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The honorable Colleen Mondor (Chasing Ray) runs a great little awards process each February for a category of books that is broader than, say, Middle Grade fiction, or Young Adult fiction, or Graphic Novels. Last year, for example, Colleen called for the best in coming-of-age novels. This year, Colleen seeks to honor books "published for adults that work perfectly for teens."

I gave a lot of thought to my choice this year, mostly because this topic has been on my mind: I have a 12 year old who is venturing out into the world of adult books while still reading MG (fantasy) and YA fiction. William Boyd's Restless was one of her favorite books this year, and she also loved Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. So while I wanted to nominate either one of those titles, a book I read recently kept whispering in my ear, "pick me."

It's not like Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been ignored by critics and readers. I think it's been on every top-10 list this year. It's one of those books that was reviewed twice in the New York Times (once by Michiko Kakutani, and once by A.O. Scott). Diaz has been interviewed everywhere about his "work of startling originality and distinction," most recently by Edward Marriott in the Guardian.

I'm not going to review The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao here, because I agree with almost every word of Kakutani's review. What I am going to do is give you five reasons why I think every teen over the age of 15 should read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

1. I found Diaz's presentation first-generation U.S. citizens in the late 20th century more accurate than anything else I've read recently. Oscar and his coevals were born in the States, but can travel back to their parents' country--in this case, the Dominican Republic. They're ambivalent about the U.S., sometimes romanticize the land of their parents' birth, but are ultimately more comfortable in the States. Their identity is more complex than that of their parents. As Kakutani writes at the end of her review,

• "This is, almost in spite of itself, a novel of assimilation, a fractured chronicle of the ambivalent, inexorable movement of the children of immigrants toward the American middle class, where the terrible, incredible stories of what parents and grandparents endured in the old country have become a genre in their own right."

Yes, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao does tell the tale of the first generation. But it also shows what's different for many immigrants and their children today--the fluidity between two cultures, two countries, and two languages. Even the parents in this story return to the Dominican Republic. They choose to stay in the United States, but still call one another Dominicans.*

2. Respect for "genre." Diaz's semi-heroic hero, Oscar, wants to be the Dominican (note how this designation relates to #1) Tolkien. He reads and writes Fantasy and SciFi. He grew up on comic books. The fantasy world is there for him when times are tough.

3. The young adult heroes of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are intelligent, flawed, and ambitious. Oscar is a smart kid, his mother's golden boy. He follows his amazing older sister--Lola--to Rutgers and studies writing. The book's most frequent narrator--Yunior--is also a writer, Oscar's roommate, and a ladies' man. Oscar, Lola, and Yunior strive to overcome their flaws and make it in this world as adults. If this premise doesn't appeal to Young Adult readers, I don't know what else will.

4. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has at its heart Oscar's attempt to score. (Hence, the arbitrary 15 and up age designation. Use your own judgment here.) Is this not a central theme of much of Young Adult literature? A coming-of-age story in its most literal sense.

5. The maturation of Oscar, Lola, and Yunior is grounded in the history of the Dominican Republic in the 20th century. They are part of a larger story--the "terrible, incredible stories of what parents and grandparents endured in the old country"--despite the fact they live in 21st- century New York and New Jersey. Diaz's contextualization of the personal in the historical and the political makes The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao a novel every teen should read.

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*I do realize that not all first-generation Americans have the opportunity to travel back to the home country of their parents due to political, religious, or economic reasons. However, this global fluidity seems to be much more common than it was, say, in the World War II era.

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Two brief reviews of books that deserve much more -- links to further coverage provided.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
(Riverhead, September 2007)
You've never heard of this book before, right? Diaz' first book since his class short story collection Drown has turned out to be a huge publishing event, inspiring everyone from Michiko Kakutani to bloggers galore to heights of praise. I can't give you much more -- just my own little story.

I read the short story that formed the foundation for BWL of OW in an anthology the ALP picked up called Rotten English -- a collection of prose and poetry written in non-standard or dialect English. Diaz was probably the most famous of the lot, but he certainly fits the bill -- Oscar Wao is studded with Spanish and Spanglish words and construction, and, my favorite, often uses the word "dude" as the subject (first example I can find in the novel, in a footnote, in parentheses: "(dude had bomber wings, for fuck's sake)"). It's electric, addicting, and like readers all over America and the Dominican Diaspora, I was hungry for more.

I finagled a copy from our kind-hearted Penguin sales rep. I started reading it in brief chunks on the subway. Then I had a day off, which I usually need as a work day, and when I took a lunch break from writing and researching I picked up Oscar Wao again. The rest of the day I spent in various positions throughout my house, book in front of my nose, unable to get away from the saga of old curses and modern dysfunction and sci-fi humor and adolescent dorkiness and tragedy masquerading as farce and the language -- oh man, the language. It's that kind of book.

