The Book Show

Junot Diaz has had marvellous success with his short stories. They appeared in the New Yorker and The Paris Review and four times in subsequent editions of Best American Short Stories.

Both his short story collection Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao have been critically acclaimed. Michiko Kakutani, the often hard to please critic of The New York Times called his Oscar novel 'An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fuelled by adrenaline-powered prose, it's confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that's equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.'

Oscar Wao is a fat, nerdy boy, a migrant from the Dominican Republic, who lives with his sister and his mother, and dreams of becoming 'the Dominican Tolkien'. He falls in love with girls who won't respond to his nerdy advances and his greatest fear is that he will die a Virgin, unknown in the annals of Dominican Republic machismo.

We meet his sister Lola and his room-mate Yunior and generations of his family who have been deeply affected by the Dominican Republic's dictatorship of Trujillo -- nicknamed 'The Goat' -- in Oscar's words the 'dictatingest dictator who ever dictated.'

Before speaking to Ramona Koval, Junot Diaz began the session by reading from his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- and be warned that there's a small amount of strong language in this intrview.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Ramona Koval: Today, another session from last week's Sydney Writers' Festival; devoted today to the work of American Junot Diaz, whose first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was recently awarded the 2008 Pulitzer prize for literature.

Junot Diaz has had marvellous success with his short stories, first of all. They appeared in The New Yorker and in The Paris Review, and four times in subsequent yearly editions of Best American Short Stories. Both his short story collection Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, have been really critically acclaimed.

Michiko Kakutani, the often hard to please critic of The New York Times called his Oscar novel 'An extraordinarily vibrant book that's fuelled by adrenaline-powered prose, it's confidently steered through several decades of history by a madcap, magpie voice that's equally at home talking about Tolkien and Trujillo, anime movies and ancient Dominican curses, sexual shenanigans at Rutgers University and secret police raids in Santo Domingo.'

Oscar Wao is a fat, nerdy boy, a migrant from the Dominican Republic, who lives with his sister and his mother, and dreams of becoming 'the Dominican Tolkien'. He falls in love with girls who won't respond to his nerdy advances and his greatest fear is that he will die a Virgin, unknown in the annals of Dominican Republic machismo.

We meet his sister Lola and his room-mate Junior and generations of his family who have been deeply affected by the Dominican Republic's dictatorship of Trujillo -- nicknamed 'The Goat' -- in Oscar's words the 'dictatingest dictator who ever dictated.'

Junot Diaz began the session at the Sydney Writers' Festival by reading from his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao -- and be warned that there's a small amount of strong language.

Junot Diaz: Thank you. It's from a section in the novel called 'The condensed notebook for the return to a native land.' And it's about the protagonist, Oscar, returns to supposedly his home country, the Dominican Republic (though he was not born and raised there) after a long absence. And for any of those who have a country that's supposed to be yours that you don't feel comfortable for that first trip back -- it's sort of about this.

And it says, [reads from After Oscar's initial homecoming week... to ...Oscar decided, suddenly and without warning, to stay on the island for the rest of the summer.]

Ramona Koval: That's one long and impressive sentence, Junot.

Junot Diaz: Actually those are the easiest ones, where you begin with the same word, you know. The harder sentences are when you don't have that kind of simple, A-B pattern.

Ramona Koval: I reckon it's a brave thing to do that. It's a big, long sentence, and unless you have the -- between the 'after' bits -- unless they work rhythmically, you can actually fail. But you don't fail.

Junot Diaz: That's always after the fact. The one...well, no, because one of the things that happens in novels is that you're just so desperate, you're looking for all sorts of strategies and all sorts of techniques and you're deploying all sorts of weird sentence structures because I'm sure you remember when you were in school your teachers would tell you you should vary your sentences, when you would write those three paragraph or four paragraph essays. The novel, it's sort of that pattern writ large. You end up trying to figure out a way to break your own rhythms.

