Biography

The son of Dominican immigrants Virtudes and Rafael Díaz, Junot Díaz was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on December 31, 1968. At the age of six, Díaz, along with his two sisters, two brothers, and mother, immigrated to the United States to join his father in New Jersey. His father had gone first to earn enough money to bring the family to the United States. Parlin, New Jersey, presented Díaz with many challenges—climatic, linguistic, and social. His mother worked blue-collar jobs, as did his father, who at one time was a cook for various ethnic restaurants in New Jersey, where Díaz grew up. His childhood home in Parlin was near a landfill. The struggles and shortcomings of both his parents profoundly influenced the writer Díaz would become. He watched the frustrations of his mother, who worked tirelessly to improve her English and pursue a formal education, albeit late in life. His father had a militaristic view of parenting, and he enforced his will in the household in strict terms. When his father was not instilling discipline in his children, he was conspicuously absent for much of Díaz’s life. As with many authors, Díaz’s life experience provided the imaginative building blocks for much of his writing, and in many ways, his constant narrator, Yunior de Las Casas, is an imagined version of himself. Diaz’s older brother became the basis of a recurring character within Díaz’s fiction, Yunior’s unapologetic brother, Rafa. But there is never a one-for-one correspondence between Díaz’s life and his fiction. For instance, though his brother was diagnosed with cancer and survived, the fictional Rafa succumbs to the disease.

When Díaz was an elementary school student at Madison Park, he struggled to communicate and relate to the English-speaking world in which he now found himself. As a second-language learner at a time when the issue of bilingualism was fraught with all kinds of problems—both politically and practically—the intellectually curious Díaz appeared the outsider on many levels. He was foreign-born. He had a funny-sounding name. He could not speak English. Moreover, the cold climate of New Jersey relative to the tropics of Hispaniola complicated his acceptance of his new home. As with many immigrants to the United States who struggle to learn English, popular culture quickly became his language teacher. Comic books and film, with their visually dominant narratives, both intrigued Díaz’s affinity for stories and helped make him comfortable with English. His passion for reading at a young age was further fueled by encounters with speculative and genre fiction by such writers as Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Díaz attended Cedar Ridge High School in Old Bridge, New Jersey, and graduated in 1987. After a year at Kean College in Union, New Jersey, Díaz transferred to Rutgers University, where he received his BA degree in English and history in 1992. The university experience opened up for Díaz the possibilities of written expression and close experiences with literature. And, like many other university students, Díaz worked many jobs at the time, such as delivering pool tables—an experience that would later work its way into the story “Edison, New Jersey.” It was also at Rutgers that Díaz read Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Octavia Butler, and Leslie Marmon Silko, women authors of color whose works stirred his imagination and passion. Upon completing his degree, Díaz worked for a time as an assistant editor at Rutgers University Press, with his path as an author still a distant dream. He had felt that he wanted to pursue a career in teaching, but to declare himself a writer was too daring a prospect at that point in his life.

Indeed, his path to a writing career was never a certain one for Díaz. Though he believed an MFA would help him take the discipline of writing seriously, he also was fraught with hesitation. Without a clear program that he wanted to attend, Díaz sent out application materials to several schools in apparent scattershot fashion. One school accepted him into its MFA program: Cornell University. In retrospect, his experiences at Cornell were less than ideal for a writer whose life experience and experiential knowledge was outside of the dominant white male framework on which many writing programs often operate. He has since been an outspoken critic of such MFA programs, which have little room for the development of people of color (POC) writers. Regardless, the time Díaz spent in the Cornell MFA program allowed him to lay the foundation for the vast majority of his published writings.

As he neared the completion of his MFA degree, Díaz published his first short story, “Ysrael,” in the literary magazine Story in 1995. The story’s publication occurred in a serendipitous moment for Díaz, as he again found himself at the crossroads of doubt and success. There was the possibility that he would graduate without publications or prospects, and his confidence was quickly eroding. But with the publication of “Ysrael,” as well as the seven stories that comprised his MFA thesis, Díaz was poised to be a new voice on the American literary scene—a voice that was equal parts gritty realism and literary cultural critique. With the publication of “How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Halfie)” in The New Yorker in 1995, Díaz was now positioned to publish his first book, the collection of stories that would come to be known as Drown (1996).

