Generous Exclusion: Register and Readership in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Abstract

As Lev Grossman’s review of Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) informs us, Diaz’s novel is “an immigrant-family saga for people who don’t read immigrant-family sagas.” However, Grossman also remarks, it “wouldn’t really be fair” to term the novel a family saga in that it is so much more than this, “a mixture of straight-up English, Dominican Spanish and hieratic nerdspeak crowded with references to Tolkien, DC Comics, role-playing games and classic science fiction.” To fix it in one particular category or genre, Grossman seems to suggest, is to miss a central point of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Now the central point of Diaz’s novel is in fact rather difficult to locate. It tells the tale of the members of a Dominican family who are trying to make their way in the United States. In doing so, the text shifts its narrative focus back and forth between New York and Santo Domingo, New Jersey and the Dominican countryside. Consequently, it appears obvious that Diaz is keen to voice the concerns of the migrant, preferably in a register that rings true to the cultural and linguistic background of a given migrant’s specific situation. I will be arguing, however, that this most obvious theme of all, the migrant experience, is articulated much more effectively by means of the novel’s multiple registers. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao works not just as a tale of immigration, not only as an account of American imperialism, and not merely as a condemnation of the brutal history of the Dominican regime. The novel effectively addresses these concerns, but it achieves much more. Paradoxically, it is in this very more—in the continued transcendence of the apparently central theme of migrancy—that Diaz’s novel presents its most successful approach to the migrant experience through linguistic and thematic digressions that seem to have nothing at all to do with