The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Díaz’s first novel arrived in 2007 after a decade-long gap since his story collection and promptly won the Pulitzer Prize, demonstrating that a debut novel could do in one gesture what takes most writers a career to achieve: invent a form entirely its own. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a Dominican-American novel written in a code that mashes together the Spanish of the Caribbean, the English of New Jersey, and the fanboy argot of science fiction and fantasy, and this linguistic invention is not merely stylistic but philosophical: it argues that these registers are, in fact, the same register.

Oscar is a fat, shy Dominican nerd who loves Tolkien and video games and falls desperately, serially in love with women who do not love him back. His family carries what Díaz calls the fukú-a curse brought to the New World with Columbus, intensified by the dictatorship of Trujillo. The novel moves between Oscar’s suburban New Jersey life, his sister Lola’s rebellion, and the terrible history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo that claimed their grandfather and shaped their family.

Yunior, the narrator, is an invented character who serves as interlocutor, moralist, and unreliable witness-a figure who, like Díaz himself, stands at the intersection of Dominican history and American pop culture and speaks both languages. The footnotes on Trujillo’s dictatorship are among the novel’s most arresting passages: brutal history delivered in a voice that refuses to lower itself to solemnity.

The novel is about the weight of history on individuals who did not choose it, and about whether love-nerdy, unglamorous, uncool love-can resist that weight. The answer is heartbreaking and necessary.