The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar WaoA Novel

Wao, Indeed.
Even if it hadn’t won the Pulitzer Prize, Junot Diaz’s first novel, the follow-up to his acclaimed short story collection Drown, would still read like the most entertaining form of Great Literature. Its transcendent prose illuminates the big issues — love, death, the immigrant experience — with the brisk, unfaltering pace of a comic book.

Ostensibly, Diaz tells the coming-of-age story of the titular Oscar de Leon, a geek extraordinaire growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar is fat and unhappy, master of the role-playing game but loser in all things love-related. But the novel is alternately narrated by his sister Lola and family friend/Lola’s sometime boyfriend Yunior, and as it traces the de Leon family’s catastrophically bad luck (attributed to the Dominican evil spirit fuku) back through the decades, weaving in the real history of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, it becomes a wider and more fragmented mosaic, its own sci-fi/magical realist/postmodern genre.

The audio version is helmed by the smooth-voiced Jonathan Davis, who relates the story as told through Yunior, along with the convincingly earnest Staci Snell, who takes on the role of rebel teen Lola. Studded with Spanish and hip-hop colloquialisms, pop culture shout-outs and enough literary references to please an English major, The Brief Wondrous Life is as joyful a listen as a tragedy can be.