The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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. 

Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie

Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie (4/5)

A creative writing instructor of mine once said, “Those who write poetry tend to love people, but those who write fiction tend to hate people.”  According to him, because a novel has to put its characters through so many obstacles, a novelist has to have a streak of sadism.  Perhaps it’s because Sherman Alexie is also a consummate poet that his love for his characters always shines through his fiction, especially in his first short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and his first novel, Reservation Blues.  It seems a little strange, then, that Alexie chose a serial killer as the subject matter for his second novel, Indian Killer.  This seemed like particularly dark subject matter for an author whose writing can be laugh out loud funny.

Indian Killer spans a number of different characters whose paths constantly criss-cross, but they all orbit around a series of violent murders in Seattle by a perpetrator dubbed “The Indian Killer.”  The Indian Killer gets his name because he stalks, murders, and scalps his victims and then leaves behind two owl feathers.  The plot seems like it might belong to those modern day dime store novels, the airport paperback.  And while Alexie indulges in elements of the thriller—there are tense scenes where we don’t know whether the killer will get his victim or not all written, like the point of view shot at the beginning of Halloween, from the perspective of “the killer”—he is far more interested in how these acts of violence are read by and acted upon by the residents of Seattle.  Four hundred years of racial resentment and anger between whites and American-Indians boil over thanks to these murders.

If there is a main character, then it is the absurdly named Native-American, John Smith, who was adopted by a wealthy, well-meaning white couple from Seattle.  As John grows up, he becomes increasingly alienated from his white parents.  Despite the fact that his parents have the means to send him to college, John takes on a job in construction after graduating from high school, but even in this environment he’s an outsider.  It’s hard not to read descriptions of John’s awkward interactions with people—his inability to read others and strange social maneuverings—and not think about autism.  Alexie appears to be using mental development disorders as a sort of metaphor for cultural estrangement.  As an Indian raised by white parents, John belongs to a culture of one.

In addition to John, the other central native character is Marie, a Native-American activist and college student.  While the murders are happening, Marie, an English major, is taking a course on Native-American literature by an anthropology professor, Dr. Mather.  Mather is a white native sympathizer, who prides himself on his enlightened attitude towards American-Indians, but becomes increasingly incensed when Marie consistently challenges his notions about native cultures because he lacks an experiential component.  For Marie, Mather’s knowledge is suspect because he has never really lived on the rez. 

Mather is affecting a kind of passing (he loves to mention that he has been adopted by Native-American tribes), and this passing is echoed by another character, Jack Wilson, a mystery writer who holds onto a historically suspect idea that one of his ancestors may have been a famous Seattle Indian.  Wilson, who used to be a police officer, writes mystery paperbacks about a Native-American, Aristotle Little Hawk, who also happens to be a private detective.  Wilson engages in representations of Native-Americans that Alexie hopes to disfigure with his literature.  Alexie describes the love plot of the average Aristotle Little Hawk novel in the following manner: “A beautiful white woman fell in love with Little Hawk in each book, although he was emotionally distant and troubled.  The beautiful white woman fell in love with Little Hawk because he was emotionally distant and troubled.”  But even as Wilson gives in to Native-American tropes, unable to break out of a narrative that has been building for four hundred years, he is also naively well-meaning.  He wishes to honor what he sees as his own Native-American ancestry, even though he is blonde and blue-eyed.

Much of the novel allows for Alexie to play with notions of identity.  The anthropology professor, Dr. Mather, seems to be an attack on academics who would unravel notions of authenticity.  Often these academics tend to come from wealthy or middle class backgrounds and are more interested in abstract notions of race than in the day to day material experience of minorities in America.  Likewise, Wilson wants to have race both ways.  He wants the benefits of a white experience while also holding onto an ersatz native background that legitimizes his occupation of native lands.  Marie’s angry and exasperated attack on those who don’t fully understand Native-American experience in the 20^th/21^st century seems to be Alexie’s way of pushing against these condescending liberals.  But on the other end of the spectrum, there is Truck Schultz, a conservative radio personality that represents America’s bigoted id.  Unlike Wilson and Dr. Mather, Truck is explicitly anti-Indian, and his radio program keeps dredging up racist discourse from centuries past.  For Alexie, these are the twin poles of misguided white beliefs about Native peoples.

