaz draws a compelling link between the violent masculinity of Trujillo and his henchmen and the contemporary forces that shape Oscar, Lola and Yunior. At turns outrageously funny and deeply historical, the novel’s serious engagement with Oscar’s nerdiness is matched by its interest in the persistence of historical memory and the politics of storytelling.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was on nearly everyone’s list of the best novels of the year. What do you think is going on culturally, politically or in the world of contemporary literature that explains its popularity?

I wish that it was some sort of sea change, but I’m not so sure. This is the same culture that will turn around next year and nominate and celebrate a deeply conservative, deeply troubling text. I’m not so certain that this concept of linear progress is all that accurate. We have multiple, concurrent strands in literature and sometimes some of these strands are more dominant, and sometimes some of them are more recessive. It’s kind of a dance.

We have far more sophisticated readers, whether its readers of literature or television. A serial show like “Lost” or “Heroes” wasn’t possible when I was growing up. People weren’t prepared to follow a story consistently; there wasn’t the technology of DVDs to catch up. We’ve become much more sophisticated on a narrative level.

But again, I’m not so sure that the political follows hand-in-hand with that kind of narrative sophistication. I’m much more cautious about the politics of a country like ours that continually votes in war-mongering morons. It’s made me much more cautious.

You’re regularly referred to as a Latino or Dominican-American writer. However, you also seem connected to contemporary transnational writers like Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru, Mohsin Hamid or Kiran Desai, who are interested in hybridized identities developing in response to globalization. Do you think of yourself as an American writer, a Latino writer or do you relate to these transnational writers?

I was a Dominican kid who immigrated to the United States in the ’70s and settled in New Jersey. I was trying to write to that experience. I could never have imagined a Zadie Smith growing up — that wasn’t the sort of thing I was connecting to. I was sort of imagining, ‘Could I possibly contain New Jersey and the Dominican Republic?’

Now, the sort of paucity of my vision doesn’t de-legitimize this larger claim that there seem to be a lot of people wrestling with this issue. We’ve been doing this forever. That’s the whole project of the New World. But I do think that now there are more languages, more narrative techniques and, like you said, there’s a lot more permission. Writers give each other permission to write things. You read someone when you’re a kid who is doing something interesting and you’re like, “Damn, I can do that, too.”

But in the end I am part of a larger movement, and there is a lot of art trying to deal with what you’re describing, whether we call it transnationalism or something else.