Book Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

2009 at 9am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

I read this book for the Book Awards Challenge.

Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a lot more than I expected it to be. And that is definitely a good thing. Here’s how the back of the book describes the story:

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd, a New Jersey romantic who dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fuku—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from the Dominican Republic to the United States and back again.

Now, all of that is true. Oscar (whose real last name is de Leon) is an endearingly, heartbreakingly nerdy fellow, and his attempts to find love and to fit in with his peers will be painfully familiar to most readers. We have all known an Oscar, and we have all felt like Oscar at some point in our lives. But Oscar takes it to another level. For him,

High school was the equivalent of a medieval spectacle, like being put in the stocks and forced to endure the peltings and outrages of a mob of deranged half-wits, an experience from which he supposed he should have emerged a better person, but that’s not really what happened—and if there were any lessons to be gleaned from the ordeal of those years he never quite figured out what they were.

Fluent in many of the invented languages of science fiction and significantly more intellectual than any of his peers, Oscar knew he would have a better chance of fitting in if he would just change, but that wasn’t really an option.

Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.

Diaz’s narrative, which is chock full of sci-fi and literary references, makes it clear that he is also conversant in the language of nerd, and he has great sympathy for Oscar’s character. His literary references, many of which will be familiar to serious readers, add color and depth to the story and help fill out Oscar’s already giant character even more.

In addition to telling Oscar’s story, the narrator Yunior, who refers to himself as a Watcher (a comic book reference), shares screentime with Oscar’s sister Lola, who steps in to tell her own story and present her perspective on Oscar, fuku, and the complexities of Dominican families. The experiences she relays are often less than savory, but they are told with such a realistic, believable voice that we come to understand and like her in spite of some of the decisions she’s made.

Yunior also pauses his narrative about Oscar to tell us the story of how Oscar’s mother grew up in the Dominican Republic, and it a story that is both difficult to read and impossible to put down. I have no idea how accurate the historical information Diaz works into the narrative is, but his writing about life under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo is chilling and maddening, and it goes a long way in helping us understand exactly how Oscar’s family became so, well, interestingly messed up. Or cursed, if you will.

Oscar’s family has more than their share of troubles, but not all of them believe in the fuku. Lola tells us:

That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.

It may sound like a downer, but The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao ends on a note that I found to be untraditionally optimistic. Despite Oscar’s many foibles and failed attempts to find love, he grows a great deal, and the evolution of his character is one of the highlights of this great book. He is likeable and easy to relate to, and Diaz (and his narrator Yunior) succeed in giving us a character we can laugh with, when it would have been so much easier to give us one to laugh at.

I went into this book expecting a relatively linear narrative about the life of a nerdy kid named Oscar, and what I got was much more than that. Diaz’s language is quick and sharp, and it never lets up. He pulls us into the de Leons’ story with a voice that is utterly unique, that allows us to identify with this family in which everyone has “the inextinguishable longing for elsewheres,” and that explores the relatively heavy topics of immigration and assimilation without becoming dark or depressing.

Diaz mixes many Spanish words into the story, allowing his characters to speak a kind of rapid-fire “Spanglish,” and while other reviewers have found these words distracting, I enjoyed the color they added to the narrative even when I didn’t know what they meant. The frequent cursing didn’t bother me at all, and it fit the characters and their voices very well. But be warned, there is frequent cursing, if you’re a reader who doesn’t enjoy that.

When it was all said and done, I thoroughly enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  The story and narrative voices are unlike any I’ve read before, and I am so happy that the Pulitzer was awarded to such a delightfully off-beat novel. 4.5 out of 5.

Visit the author’s website to learn more.