Even though the novel goes to some violent and dark places, Alexie never fully lets go of his sense of humor.  He once referred to the book as a “feel good novel about interracial murder.”  And you get a sense that Alexie really cares for his characters, even for those whom he disagrees with.  Still, this creates a somewhat uneven tone for the entire book.  If Indian Killer is less successful than Alexie’s earlier work, it is because he is pushing his craft forward.  Maybe he will develop a streak of sadism, yet.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

The Philip K. Dick Reader by Philip K. Dick (4/5)

One of the great tragedies of Philip K. Dick’s life is that he died shortly before Hollywood started pumping out adaptations of his work.  This means that he has become far more popular posthumously than when he was alive.  For most of his time as a sci-fi author, Philip K. Dick both lived to write and wrote to live.  He was an incredibly prolific artist who, at times, seemed to have an unending supply of ideas, but at the same time he also had to write in order to provide himself shelter and food.  This means that PKD’s naturally productive nature was bolstered by the fact that he was also forced to produce.  While PKD turned in a number of masterpieces in his time, his writing could often be hit or miss.  This makes it difficult for fans of his writing to navigate his body of work past some of the more well known novels.  PKD’s prolific nature makes it especially tough to find a satisfactory collection of his short stories.  Out of the seemingly endless collections of PKD short stories, The Philip K. Dick Reader isn’t a bad place to start.

The one thing that The Philip K. Dick Reader has going for it that many other PKD collections don’t is the fact that it includes a number of short stories that later served as the blueprints for film adaptations.  Of the stories included in the anthology, the following have been made into movies: “The Golden Man” (Next), “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” (Total Recall), “The Minority Report” (Minority Report), “Paycheck” (Paycheck), and “Second Variety” (Screamers).  It’s a joy just to see ways in which PKD’s vision did or did not make it onto the silver screen.  After reading some of PKD’s work, for example, it becomes apparent that the dark comedy present in Paul Verhoven’s Total Recall is akin to PKD’s similarly perverse sense of humor.

But the real gems in The Philip K. Dick Reader are those stories that surprise us with their quality, the stories that manage to contain PKD’s wit and intelligence, albeit in miniature.  One of the best finds in the anthology has to be the fantastically titled, “Foster, You’re Dead!”  Like much of PKD’s work in this collection, “Foster” is a clear response to the Cold War.  But where most of his stories are interested in what happens after the bombs hit, “Foster” presents a small town on the edge of a nuclear war.  In PKD’s vision of America’s future, the government and corporations have found a way to make war work for consumerism.  Although it is not mandated, each member of the community is expected to buy their own bomb shelter, and those who don’t become outcasts.  The Foster of the title is an adolescent whose father refuses to give in to the pressures of consumerism, despite the toll it takes on his wife and son.  “Foster” showcases PKD as a brilliant observer of power and coercion.  He understands that power over individuals and groups doesn’t always come in the form of the government.  Instead, authority can manifest itself as our next door neighbors or in the form of a commercial telling us what we must do to be acceptable in polite society. 

Since most of these stories were written during the height of the Cold War, it’s not surprising how many of them take place after the fall of civilization.  But it is surprising how many variations on the post-apocalyptic narrative PKD could conjure.  In “The Turning Wheel” a devastating war has upended social order and racial hierarchy, causing the “caucs” to become the most subordinated racial caste; “The Last of the Masters” pits roving bands of anarchists against the very last organized government run by a nearly despotic robot; “To Serve the Master” presents a world where the apocalyptic past is so traumatic that it is pathologically sublimated;  and “Pay for the Printer” is a story of Marxist alienation where humanity has lost the skills necessary to produce goods and must rely on aliens to provide necessities.  It’s interesting to read PKD’s apocalyptic fiction at a time when the end of the world—thanks to an influx of zombies—appears to once again be in vogue.  But where present day stories of the end of the world are obsessed with complete and total atrophy, PKD seems more concerned with how we will carry on.  There’s a sense in his work that he believes that the world we live in—with its racial, gender, and economic inequality—is not a given, that we can transform our society for the better.  Even in his bleakest stories, PKD often betrays a sense of optimism.

