The Arrival of Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz's 1996 collection of short stories, Drown, has begun to seem like an ethereal dream in recent years. That sparkling set of tales featuring Dominican immigrants in New York and New Jersey featured great humor and empathy and was written in a dazzling array of styles and voices. But for 11 long years, it was all we had from Diaz.

During those years, I had begun to wonder if Diaz's fate was to be a Dominican Harper Lee. Had I mistaken a one-hit wonder for the debut of a virtuoso? With the release of his new novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz answers any possible doubts about his tremendous talent.

My personal history with Drown predates my role as the bookstore's buyer. I was the staff manager at the time of its release and was one of several people on the staff that read contemporary literary fiction. However, I was just about the only person who relished good short story collections. Then, as now, a good short story engenders more complaints than compliments. A story's brevity is seen as a fault rather than a virtue.

At the time, I knew only one publisher sales rep by name, the Penguin rep Laura, and occasionally she put a galley in my hand for consideration. When she did, I was sure to read the book. Unlike now, when the bookstore is flooded with hundreds of readers copies a month, a recommended galley was to be cherished. I only saw a handful of these before I became a buyer.

Laura sought me out on the main floor where I was helping a customer in the new fiction section. She held a slender volume in her hand, and when the customer moved on she said in a hurried voice, "Arsen, you have to read this book. I really want to know what you think." I took the book from her and thumbed through it. The titles "Aguantando", "Negocios" and "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie," jumped out at me. They seemed different, exotic and in the case of the dating one, humorous. I looked at Laura and she seemed even more hyped up than usual. "We think this could really work, but we need to get readers who appreciate stories."

I took the book home that night and started it immediately. Within three days, I had completed the 10 stories. Diaz's prose entranced me, and the world of Dominican immigrants intrigued me. I called Laura (this was before I was using email) and told her how enthusiastic I was about the book. I also requested that Diaz come to the store for a reading. Once the book came out, I was a one-man band in Boulder, constantly pushing the book on anyone who would listen.

Why had it struck me so strongly? In part, it was the immediacy of Diaz's writing. It sounded like he was sitting right next to you speaking the lines. The writing was so artful that it seemed to be without artifice. In part, it was the subject. What did I know of the Dominican experience? Not much. But somehow it resonated with the immigrant stories my Armenian relatives had told me, even though those stories were set 30 to 60 years earlier and involved a very different culture.

Diaz never came to the store to read from Drown in 1996 or 1997. That didn't stop us from selling over 100 copies in hardback. The next year, I became the store's buyer, and each season when the Penguin mailing came, I eagerly went through the Riverhead catalog searching for his promised novel. It was never there. Laura moved to New York a few years later, and gradually Diaz's debut began to fade in my memory.

When I first saw the catalog listing for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao this spring, I simply didn't believe it. Was this some cruel publishing prank? I was sure the rep would come in and tell me the book had been postponed. But soon after the catalog, a reader's copy followed, and then best of all, a few months ago we confirmed a signing with Diaz. The long wait was finally over. And yet, I found myself paralyzed, unable to read the book through most of the summer.

A series of long-awaited books that had become disappointments hung over me. Amy Bloom, Nathan Englander and Ron Carlson are all great short story writers who's 2007 novels simply didn't meet my expectations. Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, his first full-length novel since Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was so silly I couldn't get past page 50. This was a tremendous letdown since I consider Kavalier and Clay one of the best novels of the past 10 years.

It was with great trepidation that I approached Diaz's novel in the waning days of August. As I waded into it, I soon found that all my fears were unfounded. Finally, a book worth the wait. Actually, it is a book worth any wait. Diaz's voice is as confident and intimate as it was in Drown and his characters are as fascinating. Stylistically, Diaz simply cannot be matched by most of today's writers. The narrative varies from first-person to second-person to third with an ease that makes these jumps in point of view seem almost natural. The book also slips back and forth through time, ranging from today to the 1940s with an equal sense of ease.

All that would be enough to make the story of the obese lovelorn Oscar, his stubborn and willful sister Lola, their powerful intimidating mother and their Dominican family one of the best novels of the year. But Diaz's novel is not just another stylistic mind-bender like Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics, or a comic exercise in smart literary criticism like Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, it is a remarkable account of the long-lasting effects that life under a dictator can have for generations of people. Diaz is exploring the influence that fear can exert on the lives of people even years after the dictator has died and the families have moved thousands of miles. In short, it is sadly a novel about the most common human experience of the last century. All of the novel's stylistic playfulness serves the purpose of revealing an amazingly powerful and important story.

Diaz's dictator is Trujillo, the man who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. We have seen him in other novels, most notably Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies. But here we don't really confront him directly. As Diaz said at his event in Boulder the other night, he's more interested in the silences of history. His Trujillo is a shadow man. His appearances are limited to a few brief scenes, but his malevolence hangs over the whole novel. He's a man who ruled his country with the assent of many people. It is these people and their willingness to acquiesce that haunt the Dominicans as much as the evil dictator does. It is this complicity, along with the horrible acts of violence, that still cannot be spoken about.