Like I said, it's after the fact. Sometimes stuff works and people will say, 'Oh, that was a wonderful sentence.' But sometimes it's a catastrophe and it doesn't work. The novelty drives you, but it's only later do you discover whether it has any function.

Ramona Koval: I want to talk about other sentences of yours too, but let's talk about the architecture of this novel for people who haven't read it. It looks like a book, but actually it's a sort of machine for the generation of energy when you read it, because it's so full of, I guess kinetic energy, the language and the joy in it and the horror in it. There are historical chapters, there's chapters in different people's voices. Tell me about creating the architecture for this book. It took you a long time, because it was about eleven years between the publishing of the short stories and this book coming out. And of course it's worth the wait, of course. But during those eleven years, was there a lot of architectural planning? Or what was going on there?

Junot Diaz: I kind of was interested ... not that my sort of aesthetic challenges required eleven years, I don't want to make it seem like that. For some reason the goals that I set out for myself just persistently eluded me as a writer, and sometimes that happens. It takes a lot longer to write something that perhaps you could have knocked out in half or one third of the time, but because of certain kind of conditions maybe with the work and your relationship to it, the work eludes you.

But architecturally, I was interested in a story...because it's set in the Caribbean: point zero, ground zero; what we call the Americas. In the Dominican Republic we understand that the island of Espanola, where the Dominican Republic is located, east of Cuba, the 'first place' Europeans settled and discovered the New World, it's always been understood that the Dominican Republic, that the island of Espanola, is the egg from which the American eagle sprang. In other words that it was the first iteration of that construct that would later reach apotheosis in the United States. And one of the things about the Caribbean -- historically, socially, even in the terrain itself, is that the Caribbean is made up of more gaps and silences and absences than presence and history and evidence.

And so I was fascinated in trying to create a book that even as it gave you this enormous outpouring of information across a number of genres -- because I was trying to fit in like historical, anthropological, memoir, multi-generational family story, science-fiction -- all the various genres that make up what we call the literary...I was trying to jam them in too, because that felt very honest to what the Dominican or the American experience is, which is like 50 or 60 genres running simultaneously.

This idea that I could create a book that -- it would give you this outpouring of information about the characters and about this world, but in the process outline the enormous silences within the story. Not only the family and Oscar but also the story of the Caribbean and the Americas. What we call the Americas, its history is underpinned by a vast sea of silence and erasure. The majority of American history, whether it's in the Dominican Republic or in the US, can't be accessed because the major participants have either been exterminated, worked to death, or just straight out erased from the history. And there's no way to get that stuff back.

And in some ways, if you're going to write an American story, which I've always felt this book was, an American story is about trying to figure out a way to communicate story and simultaneously communicate the enormous absence in which that story in some ways drifts.

And that was one of the structural concerns. there was a number of them. And I know this sounds kind of like incredibly nerdy, and sort abstract, but it really drove much of the writing of the book. There were these kind of weird things that I was really trying to get at. And again, I think your average reader doesn't give a shit about them. And your average reader can't apprehend them. But as a writer, it's the thing that you're interested in that drives you.

Ramona Koval: Well, you've got epigraphs of the book, but two seemingly vastly different sources. But actually the way you've done them they're related. You've got Derek Walcott, of course, the St Lucia poet who won the Nobel prize, and you've got a poem at the front and the last two lines are: 'I have Dutch, nigger and English in me / And either I'm nobody or I'm a nation.'

And the other epigraph is from The Fantastic Four, volume number 49, April 1966, which was a comic book series. And the quote is, 'Of what import are brief, nameless lives ... to Galactus?' Galactus is the god or the god-like kind of evil figure in that series.

Junot Diaz: One of them, yes.

Ramona Koval: One of them, right. So it's the same kind of idea, though, isn't it? From Walcott and from the comic source. Are you saying there that there are many ways to tell the same story?

