The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

No novel has ever made me as grateful for the way in which I spent the 38 years of my life as much as The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Diaz's eponymous character, an overweight young man whose real name is Oscar de Leon, grows up with his Dominican family in Paterson, New Jersey, and immerses himself in comics, sci-fi, and pop culture in general as a means of escaping from a real world that doesn't treat him very well. The novel is filled with comic and sci-fi references, most of which go unexplained (along with a lot of untranslated Spanish and Dominican slang). However, that's not to say that the novel is not heavily annotated: Diaz also makes frequent references to the 20th century history of the Dominican Republic, especially the long reign of the dictator Trujillo, and the author thankfully provides copious notes to explain that history.

In fact, the novel's title is a bit misleading. While much of it does indeed follow Oscar's brief and wondrous life, more than half covers his mother's and grandparents' experiences in Trujillo's Dominican Republic from 1944-1962, in order to detail the family curse, or fuku, that continues to haunt Oscar's generation. Even then, however, the narrator, who we later find out is Oscar's college roommate, Yunior, keeps the comic references flowing. Oscar's mother, for example is described in her adolescence as having "the Breasts of Luba," with the assumption that the reader understands this reference to the main character of Gilbert Hernandez's "Palomar" stories from Love and Rockets. In fact, Love and Rockets serves as a significant cultural touchstone for the entire novel.

Other comic references also appear frequently. For example, the narrator often refers to himself as "The Watcher," though he is far from the dispassionate observer that this reference implies. Trujillo's political power is compared to Darkseid's "Omega Effect," raising images of eye-beams that curve around obstacles to reach their targets. Oscar's roommate, Yunior, tries to give Oscar some dating advice--"don't bring up the Beyonder any more than necessary"--but Yunior then laments, "Trying to talk sense to Oscar about girls was like trying to throw rocks at Unus the Untouchable."

The references, however, are not merely arbitrary winks at a knowing audience. The narrator attempts to explain Oscar's immersion in this particular aspect of pop culture:

Maybe it was just the zeitgeist (were not the early seventies the dawn of the Nerd Age?) or the fact that for most of his childhood he had absolutely no friends? Or was it something deeper, something ancestral? ... You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto.

Oscar's outsider status, compounded by his weight, is both satiated and perpetuated by his interests in comics and sci-fi, and to some degree, most "fanboys" can probably associate with Oscar here, whether the racial element is relevant or not.

I'm also quite partial to this description of the 1970s as "the dawn of the Nerd Age." Oscar appears to have been born around the same time as I was, so he was 8 or 9 when Star Wars came out, he got to watch original early Scooby-Doo episodes in their first run, he watches afternoon Ultraman imports from Japan on WPIX, and he matures into Love and Rockets and Watchmen in the mid- to late 1980s.

Incidentally, Watchmen serves as another important cultural touchstone. In order to demonstrate Oscar's despondency over a girl that rejected him, the narrator asks a series of rhetorical questions: "Did he stop reading his Andre Norton books and even lose interest in the final issues of Watchmen, which were unfolding in the illest way? Yes." The trade paperback of Watchmen also makes significant appearances later in the novel.

As someone who spent the first 8 years of his life living in Elizabeth, New Jersey, I also appreciate the frequent shout-outs my birth city gets in the novel. As Oscar and a female friend drive down the New Jersey Turnpike:

They reached the Elizabeth exit, which is what New Jersey is really known for, industrial wastes on both sides of the turnpike. He had started holding his breath against those horrible fumes when Ana let loose a scream that threw him into his passenger door. Elizabeth! she shrieked. Close your fucking legs!

Later, Oscar's sister, Lola, holds a wig over a hot stove, and the burning artifical hair is described as smelling "like Elizabeth." Anyone who ever experienced that smell, especially during the pollution heyday of the 70s and 80s, will appreciate Diaz's descriptions here.

At one point in the novel, a character is getting a severe beating from two Dominican cops nicknamed "Solomon Grundy" and "Gorilla Grod" (which the fanboy in me requires that I mention that this name is spelled incorrectly, missing a second "d"), and the narrator describes the violent seen as, "It was like one of those nightmare eight-a.m. MLA panels: endless." So, in order to unpack this scene, one needs not only to recognize the names of two DC Comics villains, but also to understand just how excruciating 8:00 a.m. panels at the Modern Language Association convention are (especially if you are delivering a paper at them, as no one in their right minds shows up for a panel at that time unless they have a pressing need).

Who, then, is the ideal audience for this novel? Dominican men in their late 30s who grew up in New Jersey in the 1970s and 80s, read a lot of comics and sci-fi, watched a lot of sci-fi movies, majored in English, attained some fluency in Spanish, and pursued employment as a college English professor. Though I'm not Dominican, nor do I know much Spanish, I feel that I hit that target audience pretty well--not quite a bullseye, but certainly within the outer bull. Diaz spends a lot of time, especially early in the novel, explaining the history of the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, so that a reader unfamiliar with that history will not be lost. Otherwise, the novel rewards readers for being as much like Oscar as possible, which results in an interesting degree of empathy for the main character.

And the appeal of the novel goes far beyond it's heavy referentiality. Oscar's story, and those of his mother, grandparents, and sister, is fascinating and compelling, as is the unique narrative voice that Diaz creates for this novel. Amazon, which unapologetically yet unforgiveably jumped the gun by putting out their top 10 lists in early November, ranked this novel in the second position, which also shows that this novel probably has an appeal that exceeds the narrow audience that might get all of its references.

