Indiana Humanities Council

Recommended by Jim Pavlik

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao found its way onto nearly every Recommended Reading, Year's Best, or Top 10 list in 2007. It is the winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award and was recently awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction--either award would have confirmed author Junot Diaz's admission to the esteemed list of important 21st century authors.

The novel uses a variety of convention-breaking techniques to relate the life of ill-fated Oscar "Wao" and the redemptive changes his life effected in those around him. Many readers may have trouble relating to the abundance of comic book, science fiction, fantasy, and role playing game allusions, but it becomes evident as the story progresses that the influence of these works and their alienating, problematic presence is a deliberate choice by Diaz. Oscar Wao is hard to understand as a character because of his unique position between two cultures set in opposition: the tragic historical narrative that all diasporic Dominicans share on one side and the fringes of American sub pop on the other. By finding his niche in the marginalized American subculture that is sci-fi/fantasy/comic book geekdom, Oscar Wao is both more and less American than both his neighbors in the Dominican barrios of New Jersey and his Anglo classmates.

When Oscar travels to the Dominican Republic he finds that even there he is uniquely capable--or drawn--to the marginalized edges of that society, making him distinctly more and less Dominican than his relatives that never left the island. In his singular, incomprehensibly misguided pursuit of love, he draws the wrath of the fukú--the curse that has plagued the island since the time of Colombus and his family in particular since the time of his grandfather.

While the choice of separating the reader from Oscar by means of identifying him with the misunderstood fringe elements of two cultures was deliberate, it also acts as a constraint on the narrator Yunior, who, out of necessity, acts as guide to readers unitiated in either or both cultures. The narrator of Oscar Wao is both a reformed sci-fi nerd and an "Americanized" Dominican. In his own way he is capable of telling the reader the story of Oscar's brief (and wondrous) life without the aid of constant sci-fi allusions but chooses to use them, one gets the feeling, as homage--as much to Oscar as to the original works to which they refer.

Oscar's story is one of "America" as a country and as a hemisphere; it is the story of "Americanization" and the search for self. It is a celebration of pure individuality as much as a warning to those who fear or admire it too much. It is the story of the so-called "discovery" of the New World and the ensuing tragedy that has never stopped destroying lives. It is a story about the contingency of the universe.