Junot Diaz: I don't know... You'd be amazed, when you pick these opening sort of lines, that a lot of times you do it unconsciously. You're not so aware of why you're moved by a piece of art, but you know that for some reason it's important, and so therefore you should put it in. I have to admit that it was a lot less de proposito, as they say in Spanish, than it was just intuitive. But also I always think it's important to put some warnings at the beginning of a book.

It's a book where you have a number of different lives on display. And you know how we all are, we tend to think that you can like one or two lives but then just dismiss the others. To be like, 'I love Sam, but his sister's kind of a jerk.' Or 'I love character A, but...' Part of my argument was that you've got to be able to embrace things you don't like, characters you don't like, along with characters you like. Because this kind of evil god at the beginning, who says, 'Of what import are brief, nameless lives?' He's kind of like the diabolical essence of someone who's like, well, if you're not 400 feet tall then I don't give a shit about you.

But we make those kind of excuses all the time, but we use the idea that we like someone as the blade which separates people out into the worthy of our compassion and the not worthy of our compassion. And I guess the opening was, among these other things, sort of an argument for -- even people we don't like are worthy of our compassion. And that's like a top thing to get our heads around, especially where I'm from, the United States, where the entire culture is based on 'Do we like people?'

Motherfuckers like blew up the World Trade Centre and the first response was, 'Why don't they like us?' Well, but I do think it reveals in some way how that kind of criteria has soaked into everything. And engaging with things only that you like, for me, has always presented a very limited form of humanity. Because if you're only going to practise benevolence and kindness on things you like, you sound kind of crazy eventually.

So I thought that opening quote, more than just saying, I can do high culture and low culture, was also hoping to get people to be like, hey, you know, even jerk-offs need love too.

Ramona Koval: This low culture thing, though -- you're talking about genres, you're talking about science-fiction genres, anime, that kind of stuff?

Junot Diaz: Yes.

Ramona Koval: But that's something that interests you and you've always embraced, isn't it?

Junot Diaz: I wouldn't say always embraced. I think I've always had a great fascination for genre. Again, there's a number of reasons but the idea of genre like science-fiction, horror and fantasy... When I was a kid I liked it very much. I was really 'into it'. Any TV show or book or comic that had a bomb going off or a monster clutching someone, I was really into. But then you become an adolescent and for me it was that ridiculous thing where I discovered girls.

Ramona Koval: Not ridiculous.

Junot Diaz: No, no, girls are not ridiculous, but what happened with me in adolescence was ridiculous. All sorts of normative adolescent pressure...the first thing I did was as soon as it was time for all of us to be cool and to be like popular, I took all my childhood loves and kind of like pushed them into a deep, dark closet and then spent the next eight or nine years pretending I didn't even know what a comic book was, or what a science-fiction story was. I kind of was cowardly, and there's nothing wrong with that but if I could be honest and admit it, just to get a date I kind of sold my younger self right up the river. But I do think it's one of the first hard things you end up doing as a young person. The consequences of these things is you take former selves and former loves and just for social acceptance you'll be like, hey, come in this room...click. And then I didn't see this person again until I was an adult.

I think a lot about that, often. I think it was that decision to pretend to be someone I wasn't, to eliminate the less popular parts of myself once it became teenage time that led me in some ways to the character of Oscar and led me to this novel. I always think that had I had the courage to keep pursuing the sort of things I liked, irregardless of social sanction, I could have ended up at least in a similar situation as Oscar as far as his tastes. And I do think that the decision later haunted me. I always wondered how I could just so gleefully eliminate a huge part of myself.

Ramona Koval: Oscar has this thing...calls it 'the bane of the nerdy boys, the let's just be friends'. When you adore a woman and you want to discuss Tolkien or something a lot, over and over again, she's going to say, 'I really like you. Let's just be friends.'

Junot Diaz: Yes. Not through self-aggrandisement but that's one of the huge differences between me and Oscar. I had an older brother who was one year older than me and he was like a real serious...he was super-pretty, incredibly beautiful and he would hound me day and night, so that I would never develop relationships that could possibly lead to the 'let's just be friends.' If he saw me being friendly to a young woman, 12 or 13, he'd be like, 'Are you fucking her?' And I would be like, 'Oh no, I am not fucking her.' And he was like, 'Then, why the fuck you talking to her?'

