Last spring this reviewer attended a literary conference at which participating authors spoke in rooms large enough to accommodate 50 70-somethings. The exception was Mr. Diaz, who was given a movie theatre with two thousand seats all filled with 20-somethings. So, what are the children reading?
The barebones story concerns a family from the Dominican Republic who endures the brutality of the Trujillo dictatorship until they can no longer can endure it and then reconstitutes itself in New Jersey. The core of the novel consists of four biographical chapters beginning with the youngest generation. However, Oscar, the subject of the first chapter, really does not deserve to be the book’s central character. He is an obese nerd who speaks as if he has swallowed a Thesaurus and who is filled with erotic longings but is paralyzed to act upon them. He thus suffers from a deficit of what all other male characters appear to have a surfeit of. Mr. Diaz works the stereotype of the Latin stud very hard.
Far more interesting is the character of Lola, Oscar’s sister. She is a young woman with spunk, ambition, common sense and a determination not to allow the bitterness of her mother to dominate her own life. Even more interesting is the character Beli, Oscar and Lola’s mother. She is recovered from near slavery by an aunt whose attempts to provide her with an education flies in the face of the girl’s romantic yearnings. Beli does find happiness in love but, alas, she discovers her lover is married to one of Trujillo’s sisters. You can imagine how the secret police contributed to the ending of this affair.
What is the appeal of this novel for young readers? The simple guesses are: an abundance of profanity, a lot of sex (alluded to but not described), a great deal of Spanish (very hip) and a clear sense of good and evil. But the most appealing feature of this novel is the style of writing. This is not a polished narrative delivered by a remote omniscient narrator. The story is told as a breathless monolog as if delivered by someone sitting across the table who frequently addresses you, the reader, as “Negro” or, sometimes by a less polite version of the term.
The fourth of the biographical chapters focuses on Abelard, Beli’s father, who as a prosperous Dominican, falls within the dictator’s social radar. Now it seems that Trujillo had his own version of le droit de seigneur. All families with pretty virginal daughters were invited to bring them to the palace to warm Trujillo’s bed. Abelard makes the wrong choice here and suffers horribly. The inclusion of this incident in the story will inevitably invite comparison of Oscar Wao to a more adult version of this story. The Nobel Laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, wrote a novel entitled The Feast of the Goat In which a Dominican father who, faced with this same situation, makes the opposite choice. It is a novel with a more conventional narrative style but one that is less fun to read.
Without giving away the ending, I will tell you that Trujillo is, eventually, killed but the violence and chaos continue unabated in the Dominican Republic. Lola says “Ten million Trujillos is all we are”.