Of course, not every installment in The Philip K. Dick Reader is gold.  Some of the material is just plain weird and there are a few that are kind of bad.  The story “Strange Eden” ends with a lion-like creature angrily shaking his fist at a departing spaceship, and I don’t want to even get into how PKD arrives at this scenario.  But even in PKD’s worst stories there’s a nervous energy that always propels it forward.  And his best work vacillates, often uneasily, between pulp trash and high philosophy.  His short stories can often read like thought experiments with a higher number of robots, mutants, and schizophrenics.  This tension between the high and the low is a defining aspect of PKD’s work, and instead of diluting either characteristic, the sensational somehow reinforces the high minded and vice versa. 

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon (4/5)

            Over the course of his career, Michael Chabon has built a body of work that seems determined to prove that, paradoxically, we may engage with complicated, real-world entanglements through escapist literature.  Kavalier and Clay detailed the Jewish immigrant experience by looking at the early formation of superheroes and comic books.  The Yiddish Policeman’s Union took on questions of national identity and sovereignty while telling a noirish mystery adventure.  At this point it seems strange to see Chabon come to reality through the decidedly un-otherworldly genre of the personal essay.  Chabon’s collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, gives fans a glimpse into the real life obsessions that have made his novels unique imprints on the world of literature.

            Anyone who has read his magnum opus Kavalier and Clay knows that Chabon is perfectly capable of writing novels of intellectual and physical weight, so it is somewhat refreshing to read this series of airy musings that might be best read during a sequence of lazy afternoons.  Chabon’s ruminations are evenly split between autobiographical exploration and pop culture inquiry.  In one of the more intimate essays, “The Heartbreak Kid,” Chabon recounts flashes of his first marriage and waxes nostalgic about his relationship with his first father-in-law.  And yet just a couple dozen pages prior, he was tracing the evolution of Legos and doing his best impression of a septuagenarian while decrying their recent glut of licensing deals.  But perhaps the best individual essays of the collection happen when the autobiographical and the cultural cross paths, like in “A Woman of Valor” where he compares his wife to the Jack Kirby superheroine Big Barda (which, if you are a DC Comics fan, is perhaps the most romantic sentiment ever uttered). 

            I had the good fortune to briefly talk to Michael Chabon while he signed my copy of this book.  During our brief back and forth, my wife asked him if Manhood for Amateurs was a response to his wife’s collection of essays Bad Mother (which is also excellent, by the way).  He said that he wrote Manhood as a sort of companion piece to Bad Mother.  After hearing this I couldn’t help but line up both books.  The essay genre seems like a more natural fit for Ayelet Waldman, who managed to go to some difficult places in her writing.  Wanting to limit an audience’s access to your personal life is a perfectly reasonable reaction to writing non-fiction, but it would be a lie to say that it doesn’t in some manner limit this collection.  Still, I’ve always felt that it is sometimes necessary for an author to write minor works in order to prove he is a major artist.

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon (4/5)

Central to each essay that makes up Michael Chabon’s collected work of non-fiction, Maps and Legends, is the notion that genre fiction—including gothic horror, noir mystery, dystopic sci-fi, sword and sorcery, etc.—has been regulated to the ghettos of literature and abandoned by writers with any pretense to literary seriousness. Instead of learning to enjoy the sensation of goose bumps on our skin while reading a ghost story or the heart palpitating shock found at the end of a Victorian mystery, readers and writers alike have learned to ignore the joys of these visceral sensations for what is considered the more cerebral pursuits of the Joycian short story, replete with inner musings and epiphany inducing endings. Chabon believes this distrust of genre as serious literature is tied to the negative connotations associated with “entertainment,” which he describes as a word that “wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights.” We have learned to distrust anything whose primary purpose appears to entertain us.

