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Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage. Junot Díaz’s “Miss Lora” was originally published in the April 23, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.
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It’s been just over two years since Junot Díaz’s ”The Pura Principle” was published in The New Yorker (click here for my thoughts). In that story we spent time with Yunior and his brother Rafa, who was dying of cancer. When “Miss Lora” begins, it is 1986. Rafa has died, and Yunior, still suffering a “fulgurating” sadness, is about to realize he has more of his brother in him than he thought.
Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her — how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care.
Rafa, like his father, was content to sleep with any woman. The skinny woman above was a middle-aged school teacher whose toned muscles eliminated any fat from her body. Yunior doesn’t particularly find her attractive; he would rather sleep with his Puerto Rican girlfriend, Paloma, but she doesn’t want to make any mistakes (and realizes that sleeping with him would certainly be one).
Suffering from grief, hormones, and a daily dread of a nuclear holocaust . . . well, we know where this is going, in part because of the first lines of the story: one day Miss Lora touches him, and he can tell it’s different:
Miss Lora touched you, and you suddenly looked up and noticed how large her eyes were in her thin face, how long her lashes were, how one iris had more bronze in it than the other.
They sleep together, this school teacher and this sixteen-year-old boy. He’s insatiable for some time, and it’s only later, when he’s in college, that he feel comfortable enough to tell someone and that someone realizes the criminal nature of the events.
One thing I like about Díaz (and I admit I’m not a fan) is how even using ugly language — both in content and grammar — he’s able to have characters earn the reader’s sympathy, even if the character himself doesn’t realize anything is out of hand. Here’s a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey in the shadow of Manhattan, part of a culture where such things are relatively common, even looked on with pride. And Díaz can present this without making judgments, leaving it for his readers to determine how they feel.
That said, I’m still not much of a Díaz fan, as much as I admire what he’s capable of doing. I can’t quite get into the language which can, in a couple of lines, use a phrase like “hating on her” with a word like “fulgurating.” I just haven’t wrapped my mind around that, and I had a similar hangup with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (my review here), and I realize that it is my hangup. I liked this story quite a bit more than “The Pura Principle” (which I thought meandering), and I sense that in time it will grow in my estimation, but I’m still hoping for something a bit different in the weeks to come.
I failed at my first try to read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007; NBCC Award; Pulitzer), not because the book wasn’t compelling but because I was trying to read it on a trial Sony Reader. Booooo! I had to quit after the first footnote. I finally got a copy of the physical book, and the result was much better: I finished the book. It was also better because I enjoyed the process. Just not as much as I hoped, so I need your help to sift through my feelings to see if I’m missing something or if it’s just an issue of taste.
I think with this book it’s good to start with some of the things that didn’t work for me. I like a unique voice. I like colloquialism when used well. I enjoy quirky narrators. All of this is present here. You get a lot of “Dude didn’t . . .” or “Homeboy didn’t . . .” On the one hand, this effectively sets up the incongruity of style (informal) and subject (serious). But I wasn’t sure if this had any effect on me other than being interesting at best (now, in wondering how it should be written, I realize that no voice can appropriately convey the horror that was Trujillo’s regime and the experience of diaspora, so why not set up a stark contrast?). At worst, the writing, in an attempt to provide me with original perspectives, served only to be strange, distracting me from what it should be emphasizing or clarifying. Here are two examples:
. . . but a Puerto Rican goth, that was as strange to us as a black Nazi.
I understand what is being said in this first one, and can even appreciate the effect of the analogy, but it just felt too loose for me. In other words, what is effective in this analogy (how almost impossible it is for a Puerto Rican to appear gothic) is greatly overshadowed by what is not (as far as I know, goths don’t harbor any feelings of goth supremacy targeting Puerto Ricans). And here was a very strange metaphor used to describe a beating:
It was like one of those nightmare eight-a.m. MLA panels: endless.
One can appreciate the use of this metaphor in its reverse—an eight-a.m. MLA panel when compared to a beating is exaggerated and cliché, but it keeps your focus on the MLA panel’s torture. But to compare a beating, especially one as severe as the one in the book, to an MLA meeting is exaggerated in the other direction, and I didn’t find that effective. This type of metaphor stands out to me and diminishes what I’m actually reading. This took the “incongruous subject and style” tool too far for me.
Overall, however, I enjoyed the voice in the book. I found the informal mix of Spanish and English to be compelling, usually drawing me into the story rather than pushing me out. (As for the Spanish: I imagine it could be very frustrating to read this book if you cannot read Spanish, but if you do look up the words, you’ll learn plenty of Spanish slang—and vulgarity. The book is very rich for having both.)
Now for the things I enjoyed (can’t go so far as to say “loved,” I’m afraid).
Well, that’s not entirely true, I can say I loved the book’s premise. The book begins by explaining a curse that has been affecting the fortunes of a Dominican family for the past couple of generations. We come to the nearly present day to meet the family’s latest member, Oscar, a second generation American living in Patterson, New Jersey, who can still feel the effects of the curse dropped on his family when Trujillo (“the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated”; see what I mean about the tone sometimes pushing one away from the brutality of the situation rather than bringing one closer to it? Then again, it’s an interesting (is that all?) rhetorical play) was ruling the Dominican Republic. The superb link of this curse to the experience of rule by an empire, by a dictator, followed by diaspora and disorientation, is brilliant. In one of the footnotes (a touch I thoroughly enjoyed), the narrator alludes to his own idea that the curse landed on this family long before Trujillo:
There are other beginnings certainly, better ones, to be sure—if you ask me I would have started when the Spaniards “discovered” the New World—or when the U.S. invaded Santo Domingo in 1916—but if this was the opening that the de Léons chose for themselves, then who am I to question their historiography?
For this exploration of the immigration experience alone, the book is worth the read.
I also enjoyed the book because Díaz (like I just said about Roth) has an ability to use a wide lens (three generations, New Jersey and Dominican Republic, America and Trujillo) while still focusing on little intimacies of the characters. I would say that often he succeeds in making us feel for the characters because of the voice, and not despite it. For example, Oscar is a nerd of the worst ilk. No one likes him. He has all of the nerd paraphernalia, and he speaks to people as if they were from another planet. Díaz does a good job showing this in the informal, loose tone:
You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.
and the more formal tone:
His affection—that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire, and lust that he directed at any and every girl in the vicinity without regard to looks, age, or availability—broke his heart each and every day.
and together these two tones create an effect where I deeply feel for Oscar. He is a study in personal humiliation, and the nerdy analogies, which help us get a taste of Oscar’s worldview, emphasize the quiet desperation.
Díaz also does this when he explores the origination of the curse and pushes the narrative back to, first, Oscar’s mother when she is arriving in New York City for the first time:
Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorías, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart.
then, second, to Oscar’s grandfather after his false calumny charges:
The guards then proceeded to inform the other prisoners that Abelard was a homosexual and a Communist—That is untrue! Abelard protested—but who is going to listen to a gay communista?
I enjoyed the book throughout, but the profundity didn’t hit me until the last one hundred pages when the stories began to fall together and I knew enough about the past generation to understand its effects on the present one. This suggests a rereading is in store and that I’d find the rereading more enjoyable than I found this first reading. After all, going back and writing about what the book says makes me realize how powerful a gem it is.
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