The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar is an overweight Dominican nerd in New Jersey who wants to be the next Tolkien. Diaz's 2007 novel uses Oscar's obsession with genre fiction as the lens for a multigenerational family history under the Trujillo dictatorship. The Spanglish prose, the footnotes on Dominican history, and the sci-fi/fantasy references create a voice that did not exist in American literature before this book. Won the Pulitzer.
The footnotes run half a page in small type and break the story every time they appear: “I HATE THEM anywhere outside of a research paper.” There are no quotation marks, so following a conversation takes work, and the Spanish goes untranslated, leaving readers whose “ears didn’t catch all of it” guessing at tone. Oscar barely acts, defined by wanting and by other people telling him to change. Yunior catalogues women’s bodies and treats his own infidelity as weather, so “his mind is only on fucking every girl he knows.” A few readers find the prose “something akin to a high school fanfiction.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