Of course, despite being tied to images of ivy covered brick buildings, stagnant classrooms and tweed jackets, even James Joyce’s short stories have immense propensity for entertainment. Chabon understands that entertainment is found not only in the unseemly pages of genre fiction but in all works of literature, despite how esoteric they may at first seem, and he proposes “expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.” He is attempting to expand the definition of entertainment, so that it may appropriately describe both reading Poe under a blanket with a flashlight and reading T.S. Eliot in one of those ivory towers while sipping on a pipe, while simultaneously refusing to dilute the definition. It is equally subversive to describe Neil Gaiman as entertaining as Herman Melville as it is to describe Herman Melville as entertaining as Neil Gaiman.

Chabon makes this argument in the book’s first essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” and it is from this essay that all others in the book spawn. Because he refuses to define genre in pejorative terms, Chabon is given the authority to write an elegiac rumination on the comic book pioneer Will Eisner’s death or discuss Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in terms of its relation to other novels of apocalyptic science fiction. The following fifteen essays serve to reinforce Chabon’s literary worldview, and it becomes apparent how arbitrary it is to regulate one genre outside the realm of serious literature while keeping other genres within the confines of literary good taste. After all, the epiphany ending short stories of Joyce and Hemingway are a genre in themselves. In the essay “The Other James,” about the ghost stories of M. R. James, Chabon points out that Balzac, Poe, de Maupassant and Kipling—no minor figures within the literary canon—all wrote ghost stories, a genre that has been shuffled, under point of gun, to the confines of the genre ghetto. While maintaining one’s literary credentials, a graduate students can analyze The House of the Seven Gables through a New Historicist framework, but don’t you dare get caught reading the latest Steven King novel on the subway.

The collection is not without its faults. And while Chabon is a consummate novelist, I feel he has always struggled in more constrained mediums like the short story or essay. Many of the works in the second half of the book feel slight, as if there was some unifying concept that was lopped off the end. Or, to use a genre metaphor, these essays feel as if the two plots of a detective noir story never converge into one by the end of the novel. The slight frame of his lesser essays seem incapable of holding up Chabon’s thickly woven prose. However, when he is at his best, Chabon’s thoughts reshape how genre is viewed by everyone from the casual reader to the acolytes of literary critics like Bloom and Frye. At the very least Maps and Legends will give many the courage to keep the book jacket on that collection of post-apocalyptic-mystery-ghost-stories when they are reading in the park.

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (5/5)

Love Medicine tells a multigenerational story that spans many decades, lives, marriages, loves, and deaths. It is an ambitious novel that both attempts to provide a widescreen view of life as it interconnects across blood and generations while simultaneously reserving the right to zoom into quiet moments that, while they may seem insignificant at the time, blossom in import as author Louise Erdrich scales back her view to reveal the intricate nature of her story. The novel centers around the two poles of the Kapshaws and the Larmartines, two families who live on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. These families are not made up of traditional nuclear units, and Erdrich must provide an intricate and looping family tree just so the reader understands who is related to whom.

Each chapter of Love Medicine presents itself as a short story, a common technique for a first novel. However, what separates Love Medicine from other novels who have taken the same approach is the way Erdrich utilizes the shifting point of view to provide a multifaceted view of characters and events. Most chapters are written from the first person and provide an opportunity for Erdrich to play with tone and voice that depends on the character. For example, Lipsha Morrissey, a teenager growing up in the eighties, utilizes videogames for metaphors. The death of a veteran returning from Vietnam is treated as an accident or a suicide depending on the author. The technique, if a bit less experimental even if simultaneously more grand, is similar to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

By revisiting events, and even placing some events in non-chronological order, Erdrich’s stories accumulate momentum and power as the novel progresses. As readers, we are aware that we are privy to only moments in a larger story that takes place off screen. In ways Love Medicine is like a collection of close photographs of a single skyscraper – a bird’s nest on a ledge, an American flag, the sun reflecting off a window – without ever revealing the whole object. We recognize the whole from the aggregate because of our familiarity with both, and in the case of Love Medicine the whole is life from family.

