The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz
Riverhead Books, HK$214
At one point in this book, Junot Diaz's overweight, serially lovestruck supernerd rhapsodises in a letter home: 'So this is what everybody's always talking about! Diablo! If only I'd known. The beauty! The beauty!'
The beauty, the beauty. Ignoring for the moment the context of Oscar's exclamation, the same cry can summarise the public response thus far to Brief Wondrous Life, Diaz's first novel and first published major work since his short-story collection Drown.
Brief Wondrous Life tells the story of a Dominican-American young man with two great loves: women and science fiction. After a short-lived reign as neighbourhood stud at the age of seven, 'when he had two little girlfriends at the same time', Oscar grew wide as he grew older - 'sophomore year [of high school] Oscar found himself weighing in at a whopping 245 (260 when he was depressed, which was often)' - and found himself mooning over, but never quite capturing, sister Lola's hot friends or the girls in his classes. The fact that the 'dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light sabre' didn't help matters.
'Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers' cars,' college roommate Yunior reveals, 'he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova and Heinlein ... moving hungrily from book to book, author to author, age to age.'