I recorded a half-dozen draft preview videos for ESPNEWS and the dot-com; the first two are on Steven Strasburg and the top hitters in the draft. Today’s chat transcript is here. Deadspin had a good post today on the Austin Wood/Mike Belfiore debacle, which quoted me, which is what made it a good post in the first place.
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After the dual endorsement given by the two critics behind the TIME 100, I expected to love Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar Wao is a Latino geek in New Jersey caught between his ethnic identity and his inner dork, a lover of sci-fi magazines and role-playing games who speaks in his own stilted vernacular and can not, for the life of him, get laid. His life is brief and not really all that wondrous, although it is pretty crazy, a sort of hysterical realism along the lines of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The narrative breaks several times to shift narrators and jumps back once to tell the story of Oscar’s grandparents, particularly his grandfather, an educated man jailed over an apparent trifle by the brutal Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Indeed, Trujillo might be even more of a main character in this book than Oscar is, as the murderous tyrant appears in the subtext even in the present day, and the history of the Dominican Republic seems to parallel (imperfectly) Oscar’s story.
Díaz has a definite gift for language (Beli tried her hardest but she couldn’t spin bomb-grade plutonium from the light-grade uranium of her days) and reading his prose is frequently like tap-dancing on the edge of a deep crevasse – exciting, confusing, frightening, but, assuming you survive, something you’re not likely to forget any time soon. But ultimately, the story revolves around a character who’s not that compelling: Oscar is a geek and unlucky in love and life, but he’s not sympathetic – he’s almost robotic, and naïve only works on my sympathies for a little while, after which I start to wonder how a character who is allegedly quite smart can also be so dense. Diaz’s verbal gymnastics, his cleverness, and the intermittent humor all make Oscar Wao worth reading, but a tighter story and a central character who’s more human could have made this a masterpiece.
Next up: I’ve got about 360 pages left in Gone with the Wind
two issues with the Chat:
1. Las Cruces has the best green chile and it isn’t even close.
2. Laird should have bunted and had a hit if it remained fair. He’s trying to win. Beckett is a baby. If Beckett had given up three hits already would the bunt have been frowned upon? Does the Mystique of the potential no hitter make a fundamental baseball play “weak ass”?
Keith – I finished Oscar Wao a month ago and couldn’t agree more. The writing was great, but Oscar was frustrating. I found myself wanting to hear more about the narrator’s (brief) life with Lola and less of Oscar, who never evolved.
I’ve heard good things about Diaz’s collection of short stories, Drown, but those too are set in NJ and the DR so it may be more of the same.
Anyway, thanks for the review!
I caught Oscar Wao on audio book and I had a mixed feeling about it. I didn’t like really Oscar’s story but the parts about his family’s history were really good.
You must be loving Gone with the Wind. Seems like you’ve been half way through it for a month.
I do like it – and it’s only been two weeks – but I’m a little busy with the draft.
Keith, I find it a bit odd that you’d like the Deadspin article on Wood, considering it took the pitch count route. And as you stated (correctly) in your replies, the problem has nothing to do with pitch counts, but with RPs being used in a way they’re not ready for.
Re: “I start to wonder how a character who is allegedly quite smart can also be so dense.”
I haven’t read ‘Wao’, but I’m curious about this statement. I know many people in real life, who are often described as “smart” or “brilliant”, yet suffer from much of what you describe Wao to suffer from. I find this an interesting phenomenon, and always makes me reflect back on the criteria by which we judge people to be “smart”. Is it possible that Diaz’s point was to demonstrate that nerdiness does not necessarily reflect useful intellect, or intellect at all?
I agree. I kept on waiting for Oscar to develop, to break out of his shell, to change in some way, but it never came. For me, the most compelling parts were the ones telling Beli’s story.
Did you read Drown by Diaz? I’ve read both and thought Drown was significantly better, though I enjoyed both.