After the positive critical reception of his first book, Díaz was offered a teaching position at Syracuse University, and he accepted. Though Syracuse University had a prestigious history due to the advent of the postwar MFA program and its champion, Raymond Carver, its location in central New York hampered Diaz’s ability to work on his next project. The frustrations of being far from friends and home, as well as the mounting pressure of writing a successful follow-up led to a period of apparent inactivity. At the invitation of friend and Guatemalan American writer Francisco Goldman, Díaz traveled to Mexico City to reinvigorate his writing as well as his psyche. It was there that he had the idea for “Oscar Wao,” a Dominican pronunciation of Oscar Wilde. Despite the many setbacks, Díaz ultimately broke through in a major way with the publication of his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007).

The success of his sophomore effort lived up to the promise of Díaz as a writer. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was received with much acclaim, and it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2008. Only one other US Latino author had ever won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, (Cuban American author Oscar Hijuelos for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love in 1992), and Díaz was now the first Dominican American author to win the prestigious award. Soon he was in constant demand as a speaker, which certainly increased his visibility to the public. His career as a professor of writing also took a significant turn when he accepted a teaching position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT.

Díaz continued his literary exploration of the Dominican American experience with the publication of his third book and second collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her (2012), a finalist for the National Book Award. Díaz has served on the Pulitzer Prize Board (2016) and sits on the National Board of Advisors for Freedom University, an organization that provides a college education to students regardless of immigration status. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize, Díaz is the recipient of the Eugene McDermott Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” He was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” and has received many other honors. He splits his time between New York and Massachusetts.

Analysis

An avid reader of comic books, speculative fiction, and marginalized literatures, Díaz managed to infuse his first collection of stories with the elements of these literary traditions. As with many fiction writers with an MFA, Díaz built his first book on the work he produced for his MFA thesis. The resulting book, Drown, reveled in savvy, streetwise storytelling that played with the idea of machismo, or Latino masculinity. In this first collection, he also forged a central character named Yunior de Las Casas, a tour-de-force narrator who is featured in the majority of Díaz’s fiction. The stories play upon themes of immigration, Dominican culture, infidelity, love, and the ethics of trust during the journey from boyhood to adulthood. As such, the book functions as a kind of bildungsroman.

At times, it seems Díaz’s style has more in common with the narrative pyrotechnics of postmodernist authors such as David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem than he does Latino/a writers who, by and large, have not engaged in late-modernist or postmodernist literary experimentation. For instance, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes postmodernist use of the convention of scholarly footnotes by making them metafictional and, at times, contradictory rather than authoritative. His fiction is itself highly intertextual, and it often places a high cognitive and linguistic demand upon the reader by demanding knowledge of arcane comic book lore or a certain Spanish curse word. On the other hand, Díaz’s work is very much invested in the experiences of people of color in the United States and the dynamic of racial politics and ideologies.

Any understanding of Díaz’s fiction must first contend with his use of language. His narratives are blended with any number of languages and linguistic codes that must be negotiated by the reader. So, at one level, he primarily uses English while occasionally switching to Spanish in small doses. However, the Spanish he uses is quite frequently of a particular dialect (often Dominican and Mexican), and furthermore, the Spanish is colloquial and informal. The result is that many of these Spanish words cannot be found in official dictionaries, presenting a real challenge to the English-only reader. In addition, Díaz’s narrators frequently use highly allusive language that is not always explained. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, when he equates the infamous Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sauron, the narrator does not explain the significance of this character from The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). Or when he uses the trope of the masked Mexican wrestlers known as luchadores in the stories “Ysrael” and “No Face,” he does not explain the significance of this wrestling superhero figure in Latino culture. Understanding this key cultural signifier motivates the stories in key ways. But to the uninitiated, the stories will have a decreased impact. Thus, Díaz’s fiction requires a high degree of patience and participation on the part of the reader.

Díaz is clearly a devotee of the short story form. Two of his three books are short story collections. Parts of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao appeared first as short stories in The New Yorker, and the novel as a whole seems comprised of parts, chapters, and sections. He also privileges the character narrator, as much of his fiction uses this specific narrative feature. At times, Díaz makes excellent use of second-person narration, with the resulting effect of the narrator seemingly lecturing himself. The use of character narration gives the impression that the reader is drawn in close confidence, as if secret histories were being shared. Less frequently, Díaz uses third-person-limited narration. In such instances, the narrative is less streetwise and more poignant, as in the story “No Face” from Drown. Rarely, Díaz employs a female narrator, as in the section of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao titled “Wildwood 1982–1985” and the story “Otravida, Otravez.” Because his fiction is dominated by Dominican American male narrators, themes associated with masculinity, Latino identity, homo- and heterosexuality, nationalism, immigration, and the home are often at the fore.