Book Review: Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis

In the fantastic posthumous collection of Terry Southern's writing, Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern 1950-1995,editors Nile Southern and Josh Alan Friedman include an amazing little screenplay fragment titled, "Proposed Scene for Kubrick's Rhapsody." Fans of Stanley Kubrick will know that the director spent decades trying to adapt Arthur Schnitzler's Rhapsody, a Dream Novel to the screen, and the novel ultimately served as the basis for Eyes Wide Shut. In the early 80s, Kubrick asked Southern, who had worked with Kubrick on the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove among other projects, to help with Rhapsody. Southern's idea for the story, about a man whose quest for sexual fulfillment sends him deeper and deeper into the sexual underground, was to make it a comedy.

The one scene that Southern wrote is hilarious: the husband, Brian (in this version, a gynecologist) describes to his wife how he helped a patient with a particular problem with physical sensitivity. The scene is classic Southern, and it leads me to imagine a perfect alternative universe where Kubrick followed Southern's advice and turned Eyes Wide Shut into a broad sex comedy (I do think Eyes Wide Shut is a comedy, but that's an argument for another day).

While reading Warren Ellis's recent first novel, Crooked Little Vein, I was reminded about this imagined Kubrick/Southern dream project, because I think that such a project would greatly resemble Ellis's novel, in tone and theme if not in detail. Crooked Little Vein, in fact, reminds me a lot of another Terry Southern work, the novel Candy, co-written with Mason Hoffenberg in 1958. Candy is about a young female college student on a failed quest to lose her virginity, which leads to a series of comic misadventures that expose the sexual deviances and hypocrisies of Americans in the late 50s. Crooked Little Vein, published almost 50 years later, is about a private detective in search of the secret, second Constitution of the United States, and his quest leads him to explore the sexual deviances and hypocrisies of Americans in the 2000s. Both novels are picaresque in structure; both are satires; both contain scenes that would offend even the most jaded readers; and both are absolutely products of their time.

In Candy, which was banned in its initial publication, it often seemed like Southern had to invent terminology for some of the acts he described, as there was little or no precedent for such descriptions in prose, yet in my recent reading of it, I found the book to be almost quaint, sounding much like the way inexperienced adolescent boys talk about sex in the locker room. In other words, much of what was shocking in 1958 is no longer shocking today. In one of the novel's episodes, for example, a physician, Dr. Krankeit, extolls the virtues of self-pleasure in a way that would not be out of place in the "Masters of our Domain" episode of Seinfeld.

While reading Crooked Little Vein, I wondered how long it would take before this novel, with its Godzilla fetishists, saline-enlarged scrota, and ostrich abusers, would seem as quaint and old-fashioned as Candy. Ellis invites such thoughts, as much of the detective Mike McGill's interactions with other characters involve discussions of what, exactly, represents the "mainstream" in American culture. Other characters insist, often to Mike's chagrin, that the Internet, as a medium, has moved much from the margins or underground into a form that is readily accessible to all Americans. The argument, then, is that the Internet makes everything it contains mainstream. This is an interesting alternative to the view that America has become increasingly conservative over the past decade, and it's an alternative that Candy must have presented for the conservative Eisenhower era as well.

Warren Ellis does himself a lot of favors by creating a main character and plot that can be used to feature a lot of short little vignettes. McGill's macguffin--the secret Constitution--takes him from east to west coast, and his leads bring him to experience many people and places that might be considered the fringe of American sexual practices. McGill is also a self-described "shit magnet," to whom strange things just seem to happen, and this gives Ellis unlimited freedom to put his hero through some extreme and unlikely situations. The cumulative effect of these vignettes, combined with the novel's rapid pace, can be numbing. By the time the novel gets to Las Vegas, and the Jesus-shaped casino named "Freedom" (complete with Christian sex toys in every room), I felt a bit worn out, but it's about this point in the novel where Ellis's "mainstream" argument kicks in, which gives the novel's picaresque structure a larger purpose.

To offer another comparison for this novel: it's like a Naked Gun movie directed by Takashi Miike. In the Naked Gun series (or Airplane, for that matter), the jokes come so fast, and in such large quantities, that he quality of each individual joke matters little. If you don't like a joke, just wait a few seconds for the next one to come along. The same could be said about the offensive or distasteful gags (and I don't necessarily mean those terms to be pejorative) that rapidly follow one another in Crooked Little Vein: some work better than others. For example, McGill's experience with MHP, or macroherpetophiles (a word that presents an etymological wet dream)is probably the funniest set piece in the novel. However, a running gag about airplane terrorism (a flight attendant upset about her boyfriend hands out boxcutters to boarding passengers so that they can drop the plane on him; later, McGill gets a woman kicked off a plane for "speaking Iraqi") just doesn't seem well-thought-out. Even within the creative freedom Ellis has allowed for himself in this novel, those gags lack an internally consistent realism: a flight where passengers were given boxcutters would surely be grounded, but it isn't, though extending this one-off gag into a larger scene would allow Ellis to play more with the theme of American paranoia and paralysis over terrorism. Also, a scene in a Texas steakhouse, where a waitress rolls out half of a raw steer as the "special," is just too easy a joke.

In general, fans of Warren Ellis's comic work will find much here that is familiar (Mike McGill seems cut from the same cloth as many other Ellis protagonists, especially Michael Jones from Desolation Jones.). But it also seems like all that earlier, similar work was a build-up to this larger, more encompassing satire about technology, sexuality, and contemporary culture (though Transmetropolitan probably does a better job covering those topics). And I'd be especially curious to see how this novel looks in 10+ years (or 50 years, for that matter, though it's unlikely that either the author or myself will be around to evaluate reactions then). Readers then might find it a quaint little snapshot of a time when we were just figuring out what technology like the internet could do, and the fetishes and acts in the novel may be read as signs of a more innocent time--a time before the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences devoted a special Oscar category to Godzilla Bukkake.