Drown, by Junot Diaz, is a collection of short stories - not actually my favorite type of reading. If you haven't caught on yet, I'm a giant, dense novel type of gal and I like me some complicated plot lines and intense character development. Even though I loved Diaz' novel (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), I was nervous about trying out the short stories. He's a great writer but everything that I truly love about writing and reading has to do with the longer form a novel - don't even get me started on novellas.
In the end, Drown did not feel to me like a collection of short stories. Instead it felt very much like a novel - with a slightly disjointed version of time. The stories were clearly of a theme and were tied together by commonalities rather than driven apart by their differences. I've since read that the narrator stays true through the stories of Drown but honestly, I didn't feel that. The narrators could have changed but the ideas were the same, the experiences and the feelings. It was easy to feel like Diaz was speaking about a type of person rather than a specific person. My gut tells me that Diaz knows this, that based on his own experiences he's know countless people that could fill the role of this narrator. He colors it with his own obvious intellect and "nerdiness" (as he does in Oscar Wao) but the voice of his stories always seems to come out as both accessible and just beyond your grasp.
Drown, again like Oscar Wao, dabbles in the disgusting with a little too much information regarding bodily functions, etc. but it feels perfectly at home in the writing. You're not startled as much as your as embarrassed, which I again feel is part of the point. I can't speak from experience but I feel like if I met Junot Diaz at a party he would make me squirm and make me want to be his lifelong friend. His writing feels that way at least, though I worry that it will reach an end. I am intrigued to see what he does next - how he is able to evolve his writing style and story line without losing that connection I feel.
The NYTimes, it turns out, offers a wealth of links for those searching for more information on Diaz:
- Junot Diaz NYTimes Topic Page
- An abstract from Diaz' story "How to Date a Brown Girl..." from Drown (which was also contributed to This American Life - one of my favorites!)
- And an interview from This Week in Fiction
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