All of Díaz’s skill and technical narrative ability comes to fruition in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel about a “ghetto nerd” in existential crisis. Yunior once again narrates the novel retrospectively. In that sense, Yunior’s story honors his friend, Oscar, though he delivers the narrative with equal amounts of seriousness and sarcasm. Though the novel is not about Yunior per se, he is intimately connected to the events surrounding Oscar’s life. Thus, the novel is not only about Oscar, it is about Yunior himself. In a sense, just as Oscar justifies a speculative fiction lens for understanding the Dominican experience, only Yunior could have narrated Oscar’s story. Not only is he as knowledgeable of genre fiction and pop culture as Oscar; only Yunior could have placed Oscar’s life within the appropriate speculative context. The driving force for the narrative, as Yunior rationalizes, is rooted in the idea of a fukú, a particularly nasty sort of curse. To stave off the fukú, Yunior writes the book as a zafa, a kind of counterspell. Moreover, Díaz integrates actual history (some of it wrong), along with heavy doses of apocryphal recorded events and also preexisting genre literature, such as The Fantastic Four comic book. The result is a novel that is many things at once and, in its own right, delivers something new in the tradition of US Latino/a literature.

More than anything, Díaz’s fiction examines questions that bedevil certain marginalized groups. What does it mean to be a Dominican American man? Where does literacy and education fit within US Latino culture? Where does power lie for women in Dominican culture, both in the Dominican Republic and the United States? What is the troubled nature of emotionality and physicality among Latino men? These are the sorts of questions that often go unexamined by mainstream, white America, and the lives in which these issues play out are effectively invisible in the preponderance of contemporary American literature. Yet these lives reflect the expanding Latino/a demographic in the US, and that speaks to the importance of Díaz’s work. Though on the surface, his work may appear misogynistic, a careful reading of his work in toto demonstrates Díaz’s recognition that his macho protagonists and narrators are actually quite vulnerable to emotional stresses and the pangs of heartbreak that Dominican, and Latino culture in general, have been so effective in rendering invisible. Díaz’s characters are both streetwise and cerebral, and Yunior manages to be both at the same instant. In reading Díaz’s fiction, one notices that postcolonial theory resonates equally with Marvel Comics lore and the imagined worlds of Tolkien. Such juxtapositions teach us that what readers think of as history can be more outrageous than a Ray Bradbury story, and post-apocalyptic fiction like Stephen King’s The Stand can highlight the monstrous nature of a Dominican dictatorship. Whether mutant, ghetto nerd, or immigrant, the struggle of the marginalized is given its due in the pages of Díaz’s fiction, and his narrators bear witness to the vitality located within the struggle to find relevance and meaning.

Drown consists of the following ten short stories: “Ysrael”; “Fiesta, 1980”; “Aurora”; “Aguantando”; “Drown”; “Boyfriend”; “Edison, New Jersey”; “How To Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie”; “No Face”; and “Negocios.” The stories introduce many of the features that will appear later in Díaz’s fiction. All of the stories center on the experience of a young Dominican man, some stories occurring in the Dominican Republic and others in New Jersey. All of the stories feature the grit of a hard reality, and doses of emotionality, when they come, never veer into melodrama or sentimentality. They are narratives of the pliable and frustrating nature of identity, as well as the constraints of prejudices and preconceptions. Often humorous and tragic in the same story, Díaz explores the possibilities and shortcomings of young men of Dominican heritage.

“Ysrael” introduces a character that is the protagonist of the story “No Face.” In “Ysrael,” Yunior, still a young child in the Dominican Republic, is convinced by his older brother Rafa to visit a disfigured boy named Ysrael, who wears a homespun mask to obscure his damaged face. The story quickly becomes an odyssey as the two brothers traverse the city and the surrounding countryside to meet Ysrael. Along the way, Yunior learns the art of the con from Rafa, and a man on a city bus also gropes him. When the boys finally do meet Ysrael, Yunior discovers that Rafa’s real purpose is less than friendly. “No Face” works to rectify the disgrace and dishonor of what Rafa does to Ysrael by casting the masked boy as a superhero and as protagonist of his own story. In “No Face,” the reader learns the history of Ysrael and the hopes that American doctors might cure his disfigurement. Though Yunior never appears in “No Face,” his actions from “Ysrael” loom large in the story. Drown is very much a series of portraits of the fictional artist as a young man.