And he was that kind of a person. I love him...it's easy to laugh, but when you're teenager there's some stuff that goes on, and things you think and say when you're a teenager were just funny ha ha but if I brought you all back there right now, you wouldn't be laughing. And my brother was extreme in that way. And I always think of the person I could have been had he not been so...trying to make me his younger brother, because I was desperately like socially anxious all my life. But my brother was so against that. And he was day and night on that.

And I always thought that Oscar was like the me that wasn't permitted to be, in some ways, and so his whole thing of...I think a guy who doesn't have a cruel older brother like mine, who doesn't end up in these situations. And there isn't a woman who doesn't end up in these situations or our categories and our vision of a relationship aren't matched by our interlocutors.

Ramona Koval: Oscar loves language. He's always coming up with these dictionary words. I had to go to the dictionary for...is it copasetic?

Junot Diaz: Copasetic.

Ramona Koval: People say, 'How are you?' And he says, 'I'm copasetic.' Which means very satisfactory, it turns out.

Junot Diaz: Yeah.

Ramona Koval: It's hard for Oscar, isn't it, to love words so much and to not be able to share that with his peers.

Junot Diaz: It's interesting, when you're making a protagonist, when you're trying to figure out someone who can drive a whole novel, you end up looking for sort of...I know this sounds crazy but you have to figure out nickel-dime solutions to million dollar problems. How do you make a character distinct, given the fact that there's so many characters out there that are so distinct, there's been so much done. How do you make someone unique? You're always looking for the thumbprint of subjectivity, that individual thing that no-one else has.

Oscar was interesting for me because he absolutely loves words, he loves stories, he definitely loves language. But more importantly than that he's incapable of understanding that other people don't share his enthusiasm for it, which most of us can mirror. We can tell almost immediately when someone doesn't have the same interest in football as we do, but Oscar seems to have no mirroring centres in his brain. He's like, 'Oh, I'll talk to you about Klingon.' And you could be like looking for the exit, rattling the door... And part of is -- that's a failing, you know, the lack of compassion and the lack of understanding. But there was something for me that was very attractive about someone who in some ways didn't seem to understand social norms.

If you're kind of cool and popular, part of what being cool and popular is an accident of genetics in some ways, being exceptionally hot. You didn't do shit to get that, let me tell you. But even exceptionally hot people, one of the things that defines kind of cool and popular in any society is being really aware and cagey and sort of cognisant of social rules.

And Oscar seems to have no idea of the most normal social rules. I found that to be cool too, because in a society where we're constantly being told...a society of respectability...that you should on top of all the other things that we have to worry about, that you should maintain these one billion social rules so that people think we're cool. I thought that was an interesting thing for him to lack. In some ways he was the most non-American character I could come up with.

Ramona Koval: But part of it is of course coming to the US as a kid who doesn't speak English at the beginning...

Junot Diaz: Oscar was born in the United States.

Ramona Koval: Sorry, but I'm maybe talking about you...

Junot Diaz: Oh.

Ramona Koval:...because I'm just trying to work out about your compassion for this idea about coming into a situation and trying to work out what the rules are. Well what are people saying, for a start, and what are they doing and why are they doing it? Can you tell me a little bit about that experience?

Junot Diaz: I think it's a very good point. One of the things about being an immigrant, or emigrating to a culture when you're old enough to remember certain things...most of us, our primary language acquisition occurs before our memory coheres. So we learn sort of the deep grammar of the language we use without any memory of remembering it. The deep grammar of our language is actually a commonplace that we don't even see. It's just an artefact that was acquired. And what happens when you emigrate old enough to remember what would become primary language acquisition and primary cultural acquisition is that you're very aware that these are artefacts that you have to master. These are not things that are born in you. You just don't suddenly come into awareness and know all the social rules of your society. You actually have to pick these darn things up and you have to like really master them. There is a grammar to being a member of any society. And that grammar tends to be learned, and it's usually learned when most of us are so young we don't remember it.

