America\u2019s best living short-story writer gives equal time to bad-boy cheaters and the cheated-on. Sam Sacks reviews Junot D\u00edaz\u2019s new book for The Wall Street Journal.<\/p>\n
There are two things to know about Junot D\u00edaz. The first is that he is one of the most agonizingly slow writers to ever lay finger to laptop. His debut, the scintillating story collection \u201cDrown,\u201d was published in 1996, and from then on his admirers have had to wait with Job-like endurance. His next book, the novel \u201cThe Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,\u201d appeared in 2007. (It won the Pulitzer Prize but, for all its patches of brilliance, felt rough and cobbled together.) Now Mr. D\u00edaz reappears with \u201cThis Is How You Lose Her\u201d (Riverhead, 213 pages, $26.95), a slim collection of nine stories that has been in the offing for well over a decade. Some of them ran in the New Yorker during the Clinton administration.<\/p>\n
But the second thing dwarfs the first: Mr. D\u00edaz is America\u2019s best living short-story writer. His gifts of character portrayal and his sui generis writing voice will link his name with the country\u2019s anthologizable greats, from Raymond Carver to John Cheever to Eudora Welty. Despite the long interval, \u201cThis Is How You Lose Her\u201d takes up right where \u201cDrown\u201d left off. Most of the stories are about Yunior Urbano, a book-smart Dominican-American prone to lovesickness and possessing \u201can IQ that would have broken you in two.\u201d He grows up in a New Jersey housing project with his mother and brother, with whom he immigrated as a child. (His father left them for a mistress after bringing them into the country.)<\/p>\n
Yunior is Mr. D\u00edaz\u2019s fictional alter ego, but the stories he narrates are always more than raw autobiography. Yunior\u2019s family and various girlfriends are every bit as filled-in and troublesomely alive as he is. Mr. D\u00edaz\u2019s female characters\u2014many of them women that Yunior cheats on\u2014are especially vivid. There is Magda from \u201cThe Sun, the Moon, the Stars,\u201d a sensitive Catholic girl who \u201ctakes to hurt the way water takes to paper.\u201d Alma, from the story that shares her name, is a \u201cSonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatina.\u201d Yasmin, from \u201cOtravida, Otravez,\u201d works in a hospital laundry room cleaning bloodstains from bedsheets and is torn between toiling in the U.S. or returning in defeat to the Dominican Republic, \u201cwhich you never think of until it\u2019s gone, which you never love until it\u2019s no longer there.\u201d<\/p>\n
The egalitarian attention to the side-characters creates a sense of multiplicity in the stories, the feeling that each story is capturing the moment of intersection of two or more discrete and fully realized individuals. \u201cNilda,\u201d for instance, takes place when Yunior is a bewildered, sci-fi-obsessed high schooler. His wild, dropout older brother Rafa takes up with Nilda, a veteran of group homes and abusive boyfriends who has the body of an adult and the mind of a child. Then Rafa is diagnosed with cancer. Employing no obvious technical tricks, Mr. D\u00edaz conveys the diverging fortunes of all three characters\u2014Rafa\u2019s abrupt decline into illness, Yunior\u2019s darkened coming of age and Nilda\u2019s merciless drift back to the streets. One of the joys of the book is Mr. D\u00edaz\u2019s singular writing voice, a vernacular Spanglish that runs easily to a kind of jazz poetry.<\/p>\n
Here is how he describes Pura, a \u201cfresh-off-the-boat-didn\u2019t-have-no-papers Dominican\u201d from the collection\u2019s symphonic masterpiece, \u201cThe Pura Principle\u201d: \u201cGuap\u00edsima as hell: tall and indiecita, with huge feet and an incredibly soulful face, but unlike your average hood hottie Pura seemed not to know what to do with her fineness, was sincerely lost in all the pulchritude.\u201d Mr. Diaz subtly winds together the story\u2019s different threads. Clearly gold-digging, Pura marries Rafa while he is in the late stages of cancer, incurring the wrath of his and Yunior\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n
A specter in \u201cDrown,\u201d Mrs. Urbano acquires heartbreaking dimensions in \u201cThis Is How You Lose Her\u201d\u2014a pious, hardworking woman in exile, abandoned by her husband to raise two ungrateful children, one of whom is dying. Unlike so much fiction that centers on boys behaving badly, \u201cThis Is How You Lose Her\u201d gives equal time to the cheated-on.<\/p>\n
For the original report go to http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB10000872396390443686004577633303411932924.html?mod=googlenews_wsj<\/p>\n