The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
352 pp. Riverhead. $24.95
Reviewed by Paul Stotts
In contrast with last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction, Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” which is a novel of intense despair and lack of hope, Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”, this year’s Pulitzer winner, is brimming with life and hope. It is a special novel, heartbreaking sweet and touching and filled with an overwhelming sense of human warmth. This is literature as a form of magic, a wonderful spell that entrances and makes us feel better about the human experience. It is a novel that filled my heart with hope.
The novel follows the life and times of a Dominican-American family: the beautiful and fierce mother, Belicia, the smart, intensely-driven daughter, Lola, and Oscar, an obese sci-fi/fantasy-loving nerd who is unlucky in love. A history of family misfortunes and tragedies leads the family to believe they are haunted by an ancient curse or fukú. As one may expect from the title, Oscar is the main focus of the story, but each of the three main characters, as well as other members of the family, have chapters detailing their own story. We watch as each character struggles to find their own answer to the fukú, all of them seemingly unsuccessful and doomed to misfortune.
The question eventually arises, though, in the novel: can love overcome tragedy? Does embracing love so intensely in the face of peril speak only of the tragedy or of something else transcendent? We only have to envision the Christian crucifix to comprehend the import of this question. But this is also what makes “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” so human and transcendent.
Díaz writes with a manic energy that imbues the story with a vast amount of life and heart. Passion flows from the pages like happy waves lapping against the reader. The characterizations, particularly of Oscar, are vivid and brilliant. Díaz lays his characters out fully open in front of us with all their flaws exposed, and eventually, this honesty charmed me, leading me to embrace these wonderful characters. I loved them for their honesty, love and passion.
Last Word:
It is a rare thing when a novel can truly capture a transcendent emotion like love, lay it out, and enrich everyone who reads about it. Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is such a novel, and deserves to be celebrated and recognized as a great American literary treasure.
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