When considering that the vast majority of Díaz’s fiction concerns the character of Yunior in some way, the stories in Drown can be offered as case studies of the sorts of experiences that have shaped the character who will later narrate The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. This fact is an indication that all of Díaz’s fiction should be read as something like a composite novel. Thus, even stories that are not ostensibly about Yunior, such as “No Face,” still inform his overarching development as a character. “Aurora” and “Drown” do not explicitly mention Yunior, but the young Dominican men featured in these two stories could easily be Yunior stand-ins. “Aurora” details a drug-fueled relationship in a downward spiral, with the addictive power of drugs and love on full display. Cast in a series of vignettes, “Aurora” reveals heartfelt emotion and love the narrator has for Aurora, but the narration acts as a kind of confession—revelations that Aurora (or anyone else in the narrator’s sphere of relationships) will never hear. This inability to say the things that matter to the people that matter is a dominant theme both in Drown and subsequent Díaz fiction. The vehicle of narrative is the only safe space that allows Díaz’s narrators to find the courage to expose their fears, flaws, and foibles. “Drown” details a burgeoning homosexual relationship between two young men, which is exactly the kind of thing that is seemingly anathema within Dominican male discourse. The narrator cannot even bring himself to acknowledge the two sexual encounters he has with his friend, and the discovery of homosexual desire along with its acknowledgment, effectively destroy the friendship.

Not only are male peer relationships explored in Drown, but also the father-son relationship serves as an important pillar of Yunior’s development. “Fiesta, 1980,” “Aguantanto,” and “Negocios” scrutinize Yunior’s relationship with his father, Ramón, at different stages and different places in his life. While “Fiesta, 1980” demonstrates the harshness of the father toward his son, “Aguantanto” highlights the longing a young boy feels for his absent father. In “Negocios,” Yunior, now an adult, takes stock of the flaws and strengths of his father. These stories are heart wrenching in how they reveal the cultural codes that challenge the love of a father for his son and vice versa.

The remaining stories, “Boyfriend,” “Edison, New Jersey,” and “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” expose the problems of being a “man” in Dominican culture. Sexual conquest is tantamount to masculine bona fines, and Yunior struggles to negotiate the terms of masculinity while feeling the pull of love and companionship. Other forms of identity formation and expression feature in these stories, including race, hair, skin tone, food, and economic status.

As Díaz’s first major publication, Drown was met with strong critical acclaim and signaled the author as a potent voice in American literature. The collection of stories allowed for engagement with Dominican American culture at several levels, and as a unit, the book gave notice that Dominican stories were American stories. His exploration of the power of language, the nature of race, the history of two nations, and the confluence of sexuality and gender roles make Drown a powerful and intense reading experience.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao once again introduces Yunior as a narrator, this time with the postmodern tendency to make the reader aware that the book is actually written by Yunior himself. The book is Yunior’s attempt to make sense of the life of Oscar de León, a ghetto nerd who is fond of speculative fiction and little understands the nuances of his culture. As the writer of the life and times of his friend, Yunior is both convincing and, at the same time, unreliable. He claims to have knowledge of historical events that predate his involvement with Oscar’s family, and he also writes of his intimate relationship with Oscar’s sister, Lola. Yet the book is most about Oscar’s life, and Yunior adopts the guise of the Fantastic Four character Uatu, the Watcher—a chronicler of sorts, a person to bear witness to triumphs and travesties. Besides the act of narration, Yunior’s part in the events of the story is relatively minimal.

Oscar is a tragicomic figure: obese, nerdy, and virginal. What distinguishes him from similar nerds in literature is that his Dominican heritage marginalizes him in America. Thus, Oscar is doubly marginalized—both in terms of American society and also within his own Dominican culture, where pursuits of genre literature and Japanese anime are not only unexpected, but frowned upon. The only places he seems to fit in are within the pages of his comics and sci-fi/fantasy novels. In comics such as The New Mutants, the struggles of the characters reflect Oscar’s own angst and inability to find camaraderie, friendship, and romance. In addition, Yunior’s narration underscores the long histories that intertwined to bring Oscar and his life’s journey from beginning to end—histories which include Dominican dictatorships, US political and military intervention in Greater Antilles, the legacy of African slavery and Dominican Diaspora, and the persistence of such curses as fukú.

