April 2009

April 3, 2009    Diaz and Scibona

"The victim is always better because he is innocent."  On page one of Elfreide Jelinek's  Wonderful, Wonderful Times. 1980

Percival Everett published a novel called Erasure in 2001.  It is a brilliant & funny satire of the writing life and specifically of the prize giving that decorates the writing life.  The narrator, encouraged by his publisher to write something that will get more sales, tosses off a cheap-trick, confessional "ghetto memoir" and publishes it under a phony name to save his own integrity with himself.  Of course it wins the sales, wins the money, wins the tv spot appearance, and, ultimately, wins the bit lit'ry prize.  There is another twist I've left out so as not to totally spoil the plot for you.

I am a few pages shy of finishing Diaz's novel, Oscar Wao. At first I found it really cool, really hot and charming.  All that street language, all that jazzy Spanglish & Jersey/New York sweet-tough talk.  Springsteen back from a vacation in Santo Domingo with Beyonce. Or something.

Then the back stories kick in.  The horrors of the old Trujillo dictatorship that ravaged the island years ago--in the thirties, forties, fifties.  The lives of Wao's grandparents and parents.   All of it well-told, well-written.  The jivey language and cultural musicality moving us along with island rhythms and ghetto beat.

By the last two-thirds of the book we are back to the coming-of-age of Oscar and it feels like we are suddenly in a YA book.  Like now Diaz is competing with Katherine Min's immigrant childhood tale  Secondhand World.  Even after Rutgers and his first job teaching high school, Oscar remains a nerd until he goes back to the homey island and the question becomes (just like in Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned, will our delayed nerd ever get laid?  

Do I care?  Not too much.  In spite of all this musical creole layering of voices, I lost interest.  No real concern for the characters.  And even worse, the horrors of the Trujillo period seem diminished or trivialized by being made the armature for the angst of the surburban fatboy.  

I wonder if Diaz had ever heard of Everett's book.  If he had read it, did he realize it was a satire?  Even worse, did he see it, any way, as a total recipe for the prize winning book?  It is as though Diaz read the "My Pafology" segment of Erasure and said, Hey, even if this is a satire it is still the way these books win prizes, so if I imitate this, I'll make it.  

And he did.  Pulitzer.  

How long will it take American fiction to move on beyond the tonimorrison template for the novel?  

Last spring Salvatore Scibona published his first novel with Greywolf, called The End.  A complex work, whatever else it may be doing, it does mark a subtle challenge to call an end to the "pafology" novel.  "What's it like to grow up under an ethnic curse, under the cloud of immigration memories, under the weight of minority understatus, oppressed any which way but up?"  Scibona tries to move way past that worn out model.  

I hope Diaz will read him.  

April 20, 2009   Dyer's Fun

Midway into the new book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.  No way to convey how many delicious chuckles the book spreads out before you as you read along.  But here is an attempt to excerpt and spread the fun:

Jeff, our slacker, mid-40s, hero is high on bellinis and coke at the Venice Biennale art fair & now that he's gotten onto a party on a yacht he is in true heaven of cool dudeness  I guess---not Dyer's words those last---

"

The night was thick with heat.  Unlike grass, cocaine did not enhance--or even lend itself to--the lyricism of the moment.  Still, he was thinking to himself over and over, if this is not my idea of a good time I don't know what is.  I am having an unbelievably fantastic time, he said to himself.  I am having the time of my fucking life!  The last six or however many hours it was were like a concentrated version of everything he had ever wanted from life.  What more could you want?  The thing about life is that you just don't know what's going to turn up, what's going to come your way. Christ, he had arrived at the Tom Hanks philosophy of life, part Forrest Gump and part Cast Away.  It was exciting, coke, but it didn't give you much in the way of profound thoughts, he thought.  The thing about Tom Hanks was that all his films, not all of them but the quintessential ones, were about wanting to get back home.  Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away and--this was the one that elevated the point to the level of universal truth--Apollo 13.  And that was their shortcoming, because life, at its best, was about wanting never to go home, even if that meant spinning off into outer space. 

"

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