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Clever Junot Diaz

WITH his new novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", Junot Diaz has finally delivered on the promise he made 11 years ago with "Drown", his slangy, artfully visceral book of short stories about Dominican immigrants in the Jersey diaspora. As everyone's been saying, this is a novel worth waiting for. It's about three generations of a Dominican family--the patriarch is a prominent, respected surgeon in Santo Domingo; alas, the grandson is Oscar, a fat, lonely, comic-book-loving "ghetto-nerd" in New Jersey.

What's fascinating about the storytelling is the way Diaz shoves a third-person narrative into a first-person observer. The story is told mostly from the perspective of Yunior, a family friend, who laces his nearly omniscient narration with the rare bit of personal observation. This is a smart (and not uncommon) technique for juicing up a story--making it the story observed. Philip Roth has done this in most of his later books: Nathan Zuckerman, no longer the virile, charismatic, story-making hero of his youth, is left observing the trials and tragedies of his friends and colleagues. (Frankly, I find these novels lack the verve of the earlier Zuckerman books, when it was Nathan himself who was sweating and suffering and sexing.)

Anyway, Diaz spoke on the subject of third-person narration at a reading in Los Angeles a couple of years ago (there's a good recap on Laila Lalami's blog). He argued that a detached perspective leaves a story feeling cold and stuffy and "white", and not at all conducive to the urban English of writers of colour.

I have my own prejudices against third-person omniscience (Jane Austen notwithstanding), as it lacks the nostalgic kicks and sneaky unreliability of first-person grasping. But I had never heard of a racial bias against the whitey straightjacket of third-person. It takes little more than the kinetic, lively feel of Diaz's new novel--a tragedy lightened by its casual delivery in the Spanglish vernacular--to be convinced that Diaz may be right.