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The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao tells of the trials and tribulations of Oscar, a black Dominican nerd from New Jersey, and of his mother and her family, whose lives were brutally affected by the political atrocities in her native country. What makes Diaz's novel such a pleasure to read is the way he captures the feel of the English-Spanish bilingual and bicultural world of a segment of urban population in the United States. He accomplishes this by liberal use of both Spanish and English in his book: reading it seems like peeking into an East Los Angeles or Echo Park neighborhood near where I live in Los Angeles. There the people speak the same way Diaz writes in his novel - moving between English and Spanish seamlessly and having so much fun doing it.
That's not all. By peppering his text with numerous references to sci-fi, comic books and fantasy novels and with crude references to women and black men, Diaz makes the young descendants of Dominican immigrants in the contemporary North American ghetto come vividly alive. He showcases their edgy, angry hip-hop machismo (in the person of Yunior); socially maladjusted, sexually awkward, male geekdom (Oscar); and the punk feminism born of humiliation (Lola).
From a psychological standpoint, the book is about political trauma, its impact on a nation of people and on individual lives across generations. For Oscar and his sister, Lola, it all begins with Trujillo, the ‘dictatingest dictator’ the world has ever seen. Diaz's Dominican Republic under Trujillo is a hell on earth: Trujillo is the ultimate lethal narcissist - prone to deadly rages if faced with real or imagined slights (if you speak even slightly ill of him or his relations, you're dead) and who shows no mercy, and certainly no empathy, for his victims. The horror of his regime has an unhinging effect on its citizens, who function in a collective traumatized state - men are only too happy to do his dirty work; ordinary people routinely spy on each other; a