A lit thesis I will not write

I loved Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, despite gossip about Diaz at Syracuse and despite Syracuse in general. The MFA mostly ruined me for contemporary fiction but not entirely, we are relieved to note. (Also, three years later, maybe I'm writing again! Besides blog entries which are helping get things warmed up anyway.)

There's something great about putting a book on reserve at the library, and then when it comes it's like a package in the mail.

I love how Diaz refuses to italicize the Spanish in his writing--I remember reading something by him about that a million years ago [tracked down at least one reference, a quote from Diaz included in the NYT 1996 review of Drown: "I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.''] and this book seems so completely written in his language, even more than Drown did. The ELL teacher at school read it, and he said he loved it because he'd never read a book that was written how people really talk. I kept thinking about who Diaz's audience is meant to be: sometimes he seems to be talking to people who grew up in the world of the book, and sometimes--though rarely--he seems to be explaining that world to his New Yorker audience. Not too often, though, and not too much.

There are lots of footnotes. I love footnotes. Especially footnotes explaining the Dominican history referenced, the side stories, the details that don't belong in the narrative flow of things. But there were places where I got annoyed by pretensions that snuck in, including at least one--maybe only one?--footnote about something that was in an earlier draft and got edited out for various reasons. Meta in a useless jolting way, reeking of McSweeney's. Plus toward the end there was a dumb metaphor involving "nightmare 8-a.m. MLA panels: endless."

But I love the specifics and the dorkiness and the references without explanation, whether Dominican slang or roleplaying games or comics or sci fi. This book has such a voice. And after I finished it I was thinking how much more Diaz has in common with someone like Isaac Bashevis Singer than he does with most contemporary [white American?] writers. Again, I'm not as well-read in contemporary fiction as I should be to be making such claims. But I was thinking that he and Singer have many of the same themes, even with a lot of common threads. New York (outer Brooklyn/far out NJ); tight knit immigrant communities, Diasporas, with so many connections to Back Home; wars and dictators and changing regimes Back Home; young male writers and intellectuals doing what they have to do to pay rent, but living their "real lives" outside of the job; and, entirely essential to both writers, an obsession with the ladies. Lots of players and affairs and romantic intrigue in these guys' books. There's religion, too. And families with all their burdens and obligations. All those generations with their different relationships to Back Home, to language and priorities and family and history and all of it. Gender expectations, secrets left behind (but usually not really left behind at all), myths and God and all the rest of it. Plus did I mention the ladies. So that's the thesis, somewhere in there.

Teacherly post script: If I were teaching college, or maybe even high school, I'd want to use this quote to talk about voice and POV and how much can be conveyed about characters (whether the narrator, character described, or both) in a few sentences: "At college you're not supposed to care about anything--you're just supposed to fuck around--but believe it or not, I cared about Lola. She was a girl it was easy to care about. Lola like the fucking opposite of the girls I usually macked on: bitch was almost six feet tall and no tetas at all and darker than your darkest grandma. Like two girls in one: the skinniest upperbody married to a pair of Cadillac hips and an ill donkey. One of those overachiever chicks who run all the organizations in college and wear suits to meetings. Was the president of her sorority, the head of S.A.L.S.A. and co-chair of Take Back the Night. Spoke perfect stuck-up Spanish." (p. 168, in case you write the thesis or teach not sixth graders).