But the novel is not just about Oscar’s life; it is about the generational drama surrounding his family. The events of his mother’s life, particularly her life in the Dominican Republic, comprise a significant portion of Yunior’s story. Belicia Cabral is blessed with what her son does not have—sexual appeal and the confidence that comes with it. But her beauty is also a kind of curse, as it attracts the unwelcomed attention of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, whom Yunior likens to the most despotic characters in speculative fiction. Díaz examines gender and cultural expectations of sexuality through the characters of Oscar and Belicia, as well as the fraught nature of skin and hair that denotes their Afro-Latino ancestry. As in the US, the Dominican Republic has had a shameful legacy of slavery and race in its history, and Díaz’s novel takes an intense look at how these factors play out not only in the Dominican Republic’s history but also within the lives of Dominican immigrants to the United States.

The idea of writing as an act of defiance and power provides the impetus for the story Yunior wishes to tell in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Conversely, the act of erasure, of obliterating the written record of events, is the ultimate outcome of the fukú curse. It destroys and lives and testimonies with extreme prejudice. Many characters in the novel are made to disappear by powerful forces, but more than that, the historical record is expunged in such a manner that it appears as if they never existed. Records are destroyed and dissertations critical of the Dominican leadership go missing, pages are erased, or are otherwise left blank; Oscar himself claims to have written a book explaining everything that happens to him, but it is never found. Yunior’s act of writing, then, can be seen as an act of defiance against those greater forces that seek to silence critical voices.

Also, the pursuit of love is one of the dominant themes of the novel. Yunior and Oscar, though alike in their gleeful engagement with nerd culture, could not be more different in their expression of masculinity and sexuality. As seen in Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, Yunior has little restraint in his sexual activity, which is the source of much of the drama in his life. Oscar, on the other hand, frets that he may be the only Dominican man to die a virgin, a source of anxiety that drives him to act rashly and, ironically, with courage. Oscar pays dearly for his pursuit of love and sex, and his monogamy and devotion to one woman are, in many ways, admirable even to the likes of the jaded Yunior, whose tragic flaw throughout Díaz’s fiction is his inability to stay faithful to one woman.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has been hailed as one of the top novels of the first ten years of the twenty-first century. If Díaz had written nothing else, his legacy would have been cemented with this novel. It shot Díaz into the literary stratosphere, and it reinvigorated literature by US Latinos within the popular imagination. His skillful mix of humor, history, and culture helped make this novel a key work of the post-9/11 era of US literature because it deals with the idea of America from the perspective of the immigrant who remains tethered to his native land even in the midst of apocalyptic events.

This Is How You Lose Her consists of the following nine stories: “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars”; “Nilda”; “Alma”; “Otravida, Otravez”; “Flaca”; “The Pura Principle”; “Invierno”; “Miss Lora”; and “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” Unlike Drown, in which there are some stories that feature protagonists who may or may not have been Yunior, This Is How You Lose Her is comprised of stories that all highlight some aspect of Yunior’s life. Most of the stories, with the exception of “Invierno” and “Otravida, Otravez,” show Yunior in the flotsam and jetsam of sexual dalliances and romantic heartbreaks. There is a strong note of self-deprecation in the majority of stories, as if Yunior understands and acknowledges his shortcomings with little protest. Thus, while Drown, and even The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao feature a cocky and overconfident Yunior, This Is How You Lose Her reveals the crumbling façade of machismo and the physicality that often comes with it.

Only one story in the collection, “Invierno,” looks at Yunior’s life as a boy. In this respect, “Invierno” and its concentration on childhood bewilderment illuminated by adult realization would fit easily into Drown’s stories of boyhood. The story captures the fear of immigrating to a new place as a child and, as indicated by the title, winter in New Jersey is an experience unimaginable to a boy from the Dominican Republic. The movement from a state of innocence to one of worldly knowledge dominates the story, reminiscent of a story such as James Joyce’s “Araby.” The other story that sets itself apart from the rest is “Otravida, Otravez” because Yunior as a character is only at the story’s periphery, and only a reader who already knows the male character is Yunior’s father, Ramón, would even see the connection. Also notable is the female character who narrates this story of Ramón’s life without Yunior or his family. The story resonates strongly when juxtaposed to “Negocios” in Drown because they each give some insight to Ramón’s life before he brought his wife and children from the Dominican Republic to the United States. Ramón is portrayed as a hardworking but lascivious Dominican man, which serves to contextualize both his sons’ behavior in the remainder of the stories in This Is How You Lose Her.

