If you obsessively check here for new posts you’re about to think I’m going to skip eating and breathing this weekend in favor of reading. Somehow I haven’t done a book post since mid-September, and combined with the fact that I have actually been reading, there are four I need to talk about.
Here we’re just going to worry about the first — Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”
This is one of those books I’ve walked past or picked up in a bookstore roughly 2.8 billion times before I actually committed to reading it.
The story is a multi-generational tale from one family and multiple narrators. Diaz does a really incredible job of differentiating their voices so that even with no labeling you would easily know who was talking. Remember this when I get to the fourth book (the final in the Divergent series), which I think is equally as poor as “Oscar Wao” is good in this department.
For much of the story Oscar is the main focus. He’s a nerdy, awkward kid who struggles to be “normal” in many social settings and yet outwardly maintains a sort of detached attitude about his results. It’s as if in his failures he sees in retrospect he should not have expected success and adopts that as a memory instead of seeing that view as hindsight.
One of the other narrators, who at one point dates Oscar’s sister, Lola, describes one episode of Oscar’s charm:
“Oscar’s idea of a G was to talk about role-playing games! How fucking crazy is that? (My favorite was the day on the E bus when he informed some hot morena, If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen Charisma!)”
I most enjoyed being led along this story by Lola, who is a few years older than Oscar. Diaz gives her a certain thoughtfulness that comes with having to grow up early and take care (in certain ways) of both her mother and brother.
She talks at one point about discovering her mother’s breast cancer, beginning that story with, “It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”
I think I would disagree with that slightly — I shy away from using that kind of absolute — but I think saying it’s rarely the changes we want that change everything is accurate. Yes, there are a few cases in which a surprise is positively life changing, say a job offer out of the blue. But most often it’s the negatives that blow up your world.
Lola isn’t on the same level of dorkdom as Oscar, but she’s studious and likes to read. She describes part of her life in which she wanted to get away from all the responsibilities that had been thrown on her shoulders.
“All my favorite books from that period were about runaways. “Watership Down,” “The Incredible Journey,” “My Side of the Mountain.”
This sentence made me wonder how many people reading this book are like me and have also read “Watership Down” and “My Side of the Mountain.” We need a form of Google for this.
When I was a kid, my neighbors gave me “My Side of the Mountain” as a birthday gift. It’s the kind of book that has a map in the front, the ones you study for a few minutes before getting to the text even though you know there’s no chance you’ll remember anything useful without learning the context. The main character is living on his own in the woods (I think he sleeps inside a tree?) and has a pet falcon. As a boy, that’s a pretty dope protagonist.
“Watership Down” was one of the required summer reading books for my 10th grade GT English class. I thought it was going to be the most boring book in existence, but mainly because I didn’t know what the word “lapine” meant. The reading list had a description of each title, and I read this one to my mom in a mock aristocratic tone, thinking that “lapine society” involved people with powdered wigs. She let me finish, then informed me that lapine meant it was a story about rabbits. It was fantastic.
Back to Oscar — I should never have put this book down in the bookstore. It can be super depressing at times, but I think that makes you better appreciate the highs and the beauty elsewhere. I also should have been less engrossed in the story and flagged more things.
I’ll close with this insight from Diaz, which I don’t think need any caveats:
“Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one.”