Despite taking on such a serious topic, Diaz keeps the novel focused on Oscar and his sister. Oscar is a nerd beyond most typical nerds. He reads comic books, writes science fiction and can't get to first base with a girl. If it wasn't for Lola's ex-boyfriend taking pity on him, he'd be friendless even in college. Lola is headstrong and at one point runs away with a neglectful boyfriend to Wildwood, New Jersey to escape the rule of her mother. We discover that Lola is carrying out the destiny set by the very mother she is running from. It's a world dominated by the women, a similarity this novel shares with the stories in Drown, and coming of age isn't easy for the beautiful women of Oscar's family.

The stories of the characters are told through various narrative devices. In response to a question Diaz fielded at the bookstore about the shifting narration, he spoke about how he hoped to keep the narrative just out of his readers' grasp, slipping through their fingers as they tried to grab hold. He wanted to make it impossible for his readers to pin down the novel as one narration. He didn't want them getting too comfortable. To further illuminate his story, he also pulls out a magician's bag of literary tricks: footnotes, italics, letters, Dominican phrases and a healthy dose of literary and comic allusions. Coursing through the whole novel and holding it together is the idea of an ancient curse, the fuku, that haunts the Dominican, and perhaps all New World, people. All of this is woven into the novel with compassion and a whip-smart wit.

In person, Diaz is a remarkably warm presence. He came out into the audience, like a soft-spoken professor, and asked what was happening in Boulder. He was mostly met by silence and anxious laughs, but over time he was able to establish a dialogue that is rare in author appearances. He fielded an array of questions and spoke at length about his torturous writing technique (needless to say, there were hundreds if not thousands of pages thrown away), the history of the Dominican Republic, genre fiction and comic books.

Afterwards, he signed books slowly, taking a few minutes with each customer and connecting with them on an individual level. He spoke to the nerdy guy about comic books, an older couple about their time in the Dominican Republic, and finally he spoke to me about the book business and touring. I learned that they had only sent him to eight cities when he toured for Drown.

I had planned to use my time to plead with him not to take another 10 years for his next book. But I couldn't even bring myself to mention it to him. Maybe if he only took five or eight years, this novel wouldn't be so wonderful. He's still young, so there's no rush. Even if it takes him a decade to write a book, I should have another four or five Junot Diaz masterpieces to savor. If that's all there is, then that will be more than enough.

Summer Reading: Part 2

Summer equaled freedom for me, as it does for virtually every school kid, when I was growing up. I remember giddily running home with my friends after the last day of school to jubilantly dive into an endless stream of days spent swimming, playing tennis, and just wasting time, glorious time. I can't remember reading much except for the Philadelphia Bulletin's sports page, Baseball Digest magazine, and just about every Hardy Boys mystery I could get my hands on.

My love of summer disappeared when I started my career as a reporter. Suddenly, summer meant swatting away pesky mosquitoes and enduring near 100-degree heat and humidity as I covered Calvert County's team in southern Maryland's black baseball league every Sunday.

Yes, you read that right. There really were separate white and black semi-pro teams within 40 miles of our nation's capital as recently as 15 years ago. There still may be. I haven't gone back to check it out since I escaped to Colorado. I sweltered with the black team (which, to be honest, had one white player) because the level of play was better, about five times as many fans showed up and the food was far superior to anything going on at the white league's games. Still, despite the feast, it was a grind being out there in the blazing midday sun, trying to blink the salty sweat out of my eyes as I gripped my slippery telephoto lens. Most of the time, I prayed for rain -- a biblical rain.

Once I moved to Boulder, summer became the interminable time between ski seasons. Biting flies appeared every other year, making dealing with the summer tourists nearly unbearable at the bookstore. Try explaining in seven different languages and hand gestures that the flies were all part of the local color, something to write home to Switzerland, France or Japan about. While I was stuck dealing with out-of-town customers and their strange requests ("Where is your Danielle Steel section?" "Don't you have a better map of Aspen?" "How long will it take to drive to Las Vegas?" "Don't they have a place that serves meatloaf in this town?") I prayed for October, when I would take my annual vacation. I wanted to do my sightseeing during the off-season, without the tourist mob.

In short, summer had nothing going for it as far as I was concerned. That giddy feeling of my youth had turned into one of nausea as Memorial Day rolled around. I dreamt of spending my summers skiing in Argentina. A perpetual winter was my fantasy.

All that changed when my wife returned to school six years ago and then became a teacher. Summers were once again about freedom for her. That's one thing I've learned in marriage: your wife's freedom might be worth even more than your own. For me it was freedom from the alarm ringing at 6 a.m, freedom from weekend plans ruined by a knee-high stack of papers waiting to be graded, freedom to actually take a vacation and travel together. And finally, freedom to read a real book together.

My wife and I love to read out loud to one another. She does most of the reading, while I listen until I fall asleep. We've read Vladimir Nabokov, Sherwood Anderson and Guy du Maupassant. We've read contemporary novels, short story collections and even a baseball history. As soon as she started teaching, it became almost impossible to read works of any complexity. She needed to relax in her down time. Instead of Lolita, we read Lemony Snicket. Bye-bye Winesburg, Ohio, hello Snoopy's doghouse. In the last few years, our out-loud reading during the school year has consisted almost exclusively of the collected Peanuts cartoons.

