false 3 1 false true Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Jun 27 16:11:17 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 29 18:01:59 -0700 2009 Galactus the World-Devourer is one that's got my attention. Diaz's debut novel about the life of a Dominican uber-nerd and his family history is a big old mashup of two different cultures: that of nerds and that of the US-Dominican Diaspora.

Our eponymous hero is a big fat nerd of the worst kind, all Tolkien and role-playing and superheroes and space opera. This makes him the most extreme kind of outsider as he grows up in the Dominican community of New York City, the only Dominican who can never EVER get laid, which is a big thing since sex is - according to this book - such a large part of the Dominican identity. Oscar's virginity, sexual frustration and his puppydog heart are as embedded in his personality as the geeky stuff.

We also get a lot of Oscar's family's backstory, specifically his Ma and his Sister's brushes with the dark heart of the Dominican Republic. This part of the book touches on what our narrator - Oscar's sometime housemate and Oscar's sister's sometime boyfriend (when he's not dumped for fucking around) - refers to as the family curse. These parts of the book are Life Under A Third World Dictator 101 as our narrator gives us his potted from-the-hip jargon-spattered history of the Dominican Republic under Dictator Rafael Trujillo: dangerous, capricious and with a tendency to come abruptly to a violent halt.

There's a thesis running through the story that Oscar's family are cursed, which is intended to explain the violent deaths of Oscar's grandparents, the near-fatal beating of his mother, the death of his sister's Dominican boyfriend, and Oscar's own untimely demise. But it's not convincing enough a thesis. There's no denying the above tragedies, but in each case - save perhaps his sister's boyfriend's death - the violence that comes down on these people is patently avoidable if only they had made different, less headstrong choices. To me it felt like this was not a moral tale about living under a curse, but - given that most of the beatings & murders &c are a consequence of the victims' romantic intentions - instead it feels like a story about people who deliberately allow shit to come down on them because they think it somehow validates their love.

Problems with this book's cohesion arise when Diaz tries to merge the two cultures he's spent so long immersing us in, by having Oscar visit the DR in the book's final chapters, only to fall in love with a corrupt cop's ex-hooker girlfriend. Up until this point the stories of Oscar's loserhood and his family's "curse" have not intersected at all in any real sense, and they don't really do so after this point, either. Most of the nerdy stuff gets dropped in favour of the seamy, sexy, risky, violent DR side of things, which begs the question, if Oscar was going to end up like this, why did Diaz spend so damn much time building up and going on and on about Oscar's nerdliness? I mean, apart from it would be fun to write that kind of thing?

I think in the end what you've got here is two things: a detailed portrait of the worst geek you could ever imagine; and a detailed personal history of a dark and dangerous country. When I finished the last page I found myself thinking that The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao would have been a much more engaging story if Oscar hadn't been in it. His mother, his great aunt and his sister - even our hapless narrator - are all much more convincing and well-fleshed-out characters than Mr. Wao himself.

And that's the other thing. Diaz tries so hard to make Oscar the ultimate nerd by namedropping everything from Kirby to Tolkien and saddling him with every trope of nerdy loserdom imaginable, from teaching himself to read and write in fantasy languages to being fat and repulsive to every woman on the face of the planet. In the end it's too much, and Oscar becomes just another geeky caricature, difficult to distinguish from The Comic Shop Guy in The Simpsons. This begs the question in the reader's mind: if the nerd stuff is turned up to eleven and beyond, so much that it becomes more fiction than truth, then how much of the other aspects of the novel - especially the portrayal of the DR - is also just a hurricane of cliché?

You know, having said all that, I actually really liked this book. All of these structural flaws are things that come after the reading, once you've sat down to reflect and digest. But during the reading of this book I was entranced, overwhelmed, entertained and amused in the best way. This is a first novel, after all. It's expected that there will be some structural flaws, but even so those flaws do nothing to dissuade me that Mr. Diaz is an amazingly talented author - I'm looking forward very much to seeing what he puts out next.]]>