I mentioned that Diaz came by the bookstore to sign stock -- I'm glad I hadn't read the book then, or I might have acted even more foolish. When I was finished I wished I was back in school so we could lit-crit the heck out of it. What does Oscar's identification with Oscar Wilde mean in terms of his outside status, his repressed sexuality, his political persecution, his lasting fame, his flamboyance or lack thereof? What are the implications of Yunior (the book's narrator and Diaz' stand-in) asserting that the troubles of the Dominican Republic stretch back to the moment Columbus used it as an entry point to the New World, his deadly serious joke that the curse (fuku) stretched all the way to the 20th century and killed Kennedy? Why does his refusal to mention Columbus' name (he is referred to as The Admiral, which it took me a bit to understand) give colonialism such a spooky power? Does his explanation of the Trujillo regime in footnotes, David Foster Wallace style, mean that these are merely "footnotes of history"? If all Dominicans are hit by fuku, is Yunior's fuku his inability to be faithful to Oscar's beautiful sister Lola, or his association with Oscar? What's with the golden mongoose, anyway?

Point is, it's a book that pulls you in to a whole world, like the best novels do, and opens your eyes to some parts of the real world you never noticed. To be honest, there were moments when the pacing or emphasis seemed weird to me -- maybe because I could perceive the bones of the short story under the novel, and the flesh didn't always fill in where I'd expect. And Oscar's life, truth be told, isn't so very wondrous, except that it existed at all, and in the wondrous telling of it, and with luck, in the significance of his ultimate act of defiance. With luck, this pulls the purposefully anti-canonical Diaz irresistibly into the canon of our greatest American writers, not least because he can't help writing powerfully about the least powerful among us: the refugees, the prisoners, the cursed, the unbeautiful, the lonely. He'd laugh to hear it, but dude is a serious force for good in the world. He has a kind of power, and he knows it. Here are his words, full of typical allusion and irreverence, erudition and pop culture and idealism and self-loathing, from another footnote about a writer who fell afoul of Trujillo:

What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? Since before the infamous Caesar-Ovid war they've had beef. Like the Fantastic Four and Galactus, like the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, like the Teen Titans and Deathstrike, Foreman and Ali, Morrison and Crouch, Sammy and Sergio, they seem destined to be eternally linked in the Halls of Battle. Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that's too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.

Like You'd Understand, Anyway
by Jim Shepard
(Knopf, September 2007)
Jim Shepard is another one of those writers with a cult following -- what you call "a writer's writer." Check out the recent Bookslut interview here for more about him. I had a bookstore colleague once (hi, Ethan!) who had had Shepard as a writing teacher, and hearing him talk about Shepard filled me with respect for the man before I'd ever read a word he'd written. I read his previous short story collection, Love and Hydrogen, of which the only one I remember is the title story where two men, a couple, try to hide their relationship while working on a Nazi zeppelin, which of course goes down in flames. It's a very Shepard-esque story: he likes to work in somewhat exotic settings, which act as metaphors for the unhappy relationships they contain.

But that's reductive, and makes it sound like I don't like the man's work: I do, I do. What impressed me most about the new collection is the weird and simple fact that most of the relationships aren't romantic, or even homo-social (though most are between men). Fathers and sons, high school friends, brothers -- these loves are powerful too, and shape our actions and our perceptions just as powerfully as sex does. The title of the collection, which doesn't appear in any of the stories, is a great evocation of the singular inarticulate-ness that often characterizes such relationships: there's a longing for understanding, but an instinctive shoving away at the same time.

Okay, the stories, or at least my favorites. A Roman scribe in "Hadrian's Wall" seethes with resentment for his retired legionnaire father, and then fails to prevent an incursion by the barbarians, which leads to reciprocal slaughter by the Romans. In "Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak," two friends immerse themselves obsessively in their high school football team, while the narrator speculates on whether a guy on an opposing team could be the son of his disappeared dad, and his meat head best friend deals with his own father's constant comparison of him to his pro football older brother. "Eros 7" is one of the few stories involving a woman: two Soviet astronauts are assigned to orbit simultaneously but separately, a heartbreaking parallel to their secret and unsuccessful romance. Possibly the most powerful is the first story, "The Zero Meter Diving Team," narrated by the oldest of three brothers, a bureaucrat implicated in the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, where his two younger brothers die slowly. It's an astonishing play-by-play of the governmental unwillingness to admit the problem that resulted in the accident's horrible long-range consequences, and the brothers' various manifestations of suffering and guilt and stoicism and humor make it all too real.

The point here is that any of these stories might be maudlin, or worse, tough-guy pretentious, in the hands of a lesser writer. Shepard's enviable and compelling skill, sentence by sentence, is to expose his characters' posturing, their weaknesses and wants and failures and loving impulses, in language that not only shows compassion for them, but makes it clear that they are just like you, for better and (mostly) for worse. One of the best stories has no exotic setting: "Courtesy for Beginners" is about a kid at summer camp, with all the miserable hazing that can imply, while his possibly mentally disturbed younger brother is at home. After the sickening denouement, the narrator ends with this telling conclusion:

But what I did was the kind of thing you'd do and the kind of thing you've done: I felt bad for him and for myself and I went on with my week and then with my summer and I started telling my story to whoever would listen. And my story was: I survived camp. I survived my brother. I survived my own bad feelings. Love me for being so sad about it. Love me for knowing what I did. Love me for being in the lifeboat after everyone else went under. And my story made me feel better and it made me feel worse. And it worked.

