One is so tired of the Irish or “Celtic” imagination (or “phantasy” as I think they now call it) flopping about. Surely fiction should be more universal than that, I thought as a young fogey-a difference best captured in Pound’s famous review of Dubliners, where he favorably compares Joyce to the Irish Revivalists:

Which is to say that I thought and even now think I knew something about the immigrant experience, about magical realism, and about nerd culture yet in my middle adolescence I took on a different set of artistic models, I left behind childish things, and in early adulthood I resented writers like Díaz-Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem come under the same heading-for what I judged to be their retailing of a by-then superannuated “ethnic” aesthetic (maybe radical when Malamud or Morrison first essayed it but no longer) tricked-out with “genre” coloration for an audience of credulous tourist-critics who didn’t at that time know DC from Marvel. My people might have come from Europe, a difference I don’t deny makes a difference but I could still tell you about my paternal great-grandfather’s flight after a barroom killing in Lucca to Argentina, where he lived into old age and was trampled to death by a bull on the pampas about my maternal grandparents spending their adolescence hiding out in the hills and eating dogs to survive when the Nazis occupied Pizzoferrato in winter and about the village fortune-teller my mother’s mother consulted before she left for good, who informed her she would die in America at age 92 (she made it to 91 and six months, close enough for me) and about my immigrant mother’s beauty shop and all the old women’s stories I heard there and didn’t I grow up in a pile of comic books and science-fiction novels too, immersed in Superman and Batman, Heinlein and Bradbury, Moore and Gaiman? The emotional impetus behind my response was in part no doubt personal. I took the identity-politics aspect of the novel, the my-grandmother-was-magical multiculturalism, by then a literary cliché, to be a thin veneer over its flattening gentrification of the fringe aspects of popular culture it annexed. The novel immediately went onto every syllabus from Intro to Lit to Seminar in Advanced Semiotics.įor my part, I skimmed it, threw it across the room, and refused to have anything to do with it. Renowned as a short-story master for a decade, Díaz had come through with an ample novel, really three novels in one: an immigrant American bildungsroman, a Caribbean magical realist family saga, and-the newest element-a nerd culture cri de coeur bristling with references to fantasy fiction, anime, role-playing games, and comic books.

This 2007 novel was published during my second year of graduate school, and you’d have thought Christ returned to earth. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Short stories by junot diaz