I’m from a family of illegal immigrants. That’s very different from people whose parents were middle class or upper-middle class, South Asian or Caribbean, who came to the “metropole.” But it doesn’t change the fact that in our own ways and with our own class differences, we’re attempting to deal with similar issues.

In your novel, you weave the personal with the political through your treatment of masculinity, drawing a clear line from Trujillo’s masculinity to Oscar’s and Yunior’s. How conscious were you of exploring this through the interrogation of a Dominican or gangster masculinity?

I was obsessed with this idea that all these folks were dealing with this grand narrative of this Trujillo masculinity. What was interesting about this book was that it was making some sort of tremendous, bizarre claims aboutNew World masculinity. I’m fascinated by this stuff because I grew up in a United States where this masculinity is the absolute operational model.

Look, everyone sits around and pretends that we’re all in this new age of masculinity and this new age of sensitivity and that the kids don’t play football anymore, they play video games, they watch the “X Games.”

The truth is that if Trujillo was alive and well, he would feel extremely comfortable in the United States. I mean, for God’s sake, the war in Iraq [would be] just perfect: He loved a civic society that misunderstood what it was and he loved an exceptionally violent governing elite.

Oscar’s interests mark him as a classic nerd, and for this reason he’s tremendously anxious about his masculinity, which the macho Yunior, the narrator, represents. But doesn’t Yunior learn a new model of masculinity through his relationship with Oscar?

And from telling the story. Yunior is attempting to unlearn and expiate himself, repent in some way, do penance. But, unfortunately, he’s doing it in exactly the same way that the masculinity he’s trying to undermine has always perpetuated itself, by being the only voice speaking.

Yunior keeps giving clear messages, that in some ways, “Look, guys, I’m trying to lay out a map of how fucked up I am and how fucked up this is.” But the very map is a product of that power, and so is the reader’s desire for that authoritative narrative. People want to feel like the person telling them the story has facts.

I was particularly moved by the last page, where Oscar talks about the paramount importance of intimacy. He’s been in search of sex, but he discovers intimacy. How did you come to that idea?

I guess I knew it from the beginning. It’s basically what’s true about every quest narrative. What you discover is that the object of the quest is just a MacGuffin, and that what you learn in the journey is actually what was valuable, but you didn’t know it. You were so focused on getting the ring, getting the spear, killing this creature, that you don’t realize that there was something else.

Isn’t there a political dimension to your emphasis on the importance of intimacy? The hyper-sexuality and violent masculinity we see inTrujillo has seeped into Yunior, and that’s politically important because the capacity to experience intimacy is ultimately going to determine the way you exercise political power.

The first rule of intimacy is that you have to drop your performances, that the “masks” have to drop.

This book is filled with characters wearing masks. We’re narrative animals, we love to wear masks, that’s the way we live. We perform. But yet, it’s very difficult to connect without the dropping of masks.

For me, that’s the art of stories. Stories are there so you can get to the point where you can finally take off that last mask. That’s what growing up is, because when you take your last mask off, you are utterly vulnerable, you are utterly in another person’s power.

And what contemporary masculinity, what contemporary power structure, ever puts itself utterly in someone else’s power? Isn’t storytelling the desire to put everything about the world in your power?