Take their words for it: these are two books that are seriously worth reading, and worth adding to the ranks of great 21st century American literature.

(And come see Shepard read and talk with his editor, the equally cult famous Gary Fisketjon, on the 24th.)

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Apparently no more than five minutes before I arrived at the bookstore for my shift yesterday, George Saunders (The Braindead Megaphone) was sitting in my office chair, talking on my phone, doing the pre-interview for his gig on Letterman. You can see a video clip of the show here (thanks to Ed for the link.) He was gone before I got there.

But the day wasn't a total loss. A couple of hours later Junot Diaz stopped by to sign stock of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao before his big reading uptown that night (thanks to Richard Grayson for the write-up), and he kissed me on the cheek not once, but twice.

And in the evening Edward P. Jones was in the store, fresh from an interview on Leonard Lopate (thanks to Maud for the link) to introduce writers from the anthology he just edited, New Stories from the South 2007.

Just one of those days, I guess.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Author: Junot Diaz
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1594489580
ISBN-13: 978-1594489587

I was in New York this June for Book Expo America and was walking through a crowded aisle on my way to a meeting when something caught my eye and made me stop dead in my tracks. The name Junot Diaz on a simple white cover was enough to stop my fast moving walk to a meeting a had about a minute to get to clear on the other side of the Javits center. I not only stopped, I gasped and then I grabbed. I held that book like it was the Holy Grail and enraptured, carried it to my meeting which I couldn’t concentrate on because all I could think of was the book, the long awaited book burning a hole in my book bag.

That night on the balcony overlooking the Empire State building at my friend Joe’s place in Hell’s Kitchen I reverently opened the book by Junot Diaz. It was early morning with a muggy sun coming up before I put it down again. There were pages that I read once, twice, thrice just for the pleasure of them. The footnotes in particular were wonderful. I read them again and again out loud to myself just for the pleasure of saying them. I re-read the book on the plane home and found it to be equally entertaining and great. I got into the office and shared footnotes with people reading them out loud at random times.

I waited and waited to review it. Why? Because sometimes a book is so damned great that it defies reviewing. I mean what do you say? Everything will sound canned. It’s great, it’s wonderful, it’s fantastic. Whatever. It’s all that and more but how to say it? How do I describe what is essentially a masterpiece so eloquent that it almost defies description? Think Britney Spears following Janis Joplin at a concert. Yeah.

Well, I chickened out and put the book to sit on my shelf for a couple of months just to sit there and glare at me. Well it’s time now – the book, the glorious book is tired of waiting. I read it again last night and two months haven’t changed its beauty.

The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao begins with a history of fukú (a curse of both gargantuan and subtle proportions) outlined in its gorgeous footnotes that reveal a plethora of Dominican history and political information with a deft and almost musical talent. The footnoted description of fukú was hilarious and I read it again and again. You get the sense that this story about a sci-fi addicted, desperately lonely fat boy Oscar is doomed from the start but you can’t help hoping for him all the time knowing that the fukú is gonna get him.

The book flips back and forth with information about Oscar, pitiful Oscar, his sister, mother, grandparents and peripheral people in his life. The whole Dominican Republic past and present is also a character as is the evil Trujillo. The 30-year reign of terror of one President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was particularly bloody. Shit, us Mexican girls grew up scared of Trujillo. That vato made the massacre at Tlateloco by the Mexican government look like a Sunday outing. (I’m NOT trivializing Tlateloco by any means – just showing how horrible Trujillo was. Sol ducks looks around hoping the fukú doesn’t get her).

Oscar’s life story is an amazing one – he is a hero just by virtue of being so pathetic and his first generation immigrant status. You feel his pain, his loneliness and want so badly to help him but you can’t. There are 500 years of pain and abuse stored up in that boy. The way I saw it Oscar became the colonized Latin America/indigenous peoples all rolled up into one fat nerd.

The book switches back and forth from English, to Spanish, to indigenous slang, to insults, to an almost hip hop feel, a sing-song rap about cultural genocide, abuse, pillage and politics all caught up in the life of one young man. It reads like a song and makes no italics or apologies for switching back and forth between languages and slang. It’s saying understand me or don’t – my prose is so gorgeous I don’t need to translate for you. Just deal. Just read. Just absorb. And you do. You breathe Junot Diaz’s words. You learn more about the DR and politics than you’d ever learn in a history class taught by the best teacher. You’re captured, captivated, you’re sucked in, your singing along with him and your singing in his style. At the end of the book you’re changed and you’ll never be the same.

Book Description from the publisher

This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today.

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukœ-the curse that has haunted the Oscar's family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Diaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time

About the Author
Junot Diaz's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. His debut story collection, Drown, was a publishing sensation of unprecedented acclaim, became a national bestseller, won numerous awards, and is now a landmark of contemporary literature. He was born and raised in the Dominican Republic, and now lives in New York City and Boston, where he teaches at MIT

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