A small window on love
As his extraordinary 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, so exuberantly demonstrated, Junot Diaz has one of the most distinctive and magnetic voices in contemporary fiction: limber, streetwise, caffeinated and wonderfully eclectic, capable of conjuring for the reader everything from the sorrows of Dominican history to the banalities of life in New Jersey.
Brief Wondrous Life is, at once, a coming-of-age story; a family portrait; a meditation on the violent legacy of the Trujillo era of the Dominican Republic; a pop-culture, postmodern reflection on the fragmentation of history; and a haunting story about the allure and disappointments of the American dream.
It is one of those amazingly inclusive books that seems to embrace everything the author knows, while his new collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her, is a miniaturist performance — a modest, musically structured riff that works variations on one main subject: a young Dominican man’s womanizing and its emotional fallout.
This character, Yunior, appears to be the same Yunior who narrated Brief Wondrous Life and who stars in Drown, Diaz’s critically acclaimed 1996 debut collection of stories. This Is How You Lose Her is, in many respects, a kind of bookend to Drown, with more strobe-lighted glimpses of Yunior’s life as he tries to juggle girlfriends, pursue a literary career and come to terms with his father, who was absent for much of his childhood.
The strongest tales are those fuelled by the verbal energy and magpie language that made Brief Wondrous Life so memorable and that capture Yunior’s efforts to commute between two cultures, Dominican and American, while always remaining an outsider. Diaz evocatively describes Yunior’s affection for Santo Domingo: how he loves “the plane landing, everybody clapping when the wheels kiss the runway,” loves “the redhead woman on her way to meet the daughter she hasn’t seen in 11 years,” holding gifts on her lap “like the bones of a saint.” He is equally adept at evoking the exotic world of New Jersey that Yunior and his handsome brother Rafa are introduced to as children.
Yunior’s portraits of women are animated by both a condescending machismo and a sort of wistful regret. There’s Alma, “one of those Sonic Youth, comic-bookreading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity,” a woman who reads his journal and discovers that he’s been cheating on her. And there’s Veronica, “white trash from outside of Paterson,” a bookstore-loving “smarty-pants, the kind you don’t find every day,” who tells him he has “to decide where and when” they meet because if it were up to her, she’d want to see him every day.
This Is How You Lose Her doesn’t aspire to be a grand anatomy of love like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera but it gives us a small, revealing window on the subject.
Asked by a friend if she loves her married boyfriend, one of Diaz’s characters gives this answer: “I told her about the lights in my old home in the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn’t do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel.”