And I think that because I learned it when I was very cognisant of it, I was made very aware that social norms and linguistic norms and even what we would call epistemic norms, the kind of knowledge norms -- these things are learned artefacts. No matter how well you master them, no matter how well I speak English or how boned up I am in all things American, the very fact that I have to think about them, the very fact that they're not actually a commonplace, that they weren't acquired mostly at an unconscious, alters my relationship with them fundamentally.

And I think that...I mean it is a weird thing, to be speaking and always hearing the echo -- I feel like I'm always on a one-second delay when I'm talking. The larger part of my brain is always running the language through a filter to make sure I get everything correct. You never stop being an immigrant, I don't think. My children, if they're born in the US, won't be immigrants at all. But I don't think you ever stop.

There's this wonderful book, a book called The Rise of David Levinsky, has anybody ever read that? It's like the classic of American immigrant literature and David Levinsky goes from a sort of East European Jew to like a pedlar in the Lower East Side and then becomes like sort of like Charles Foster Keyne super millionaire. And at the end of the book he says this wonderful thing. He's like, 'And I have everything I could have ever imagined and I still hate the sound of my voice when I'm ordering food.' And you just never stop being that person. And I guess it does lead to certain preoccupations and patterns in your characters. I think that these things end up being reflected in the people I make, without knowing it.

Ramona Koval: What about that guy who comes from the Dominican Republic as a kid and learns English, and his first novel wins the Pulitzer prize?

Junot Diaz: Well what about him?

Ramona Koval: Well that's quite something.

Junot Diaz: Yeah, but...I always call that survivor bias.

Ramona Koval: What do you mean?

Junot Diaz: Well there's...you know, there's this term called survivor bias, which means that usually, because we can't speak to the people who came over, all the people who came over -- we can't bring every Dominican kid from my cohort and ask them how the experience was. We tend to latch on to one person who makes it and think that person is emblematic of the experience.

Ramona Koval: The experience of reading this book, for the reader, is kind of like being in a place where you don't know the language, either. Sometimes...there's lots of Spanish there. Sometimes you don't translate it. You just have it there. And sometimes the reader thinks, 'I think I know what that means. I couldn't actually give you a word by word translation, but I think I get it.' It's like being in a culture where you don't know the language. You think, 'I know the tune, I'm not sure of the words but I think I know what this tune is.' Is that what you want? Did you want the reader to feel like a migrant in this book?

Junot Diaz: Well, I just think, immigrant or a migrant...as an immigrant you make certain general experiences explicit. What I mean by that is, look, when all of us are communicating and talking and we're out in the world, we'll be lucky if we can understand twenty per cent of what people say to us. A whole range of clues, of words, of languages, escape us. We're not perfect. We're not gods. But on top of that, people misspeak, sometimes you mishear, sometimes you don't have attention. Sometimes people use words you don't know. Sometimes people use languages you don't know.

On a daily basis human beings are very comfortable with a large component of communication which is incomprehension. We tend to be comfortable with it. But for an immigrant, it becomes very different. What most of us consider normative incomprehension, an immigrant fears that they're not getting it because of their lack of mastery in the language. And what's a normal component of communication, incomprehension, or whatever the damn word is, in some ways for an immigrant becomes a source of deep anxiety. Because you're not sure whether it's just incomprehension or your own failures.

My sense of writing a book where there is an enormous amount of language that perhaps everyone doesn't have access to was less to communicate the experience of the immigrant than to communicate the experience that for an immigrant causes much discomfort but that is normative for people -- which is that we tend to not understand, not grasp a large part of the language around us. What's funny is, we will, Ramona, accept incomprehension in our everyday lives and we will meet that in a book with enormous fury. In other words, what we're comfortable with in the outside world we do not want to encounter in our books.

