Oscar Wao (his nickname is what ‘Oscar Wilde’ sounds like in a Dominican-American accent) is a young immigrant growing up in New Jersey, unstereotypically obsessed with sci-fi, fantasy, and British ‘nerd’ shows such as Doctor Who and Blake’s Seven. He is also living under the Fukú, an ancient curse his family brought with them from the Dominican Republic which predestines them to prison, torture, unfortunate accidents and frustrated love. Junot Díaz’s first novel is told in a composite argot of street Spanish, American English and arcane references to the great texts of nerd literature, and amply fulfils the promise of his short story collection Drown, published more than ten years ago to universal acclaim: ‘Writing this good comes along, if we’re lucky, once or twice in a generation,’ wrote the Observer.

Again and again people’s personalities and experiences are described in the most extreme terms – almost as if they are comic book characters themselves, not merely characters in a story that makes frequent reference to comic books. But while it’s easy to quibble with such characterisations, they help illuminate the ambitiousness of the novel in general. For Diaz, the straddling of worlds is not merely played out in the theme of the story but in its form as well. He straddles realism and fantasy, he seems to imply, because that’s how it feels to cross from the Dominican Republic to America, or vice versa – a straddler of worlds separated by an impossible chasm. He marries English and Spanish because his characters think and speak in both. He marries high culture and pop culture, referencing both Shakespeare and the heavy-metal band Judas Priest, because neither one nor the other is sufficient on its own to get at the complexity of immigrant identity.

(LRB 20 March 2008)

Faber | paperback 640 pp. |ISBN: 9780571179558