“Miss Lora” and “The Pura Principle” show Yunior at the threshold of adulthood. “Miss Lora” suggests sexual knowledge and experience as a rite of passage for Yunior, who becomes an object of desire for a much older woman. The story reveals the degree of importance placed on cultural expectations of masculinity, yet it also shows the double standard concerning gender, age, and sexuality. There is no doubt that Miss Lora’s sexual relationship with the underage Yunior is legally rape, but the story makes little acknowledgment of this fact. Yunior’s mother, as might be expected, disapproves of the relationship, as she does of her son Rafa’s in “The Pura Principle.” Yunior narrates this story of his brother’s battle with cancer and his recalcitrant decline. Rafa always proves to be like a Yunior from an alternate universe, what Yunior might have been if he were less introspective and sensitive. In all of Díaz’s stories that feature the two brothers, their sibling rivalry is typically foregrounded. In “The Pura Principle,” Rafa’s battle with cancer makes his behavior more egregious than ever, and the story is characteristically Díaz in its quick wit, its examination of machismo, its frank treatment of sexual relationships, and its devastating treatment of love and loss.

The remaining stories all directly reveal Yunior’s foibles and predilections when it comes to the various girlfriends he has had in his life. More to the point, Yunior invariably destroys the trust he has with his girlfriends by cheating on them. In “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” Yunior travels to the Dominican Republic with his girlfriend, Magda, in the hopes that the trip will rekindle their relationship. It doesn’t. “Nilda,” “Alma,” and “Flaca”—all named after various girlfriends—emphasize the tortured positions in which Yunior often finds himself. At one level, he loves these women; at another level, he cannot stay monogamous. Yunior is a paradox, an embodied contradiction that cannot help himself even when he knows the trouble that he will bring upon himself.

In many ways, all of Díaz’s writing has led him to the final story in the collection, “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” All the bravado of his younger self is laid bare in this hard-hitting story. Yunior, who usually is the one causing the pain of infidelity in his relationships, now has the tables turned on him. In addition, his body has physically broken down, and the pain in his back is no longer bearable. Díaz has hinted at such comeuppance for Yunior in earlier stories, and the character is arguably made a better man, a better human being, by the end of the story. The story covers five years of Yunior’s life, and for a man who has cheated and moved on to the next woman, the breakup with his fiancée marks a turning point in his life. Yunior is truly in love with her, but his own understanding of love was so shallow and limited that he only realized it after she left. It is as if Díaz vivisects Yunior, removing and cutting until he arrives at the essence of who Yunior is—a man with the capacity for love but without the understanding of what it takes to have and keep love.

Díaz’s third book marks the culmination of the story of Yunior de Las Casas that began in the earliest of the author’s writings. This Is How You Lose Her rides on an elegiac tone, even in the midst of tough talk. The book works as a closing chapter to what can be viewed as something like a composite novel. By the end of “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” it is clear that Yunior is invested in the act of writing, and he becomes a writing teacher. Yunior recognizes the power of writing. It is a trait he shares with his creator, Díaz.

Summary

Díaz is a writer who indulges in postmodern narrative techniques in order to expose the fault lines of culture in the United States and the troubled history of the Dominican Republic. Both his long and short fictions brim with a seemingly paradoxical brew of hypermasculinity and emotionality, and he often finds something worthwhile in the blend of the incongruous—the tough-guy narrator who possesses an embarrassingly high geek quotient, the impossibility of a Dominican man who is in danger of never losing his virginity, the cheater who wants to help a young woman rather than conquer her sexually. He challenges his readers to keep up with the highly specialized allusions to popular culture as well as Dominican traditions, and he deploys untranslated Spanish slang so the reader has no choice but to contend with it. Díaz has achieved literary stardom in the popular imagination and in university classrooms as well by demonstrating a willingness to be an outspoken advocate for the marginalized, whether it is on behalf of a student of color interested in attending an MFA program, an undocumented immigrant with the dream of attending a US university, or a distressed but stoic character within the pages of his fiction.

Bibliography

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