People come to me and they ask me -- not you of course -- but people ask me, 'Are you trying to lock out your non-Dominican reader?' And I'm like, 'No...' I assume any gaps in a story, any word that people don't understand, whether it's the nerdish stuff, whether it's the elvish, whether it's the characters going on about dungeons and dragons, whether it's the Dominican Spanish, whether it's the sort of high level graduate language -- I assume if people don't get it, this is not an attempt for the writer to be aggressive, this is an attempt for the writer to encourage the reader to build community, to go out and ask somebody else.

For me, words that you can't understand in a book aren't there to torture or to remind people that they don't know. I always felt that they were to remind people that part of the experience of reading has always been collective. You learn to read with someone else. You may currently practise it in a solitary fashion, but reading is a collective enterprise. What the unintelligible in a book does is to remind you our whole lives we've always needed someone else to help us with reading -- whether it was the first days when we were learning and we had to ask someone what this word meant. Or now, when we encounter a verb in Latin that we don't get, or some of us don't get. So I think part of me, I'm trying to remind us in the reading experience what is human and what is the origins of the reading experience, which is community.

Ramona Koval: But this book is about history, too. It's about a lot of things. It's about many universes. And there's a lot of footnotes in this book. And they're written with such verve and amusement as well. So there are several dimensions of the text. Tell me about the footnotes and what got into the footnotes and why.

Junot Diaz: Again, like we were talking earlier, you have these kind of structural challenges for yourself. And one of the things was, among my other concerns for the book was that this was a book that at its heart had as its greatest fear, dictatorship. One voice speaking only. That's in some ways what a dictatorship is. If you take the idea of the authoritative to its logical conclusion you have the dictatorship.

The footnotes came out of a strategy...I realised that unless I would have countervailing voices the book would fall into the very pattern it was attempting to challenge. The book was attempting to challenge this idea of one person speaking. Sauron this dictator. It was a book about this new world masculinity, and yet that's the women were such a huge part of it, because in some ways I needed those countervailing voices. If it had all been male voices it would have just thrown the whole thing off. And the footnotes were part of that larger strategy.

Again, if you read the book what you'll see is that the footnotes keep competing with the overtest. The standard application of a footnote is to reinforce authority and reinforce erudition. That's traditionally the way they're used. These footnotes actually do everything to undermine the story. You think that they're in some ways providing dilation, but they're doing the exact opposite. Every time you're starting to pick up a rhythm in the book, there'll be a footnote. And the footnotes are openly incorrect. And instead of being erudite and instead of being authoritative they keep questioning the ability to tell. And even worse, footnotes spend a lot of time delivering gossip and ad hominem attacks.

And I just wanted that, because I wanted the under story to battle with the over story in that way that King Lear's clown kind of battles him. Every time King Lear would get a ball of steam going the clown would be like 'Yip...' you know. I think that's a really good way of getting at this idea that novels perpetuate in a very subtle way that it's okay to sit down and listen to one unbroken, unchallenged voice. I always was very fearful that my love of reading novels came out of the same place -- and I know this is a huge leap -- came out of the same place, why dictatorships are possible. The thing about collectives and dictatorships is that dictatorships give people a sense that there's an idea of a cohesive, simplifying, persuasive narrative that explains the world. What is a novel, in the traditional sense, other than a cohesive, simplifying, explicatory narrative? And so I know this of kind of crazy but it was part of that whole strategy.

Guys, thank you so much...Ramona, thank you so much.

Ramona Koval: And thank you so much. [applause]

American writer Junot Diaz, whose first novel, The brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won this year's Pulitzer prize for literature, talking to me at the Sydney Writers' Festival. We'll post a longer version of this conversation (downloadable mp3) including more about the dictator Trujillo and his lethal fascination with fashion, on our website: abc.net.au/rn/bookshow. And The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is published by Faber and Faber.

Publications

Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Author: Junot Diaz
Publisher: Faber, 2007
ISBN 9780-5711-7955-8

Presenter

Ramona Koval