- The Good: Immigrant stories; family conflicts; Spanglish
- The Bad: Misogynistic characters who constantly think about how to use women; unrealized magical realism
- The Literary: Pulitzer prize winner, among many other awards
Following his family’s journey from Santo Domingo to New Jersey, Oscar’s story is a microcosm of a curse, the fukú, that has haunted them for generations. Oscar dreams of falling in love and becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien.
This book won dozens of awards, including this Pulitzer, and I have thoughts.
Diaz has an ability to craft characters that resonate and are significantly shaped by their experiences, then put them in a room together to create conflict that feels very real. Oscar is a sweet boy, but he’s been horribly overweight his whole life. As he becomes an outcast among his peers, he dives further into scifi and books. He only knows how to talk about his nerdy interests, using a larger-than-average vocabulary, perpetuating the cycle of isolation.
I think most people who have experienced the feeling of being an outsider can relate to Oscar on many levels. He’s overweight, a scifi and fantasy nerd, smart, poor, and an immigrant. But you’ll spend just as much time with the other POVs, including Oscar’s sister Lola, a rebellious runaway, Oscar’s mother Belicia, who fled the DR to save her life, and the narrator Yunior. The narrator is the only POV outside of Oscar’s family, a short-lived college boyfriend of Oscar’s sister, who has ongoing romantic feelings for her and so takes Oscar under his wing.
Diaz introduces the concept of the fukú curse as something only Oscar’s superstitious grandmother would believe, then proceeds to give it legitimacy, both because the family really does have a lot of bad luck, but also because the scifi and literary references enhance reality with exaggeration and magical thinking, with the power of story. For example, the introductory chapter compares Trujillo, the previous dictatorial president of the DR to Sauron. I like all the scifi and fantasy literary references in themselves, but Diaz uses them to shape the world in a very intentional way.
Stylistically, this novel is doing some interesting things. Spanish or Spanglish dialogue is scattered throughout, and gives no excuses or translations for English-only speakers. Long footnotes provide context for DR politics and history. The narrator isn’t revealed until halfway through the story. You might even make a case that the fukú curse is a thematic stand-in for the expectations we put on children, or how difficult it is to escape poverty, or institutional racism.
In spite of all the well-crafted elements, I don’t really like this book. I think mostly because the heart of the fukú curse is love.
Let me explain. Oscar’s family has a lot of bad luck with sex. Two of the four POVs are teenage or early 20s males, so I guess it’s not surprising that most of what they think about is sex, but their view of and treatment of women is not easy to read. You’re supposed to feel sorry for Oscar, but he’s the gamer-gate type of misogynistic. Yunior is Oscar’s opposite in that he’s a woman user and serial cheater. When she’s young, Oscar’s mom grows in huge breasts, so her story is learning that men will do just about anything to please her. She quits school because her crush doesn’t like her back, and then she falls in love with a man in organized crime. Oscar’s sister is sexually abused at a young age, so she rebels by shaving her head and serially dating, using men as a means to escape her mother.
I suppose the book is a tragedy. It’s right in the title. But none of the characters can move past their individual sexual burdens. Both Oscar and Lola attend college and are quite smart, but neither really has any passion. Oscar does write, but being a writer isn’t what defines him—it’s whether or not he can finally get laid. The focus on sex as the crux of the curse feels reductive. The tragedy doesn’t allow for any of the characters to grow, escape poverty, or heal emotionally.