Author of 1996 short story collection Drown and 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz has garnered considerable critical fame for his work, including a Pulitzer Prize for Oscar Wao. He currently teaches creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. On Wednesday, Aug. 26, he will address the 2009 Helen and Philip Brecher New Student Forum, a Brandeis orientation tradition. Oscar Wao was chosen as summer reading for incoming first-years. JustArts: Your first book, Drown, was a collection of short stories published to wide acclaim. Was there a sense of expectation afterwards as to what your next work would be? Did that contribute to the subsequent writer's block?
Junot Diaz: I wanted to write a novel. What it was about wasn't clear, but I wanted to write a novel for sure. It just happened to take 11 years. I'm sure the expectations didn't help but that wasn't the real problem. The problem was that I was too hard on myself and on my book.
JA: In the 11-year span between the publication of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, you've mentioned that you wrote a lot of unsuccessful material. Is all of that related to what would become Oscar Wao or your upcoming novel? What other kinds of ideas did you pursue?
JD: All of it was for versions of Oscar. All of it terrible.
JA: Were the stories about Oscar and Trujillo always intertwined in your mind from the very beginning? Did Yunior always narrate the tale?
JD: Yes, Oscar in some ways was the anti-Trujillo. And Yunior was always the narrator for reasons that are in my opinion essential to the book.
JA: Part of Oscar's loneliness stems from his total isolation as this Dominican ghetto-nerd. If he had grown up with the Internet, do you think meeting and interacting with other fanboys would have made him less lonely? Could he have found some of the intimacy or connection he so craved?
JD: Oscar's loneliness runs deeper than the non-networked '80s. Oscar is a victim of a society, a culture that has losers and winners and his love for a "useless" art form and his atypical masculinity all helped to marginalize him as well.
JA: I was delighted when you referred to A Wrinkle in Time during your talk for Google. What other children's books have influenced or stayed with you? What is it about reading books or comics or imbibing other kinds of culture as a child or adolescent that causes them to leave such lasting impressions?
JD: Well, I don't consider all comics to be children- or adolescent-specific, though some are. As a kid I adored Watership Down and a lot of John Christopher's adventure books. At that age I suspect we're simply more open to fall in love with a narrative. As adults our sense of wonder is dulled, our willingness "to go along" is sometimes reduced. In the end books that touch us in childhood touch us forever and the why of it is still a mystery.
JA: Which other artists have influenced you as a writer? What are you currently reading or watching?
JD: So many artists made me. From Stephen King to Maxine Hong Kingston. Right now I'm reading novels for the National Book Awards. I'm a judge. I can't wait to get back to my own reading, though!
JA: The book is filled with allusions and footnotes, particularly in the beginning. What's your advice for people who might not know as much about comic books, science fiction and fantasy as Oscar does? Does not understanding all his references dilute the experience or somehow improve it?
JD: My advice is that you should seek someone out who can help you understand the terms! It's a nice way to build community, to meet new people. And this book can be [understood on] so many different levels. It's ok not to understand whole chunks of it; the book still functions, as strange as that might sound.
JA: You've lamented the unidirectionality of genre writers before-how they'll never become legitimate literary presences the way, for instance, Michael Chabon can when borrowing from a specific genre. Do you think this will ever change? And, if so, how? Does the success of your own novel-by no means a typical, high-handed, ponderous affair-improve these chances?
JD: Hard to predict. I want it to change but I doubt it will any time soon. One book can't change a culture. But these conversations, if they happen enough, might.
JA: Ethnic writers, as you've mentioned before, are sometimes forced into the role of an ambassador for their culture. For some people, myself included, Oscar Wao was indeed an introduction to a previously unfamiliar aspect of Dominican culture and history. Do you consider that a kind of success? Or do you feel limited by the title of being a "Latino author"?
JD: I'm not an ambassador of any kind. I'm an artist. But a book has a mind of its own and if you learned a lot about Dominican culture and history that's cool, but it's not anything that I'm aiming for in my process. I'm trying to address in largest terms the human condition through a Dominican lens, but native informant I am not. As for being a Dominican writer-it doesn't limit me at all, because people are not one thing and I am not one thing. I'm a Dominican writer but I'm also a writer from New Jersey, an immigrant writer, a writer of African descent. I'm many things and I embrace each of them as long as I'm not limited to any of them.
JA: For you, what is the American Dream? How do some of your favorite characters define it?
JD: The American Dream is the dream of civil rights, of a more just, more equitable society. It is the dream of all the Latin American young people who got disappeared and tortured in the '70s and '80s for desiring a more just society.
JA: When you include the offspring of immigrants like Oscar and Lola, who simultaneously understand so little about their parents' lives and are yet doomed to relive parts of it, are you trying to indicate something representative of the immigrant experience? How much can the second generation manage to straddle two cultures successfully?
JD: Oscar and Lola are not doomed to repeat anything specifically because they are immigrants. It's the silence in their family that invites the repetition; it just happens that some immigrant families have become geniuses at silences.
JA: I noticed you were scheduled for a lot of college visits in 2009. Have you enjoyed the experience? How have the student audiences compared to your usual students at MIT?
JD: I love meeting readers from all over the country, from all over the world. Something I could only dream about when I was a young boy stuck in a nowhere town in Central New Jersey. MIT students are one of a kind. They are intense in ways that few students are, and they have to work in ways that few students have to work. Such a different culture. But young people share so much in this culture that the institutional differences don't really loom as large as one would think.
JA: Any more hints about your upcoming novel, Dark America?
JD: It's just coming slow. I'm trying to blow up the planet. So it's taking a while to get going.
-Joyce Wang