The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao (5/5)
The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz opens with the epigraph, “Of what import
are brief, nameless lives…to Galactus??” Any fan of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby will know
immediately that these words are uttered by the Marvel character, Galactus, the
devourer of planets. But for those who
are not as steeped in comic book lore, Galactus is a gigantic, godlike alien
from before time who wears what looks like an Inca headdress combined with a
Tesla coil for a helmet and also appears to sport a mini-skirt and
leggings. Galactus strolls around the
galaxy looking for new worlds to consume.
Contained within the quote is the question of our place within the
universe and what a singular life means buried in the expanse of time and
space. The quote also signals that Junot
Diaz is a cultural omnivore, consuming literary and popular works from high and
low.
The epic, universe spanning epigraph prepares the reader for
a story of Oscar de Leon, a Dominican-American living in New Jersey who is culturally suspended
between his Dominican heritage and his love of geek culture. Oscar is cursed to be both a hopeless
romantic and completely incompetent with women.
He is subject to fits of depression and struggles with his weight. But, as Diaz’s epigraph suggests, Oscar is
also the subject of much larger forces.
Early on Diaz introduces the concept of fuku, a kind of New World curse
that was initiated with Columbus’s
arrival. Oscar’s tragic, infinitesimal
story is in fact a single element in a much larger story that stretches back
several generations to the Dominican
Republic.
Diaz juggles a number of interlocking narratives, presenting
events at different periods of time in the De Leon family’s history, and he
switches perspectives several times, from a chapter told from the first person
perspective of Oscar’s sister, Lola, to a letter written by Oscar shortly
before (and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here) he dies. But the vast majority of the novel is
narrated by Yunior, a character who has a tendency to pop up in Diaz’s
work. Because of the novel’s ability to
skip from character to character and time to time, filling us in on the history
of Oscar’s mother and grandfather in addition to Lola, the narrative nimbly
jumps across national and cultural borders.
I once had the good fortune to watch Junot Diaz speak in
person, and one thing that surprised me at the time was his claim that he
didn’t want Oscar Wao to be an
immigration narrative. At first I didn’t
understand what he meant. After all, the
characters do in fact emigrate from the Dominican
Republic to the United States, so how could this
not be seen as a story of immigration.
But rereading the book, it became clear that Diaz is more interested in
the idea of diaspora and how cultures pool and divide when individuals are
constantly mobile. Just as the narrative
consistently returns to the DR, so does Oscar and his family.
Living in the United States, Oscar becomes
estranged from what is considered Dominican culture as he further immerses
himself in geek culture. While Diaz
represents geek culture as American in a number of ways—Oscar first becomes
obsessed with the Planet of the Apes
series and later post-apocalyptic films reacting to the U.S./Russian Cold
War—Oscar is also intrigued by the burgeoning anime culture coming in from the Far
East, and as he becomes more interested in writing, Oscar thinks he might
become the Dominican Tolkein, contributing his unique national identity to this
partly transnational conglomerate known as geek culture. For Diaz, geek culture represents the
possibility of a global culture unbound by national borders.
The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao has all the
makings of an instant classic without the baggage that comes with the word
“masterpiece.” Diaz’s narrator, Yunior,
is linguistically nimble and has somehow managed to keep an entire universe of
literary and pop culture references within his grasp. The novel itself is a little over three
hundred pages, and yet paradoxically seems absolutely endless and concludes far
too soon.