Perhaps the single most impressive aspect of Love Medicine is Erdrich’s prose. Her writing is just this side of magical realism, and while certain characters may believe in magic, Lipsha Morrissey believes he has a healing touch, because these very same characters are telling the story we are welcomed to doubt their powers. However, Erdrich’s writing is often imbued with an effervescent mysticism. In the chapter “The Island” narrated by Lulu Nanapush, Lulu leaves her home to live in a cave on an island with Moses Pillager, perhaps a more surrealist chapter than the rest of the novel. Upon consummating her romance with Moses, Lulu, who would go on to father many children with many fathers, informs the reader: “I want to grind men’s bones to drink in my night tea…I want to be their food, their harmful drink, to taste men like stilled jam at the back of my tongue.” These moments of surrealism are equally matched by a prose that seems permeable and effervescent, as if the words can barely capture the events before us.

Erdrich is responsible for populating her novel with a myriad of characters whose lives bend and bounce off one another, and while we may not condone the actions of every one of them, there is a clear understanding that their actions rise from a shared pain. Because these characters are connected through a webwork of relations, their loneliness seems that much tragic.

Edgar Allen Poe - "The Masque of the Red Death"

Edgar Allen Poe – “The Masque of the Red Death”

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” like many of his gothic tales, is concerned with the aristocracy of the old country. As the story opens, the red death is spilling over the countryside causing symptoms such as “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores.” Juxtaposed against this grim depiction, Poe introduces the only character with a proper name: “But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious.” In the midst of a national pandemic, Prospero has locked the castle gates in an attempt to form a damn between him and the waves of the red death, and the prince even plans a gaudy gala for the occasion.

Of course, because this is a gothic tale, things do not end well for Prince Prospero. After one of Poe’s typically phantasmagoric description of the prince’s seven chambers – each chamber is lit through different colored stained glass and decorated in a similar color scheme – the author introduces us to the decadent fashions of Prospero’s guests: “There were much of the beautiful, much of the wanton much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.” Throughout the evening a pendulum driving clock marks the passage of each hour so loudly that the band playing must stop until the bells have finished their toll. This carnival of the grotesque is interrupted by a lone figure whose costume far and away exceeded that of the party goers, or, in the words of Poe, the intruder “out-Heroded Herod.” When he finally summons the courage, Prospero lunges towards this party crasher but quickly falls dead on the floor. The other partiers rip at the intruder’s garb only to discover that the pieces of cloth covered no tangible form underneath, and then they too succumb to the affects of the red death.

Poe’s story deals with themes important to the new American democracy, particularly the anxiety over the old world’s titled aristocracy and whether that aristocracy exists in the United States under a different name. Prospero’s attempt to shield himself from the outside world is indicative of a society built on two tiers. Prospero assumes the atrocities outside his walled castle have no bearing on what goes on behind those walls. Natural law does not apply to Prospero and his guests. Nature, as suggested by the loud incessant clock, eventually catches up to each of, and the same is true of Prospero and his aristocratic friends. Death is the ultimate democracy because it is the only true assurance of equality. The theme of a masque suggests Bactin’s concept of carnival, whereby the natural order of society is upturned. Indeed, while Prince Prospero believes himself above those who must suffer the red death, he finds himself mired in the same bloody death as the peasantry.

Much of Edgar Allen Poe’s story seems timely today. It is easy to think back to Prince Prospero when you hear about billion dollar ponzi schemes, business men faking their own death and banks receiving taxpayer funds with little asked, while homeowners are being chastised for lack of personal responsibility. As Prospero’s name suggests, the real difference between the aristocrat and those suffering an agonizing death outside of his castle isn’t the title of Prince but rather the acquisition of wealth. There is a reason Poe’s story would have resonated in a country without such titles, and that is the fear that the double tier of prosperity still existed. And of course it did. There is more than a little catharsis found in “The Masque of the Red Death,” and I challenge anyone not to root for the red death just a little. Of course, catharsis can only go so far. What the United States needs now is a complete re-imagining of our economy so that no matter one’s class, the aristocracy cannot profit while the rest of us vacillate outside their wall.