Jun

10

Ghetto Geek.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 10, 2008 |

When I first read Junot Diaz’s collection of short stories Drown I really didn’t like it. The stories seemed too disconnected, too hard, but there was something about them that stuck with me. The barrio was far from any life I knew or had even experienced; here was a guy writing about men who have affairs or even maintaining two different families, about mothers trying to hold their families together while also carving out some space for themselves. Even though the settings were strange to me, though, the themes weren’t. Most of his characters are kids; the stories seem to be mainly autobiographical, and the kids have to fight for their survival but also struggle to create their identity. In Fiesta, 1980, Yunior is uncomfortable when the woman his father has been sleeping with, and has moved in with, calls him “the smart one”, and asks, “Maybe you want to see my books?” He knows the books are really his father’s, who “couldn’t even go cheating without a paperback in his pocket.”

Diaz’s new novel, his first book since Drown was published in 1996, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, about a “ghetto nerd” who’s part of a cursed family, a guy who dreams of nothing more than being kissed–and who buries himself in science fiction and fantasy. Diaz has created his own identity; the son of illegal parents, he’s an MIT professor, a bestselling author, and even a Pulitzer Prize winner. He tells great, compelling stories which carefully walk between brutality and brittleness, but his own story is pretty amazing in itself.


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