A Brief Wondrous Personal Narrative

My senior year of high school was a time of serious literary exploration, perhaps the most serious and defining of my life. I, like any high school kid, I think, was looking for something greater to connect with, something to latch on to and make my purpose and meaning in my life that could lead to a meaningful career and unique perspective.

Literature had long been my source of epiphany, escape, and enlightenment, and I was positive some piece of literature would contain my answers. I had read many of the "classics," but I felt a particular need to be true to my own generation--to know what was going on now in literature, to help the world takes its next steps rather than just focus on the past. A book or short story or poem just didn't seem to really count to me if it was older than five years. The world was changing and I needed to know how literature was changing with it.

But school is seldom about what's going on outside its walls, especially high school, and there were no contemporary literature courses available for me to take, so I was forced to find my own way into the scary and chaotic world of contemporary literature.

I figured award winners were the easiest and obvious answer to point me in the right direction. And that's when Oscar Wao fell into my lap. Having won the Pulitzer prize that same year, I figured it was a sure bet for a good perspective on how literature was in my own time.

I opened the cover to find the epigraph:

"Of what importance are brief, nameless lives...to Galactus??"

 Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (Vol. 1, No.49, April 1966)

The book had already shattered everything I thought were the rules of literature, and I hadn't even really opened it yet. I was in an AP literature class at the time reading deep stuff like Heart of Darkness, and my whole mindset of literature had been built around a dichotomy between "literature" and "books for fun." I had been harboring a personal pipe dream at the time of being the first person to win both the Pulitzer and the Hugo award for the same book, thus proving that speculative fiction can indeed by high art. Nowhere had I found any evidence that this would ever be possible--until that epigraph.

 This book had won a Pulitzer prize, my high school senior self thought, how can it be getting away with quoting Fantastic Four?

But that was only the beginning. The entire book is a kind of love letter to the kind of reading and dreaming that only fantasy and science fiction can provoke. References not only to comic books, but to The Lord of the Rings, anime classics, Ray Bradbury stories, and more abounded through the book, often explained further in footnotes that took up at least half the page. On top of that, the book shattered dozens of my other perceived "rules" for literature with multiple narrators spread across not only space but generations, being at least 10% in Spanish without any translation provided, and bringing in odd and totally unexplained fantasy elements like a man with no face and talking animals. None of this was allowed in "literature" according to everything I'd been taught.

Obviously, there was a whole history of literature at work here that I was still ignorant of. I had heard words like modernism and post-modernism and had an idea that two world wars and a drawn-out Vietnam conflict had affected arts and letters profoundly, but nothing had prepared me to jump this far into post-modernism, let alone post-colonialism, Latin-American literature, third-wave Feminism, Marxism, and structuralism, and all of the other -isms haunting the pages of Oscar Wao. From my perspective, this was just new, raw, revelatory denial of everything I thought literature was supposed to be.

But then there was the problem of morals. My faithful Mormon upbringing had taught me an exceptionally high moral code that I was more than happy to stick to in my personal life and media choices. I had maintained my distance from rated R movies quite easily, but books never had a rating system, and books weren't part of the evil Hollywood superstructure. And besides, this one won awards. There must be more to it. As the book went on and the sex and politics got more prevalent, violent, and disturbing, I worried increasingly if I should just walk away. I adored the writing style and could appreciate the high level of technical and lyrical mastery over the English (and Spanglish) language, and the plot was indeed compelling despite the fragmentation of time, place, and voice--but I knew that if even 10% of this book were in a movie I would never even consider viewing it.

I continued my way through the book, however, always passing uneasily through certain scenes and sitting back in awe at others, and sometimes both at once in guilt-ridden wonder. As I pushed through, I started forming an opinion of my own on literature. I all but swore fealty in my heart to my own movement I naively called "Post-post-modernism," or even "Okay-ism." I struggled profoundly with a book that held nothing back in showing me the "realities" of life--drugs, sex, violence, oppression--but which seemed complete and utter fantasy to the comfortable suburban religious life I had led with loving parents who still loved and lived with each other, and siblings who gave me inspiring and admirable examples of how to live. Oscar Wao was so full of truth, but it reached those truths through a world I just couldn't believe really existed to the extremes Diaz portrayed.

Near the end of the novel, I had silently declared war on the entire literary establishment in my crusade to show the world isn't that bad after all, and that some people really are happy and good and clean. I was all but trudging through the final pages, now just reading to finish what I started rather than out of real enjoyment.

And then this happened:

Oscar remembers having a dream where a mongoose was chatting with him. Except the mongoose was the Mongoose.

What will it be, muchacho? it demanded. More or less?

And for a moment he almost said less. So tired, and so much pain--Less! Less! Less!--but then in the back of his head he remembered his family. Lola and his mother and Nena Inca. Remembered how he used to be when he was younger and more optimistic. The lunch box next to his bed, the first thing he saw in the morning. Planet of the Apes.

More, he croaked.

_______ ________ ______, said the Mongoose, and then the wind swept him back into darkness.

And about twenty pages later, after Oscar's dead, the book ends with a final letter from Oscar that his siblings found that he had written right before his death, at a time when he finally got just one weekend to spend with the woman he had always loved but could never be with, living like a married couple in peace, and the letter and the book end like this:

He wrote: So this is what everybody's always talking about! Diablo! If only I'd known. The beauty! The beauty!

And suddenly my war was over. These two passages shouldn't redeem the whole book, but they did and they do. In my mind, Diaz wrote this whole book to write just that final paragraph, to make sure it meant exactly what he needed it to mean. He had to make absolutely sure you were broken as a reader, having lost hope even yourself in any happy ending for this boy and his family. He had to take you to that brink so he could bring you back. He had to show you that even in the worst of all possible worlds, it's possible to hope. Men may die in screams of "The horror! The horror!" as Joseph Conrad suggests and Diaz is clearly responding to, but they don't have to. Even these people--even Oscar Wao.

The awe I felt in that moment is difficult to over-emphasize. After the constant discomfort of terror throughout the whole book came this moment where love and beauty were reborn in an instant to my mind. That final paragraph was my hotel room on the other end of the monolith in space, my moment of utter awe at the existence of the familiar among the alien. And like Dave Bowman, I left that moment turning back and looking on my whole world not knowing what I would possibly do next, but confident that I could come up with something.