What I said then:
Won the Pulitzer a few years back, and is about a Dominican kid who's obsessed with comics.
What I say now:
Maybe I ought to steer clear of prize winners from now on, because I've gotta be honest, I was a bit underwhelmed by this one. Don't get me wrong, it was really entertaining: it's written in a casual, conversational kind of style that kept me turning the pages. I just found it pretty emotionally hollow.
Oscar, a second-generation Dominican living in the New Jersey suburbs, is an unsuccessful romantic. A true nerd's nerd (fat, ugly, loves comic books and Tolkien novels, plays Dungeons & Dragons ... it'd all add up to a a dumb cliche, except Díaz's own love for geeky stuff shines through), Oscar falls in intense, instantaneous love with every beautiful woman he meets. This love, which the novel kindly characterises as generous and genuine, rather than creepy and weird, is basically never reciprocated. As he suffers rebuff after rebuff, Oscar retreats into worlds of fantasy, either in the literature he loves, or in the novels he's writing.
Hey, I dig nerdy stuff (I'd estimate I understood around 75% of the references to geek culture), and I could definitely dig a novel that takes a character who's a cliched nerd and then, by giving him an interior life, busts him out of the cliche. Unfortunately, by the end of the novel, we really don't learn anything about Oscar that I haven't included in that second paragraph. His entire life he just repetitively does the same things, and encounters the same problems, and deals with them the same way. I never felt like I gained a deeper understanding of him, or really any understanding at all. It's like writing a novel about Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons, without ever delving deeper than "Worst ... [whatever] ... ever!"
Because Oscar's story is so thin, Díaz veers off on tangents about his mother and sister and, while he's doing so, delves into twentieth century Dominican history. As somebody entirely ignorant of twentieth century Dominican history (before reading this novel I'd never even heard of Trujillo, the Dominican Republic's murderous mid-century dictator) I found that stuff pretty fascinating, with its secret police and purges and distinctively Latin-flavoured fascism. Unfortunately even those aspects of the book begin to get repetitive, each subplot beginning with love (or at least sex) and ending in secret murder in the countryside. When the two halves of the story do meet up, it's not in a way that's thrilling or unexpected, it's in exactly the way I could have predicted two hundred pages ago.
The tone of the writing was really light and fun (and I'll always give bonus points to a book that throws in a reference to the Witch-king of Angmar), but even that wasn't without its issues: most of the book is narrated by an unknown person who knew Oscar and is relating the events of his life. Just who this person is is kept secret from us for more than half the book, for no apparent reason: when it's revealed to be an old college roommate of Oscar's, it doesn't mean anything (other than for us readers to go "Oh, him ... okay"). Why play coy, when it doesn't matter? I found it a little frustrating, I'll admit. It just seemed like a strange bit of mis-direction.
And then, to add to the issues with the narrative voice, some chapters aren't narrated by the old roommate. They seem to be narrated by the member of Oscar's family directly involved: the sister, for example. But the narrative voice doesn't change as the narrator changes, it's still written in exactly the same style. So, is the roommate pretending to be the sister? Do all New Jersey Dominicans speak exactly the same? Or is Díaz just unwilling (I'm not gonna say 'unable') to break out of this one tone of voice? I dunno, it just felt a bit lazy to me.
As I said up top, I found Oscar Wao to be a fun read. But it didn't touch me emotionally at all, and that's a problem.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Hello America by J.G. Ballard
books to go: 74
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