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July 01, 2008
Media Glutton: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao vs. lesser books I liked more
I'm about to start y second year of MFA in Creative writing work through the Ranier Writer's Workshop. the first year was great for all kinds of reasons, most of them having to do with improving my writing. But I also was forced to read a lot of novels I probably never would have picked up, expanding my literary horizons and deepening my appreciation for good writing. It was a really useful, sometimes frustrating, but overall very worthwhile experience. When I finished up my first term's work back in May, I went on an orgy of reading whatever the hell I wanted to, including a lot of sci-fi and some thrillers and some nonfiction. Good times for the most part.
When I heard about Junot Diaz's book, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I knew people at school would be expecting me to have read it. The main character is an old-school role-playing game geek obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy who dreams of being the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkein. Once the book won the Pulitzer Prize and the author appeared on the Colbert Report I figured it was time to see what all the fuss was about.
So let me say first of all that it's a really well-written book. I mean, damn. It's written in voice, actually a few different voices, and all of them are evocative and often poetic in a Dominican street slang kind of way. The prose comes at you full speed with the lingo and the Spanglish, with David Foster Wallace-worthy footnotes to explain some of the more intriguing and obscure references. Judging from the obscure 80's pen and paper RPG references alone, all of which I am almost embarrassed to admit I caught, Diaz really knows his old-school geekdom personally. Not that the book gets mired down in these things. The geeky protagonist Oscar is only the focus of about a third of the book, with the other parts about his sister and even more about his mother's life growing up in the Dominican Republic. I learned a ton about the DR, which I really knew nothing about before this book, and found it all compelling.
But here's the thing. I didn't find this book to be at all satisfying. Part of it is that I really don't enjoy coming of age stories, and this novel is not just one such story, but rather three. And second, and even more important, I just didn't like Oscar much. Which is to say, even though I could relate to his experiences and understand his point of view, I didn't empathize with him. And when the end of the book plays out and his brief but not at all wondrous life comes to an end, I was just pissed off at him. It wasn't a tragedy, and it wasn't the so-called family curse or fuku that the book was supposed to be about. It's a story about people making bad decisions for bad reasons over and over again, and really I don't give a damn. People making bad decisions for good reasons, or because of bad information is more interesting. People making good decisions for bad reason is also interesting. Blockheads who should know better doing exactly the wrong things even though they know better: I don't care. Yeah, yeah, blinded by emotion and love, unable to see the truth because he's living in his own fantasy world or whatever. Here's the truth for me: when I finished the book I threw it across the room in disappointment.
But here's the other truth. It's a really well-written book. Like I said above, Damn. So as I've moved on to other titles this past week, I've seen the difference. Plots that engage me are flat and uninteresting in less talented hands. After Diaz's spellbinding, characterful prose, the flat, mono-tone dialog of the current sci-fi thingy I'm reading seems all the worse by comparison. Now of course not all stories are for all people, and I can see why lots of critics and readers have fallen for Oscar Wao. Me, I'm just left looking for some happy medium between storytelling talent and actual story.
Posted by rdakan at July 1, 2008 10:45 AM