In the summer, we can finally break out a novel or some literary stories. See you later, Linus, hello Richard Ford. Ah, that giddy feeling has returned. Here are some more comments about my summer adventures in reading:

They call this Wildlife: After a week of deliberations and false starts, my wife and I decided to read Richard Ford's Wildlife together. The first line caught us and filled us with a feeling of mystery, anticipation and a sense of nostalgia. "In the Fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him." The next few pages beautifully evoke Great Falls, Montana of that bygone year: the sounds of the crude oil processing and the smell of the wildfires that blazed through that summer.

As we read the book, we were struck with the simplicity and rhythm of Ford's language. The story plays out at a languid pace and is told without much emotion by the narrator, Joe Brinson. Joe rarely shows flashes of anger and is forgiving of his mother, even though she subjects him to many inappropriate and awkward situations. No kid wants his mother to fall in love with another man, but certainly no kid should have to endure witnessing nearly the whole affair. Joe thinks of his father, who is temporarily away fighting the fires, as heroic and wronged by his mother, but he tries to stay even-keeled throughout this tumultuous time.

Reading Wildlife out loud enabled us to slow down and enjoy its meditative qualities. Not much happens, and there are only a few scenes, the entire novel taking place in just three days. Talking about each scene, each scrap of dialogue allowed us to tease out the subtle nuances that are the hallmarks of Ford's fiction. Reading it quickly and silently would have been much less satisfying and perhaps even boring. It was a great way to appreciate one of Ford's forgotten works.

The Joys of Podcasting: Speaking of Richard Ford, one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had this summer was hearing him read John Cheever's magnificent short story "Reunion" on a podcast from The New Yorker magazine. Ford's southern lilt brings out the hopes and disappointments of this story in which a teenager meets his father in Grand Central Station after a long separation. The boy's worship of his father soon turns to keen embarrassment as the father's boorish behavior and alcoholic ways come to the forefront in the brief time they spend together.

Cheever's story is a true marvel in economy. It takes Ford less than 10 minutes to read it and yet it contains a whole world. We see the boy, the child of a divorce, passing into adulthood in this simple encounter, and we see the father spiralling downward, unable even hold a conversation together, let alone a marriage. After he reads the story, Ford answers some questions about it, and his insights truly shed new light on the tale.

I have since subscribed to the The New Yorker's monthly fiction podcast, as well as the The New York Times Book Review's weekly podcast from iTunes. They're free. I've been rewarded with intelligent conversations on books, including lengthy discussions about Joyce Carol Oates and Tessa Hadley, an interview with Stephen Carter, and Junot Diaz reading one of his early short stories. It's a great feature of iTunes that an old musician friend of mine turned me on to. I asked if he downloaded music, and he replied that he was addicted to podcasts, and that there was an amazing array of literary podcasts on iTunes. I scoffed at him, until I heard Ford reading Cheever -- now I'm hooked.

Can't ask Jeeves, Try Baxter: Each summer when I'm in Cape May, NJ, I read one of P.G. Wodehouse's works. Somehow, amidst the Victorian mansions and beautifully tended gardens of that beach town, it seems fitting to delve into the world of British Lords, their wayward family members and their all-knowing butlers.

Wodehouse seems out of favor these days. Hardly anyone I know reads him, and when I mention him to people, they often think he's probably a bit stale and irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. His humor is no more stale than Shakespeare's, and his sense of irreverence towards the moneyed classes has become even more relevant as the income gap continues to grow in this country.

The reason that more people aren't reading Wodehouse is that he is writing in a genre that is largely forgotten -- the farce. On the surface, his tales of mistaken identities, goofy subterfuges, and misplaced love appear to be silly. Even if you get beneath the surface, his plots are still quite ridiculous. But his writing and his wordplay are remarkable. He sets up verbal conundrums and deftly works his way out of them with clever witticisms. No contemporary author, not even David Sedaris or Dave Barry, makes me laugh out loud as often. I am terribly annoying when I'm reading these books because I insist on interrupting my wife, regardless of what she is doing, to read her humorous passages. She always laughs, usually because she knows I won't stop until she does.

This year, I read a collection of stories, Lord Emsworth and Others. These stories don't include his most famous character, the brilliant butler Jeeves (whose name is only known to many people because of the Ask Jeeves website that has since been simplified to Ask.com). Most of the stories in this collection are set in Blandings Castle and feature Lord Emsworth, a complete dimwit, who believes he's an expert gardener (sounds a bit like the current Prince of Wales). The plots usually revolve around the Lord, his butler Baxter -- who actually runs the estate and drives Emsworth batty -- and his bossy, imperious sister Lady Constance.

The Overlook Press has done a magnificent job over the last several years in reissuing Wodehouse's books in small, attractive and very affordable hardbacks. The books are actually the perfect size, smaller but much more sturdy than trade paperbacks. They remind me of the old classic Modern Library titles or of the editions that Algonquin used to put out of Kaye Gibbons' and Julia Alvarez's novels. They just feel good in your hands.

There's no better way to spend a summer day than with a book that feels just right.