The BR Pile: Diaz and Robison
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Sure, there’s not a lot I can say about this book that hasn’t already been said. It’s been reviewed by folks I’d kill to have read my stuff, and it’s won the Pulitzer, for Pete’s sake, among other prestigious prizes, as well as being on a bazillion “best of” lists. So this is just my take.
You should read it immediately, if not sooner.
This is an immensely hard book to read. Diaz tells you up front, he’s going to describe terrible things in the course of the story, and then take you a little farther. He makes good on this promise—the descriptions of conditions in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo regime are horrific—and then he goes several steps past that. You can’t help but follow, even when you know what is coming. And yet…
This is an immensely easy book to read. The prose rampages, the dialogue flows, the characters are painfully, wonderfully recognizable (and for the SF/F geeks and nerds out there, the pop references are legitimate). It would have been easy to make Oscar a caricature, or to render his story as a structural imitation of the SF stories he’s immersed in. It is a quest story, filled with family curses, the search for love, and mind-bending violence, but so well-grounded in Oscar’s attempts to negotiate his Dominican upbringing with life in New Jersey, that you’re not paying attention to structure until after, when you’re marveling at the whole thing. Even the footnotes work.
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison
Okay, so apparently I’m going through a “guys who don’t easily fit into the world, in fact and fiction” phase. This one is the memoir of John Elder Robison (brother of Augusten Burroughs), who lived most of his life with undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. In addition to a disastrous family life, John discovered he didn’t relate to the world the way that everyone else seemed to. He missed facial cues, didn’t get sarcasm, and found names and small talk confusing and lacking in logic. He more than understood machines and electronics, and because of his finesse with sound systems, found work as an engineer with rock bands. Although he applied the logic with which he was gifted to social life, he didn’t understand how he was different from most of the world until a therapist friend suggested that he might have Asperger’s.
The profoundly honest way in which Robison describes and analyzes his life is what makes this book remarkable. It is not a tear-jerker, though it could easily be; it is neither trite nor pious. It is thoughtful and…just a little odd. It is dark and very funny and the author understands this. It is an anthropology of the “neurotypical” world by a brilliant outsider trying to piece together its cultural mechanisms.
The book is magic, if only for the section on how John names people and things:
My names for nonhumans are clear and descriptive. They are never tricky. For example, consider Dog and Poodle. There is no mistaking what they are. These are good, true, functional names.
My brother, who does not have Asperger’s, got a dog and named it Kitty Kitty. I would never do that. One day, my brother came to visit and we took Kitty Kitty for a walk in the Berkshires. He fell into a pool of road-repair tar. I would never name a dog Kitty Kitty or Cat, and my dogs would never fall into road tar.
Sure, there’s not a lot I can say about this book that hasn’t already been said. It’s been reviewed by folks I’d kill to have read my stuff, and it’s won the Pulitzer, for Pete’s sake, among other prestigious prizes, as well as being on a bazillion “best of” lists. So this is just my take.
You should read it immediately, if not sooner.
This is an immensely hard book to read. Diaz tells you up front, he’s going to describe terrible things in the course of the story, and then take you a little farther. He makes good on this promise—the descriptions of conditions in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo regime are horrific—and then he goes several steps past that. You can’t help but follow, even when you know what is coming. And yet…
This is an immensely easy book to read. The prose rampages, the dialogue flows, the characters are painfully, wonderfully recognizable (and for the SF/F geeks and nerds out there, the pop references are legitimate). It would have been easy to make Oscar a caricature, or to render his story as a structural imitation of the SF stories he’s immersed in. It is a quest story, filled with family curses, the search for love, and mind-bending violence, but so well-grounded in Oscar’s attempts to negotiate his Dominican upbringing with life in New Jersey, that you’re not paying attention to structure until after, when you’re marveling at the whole thing. Even the footnotes work.
Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s by John Elder Robison
Okay, so apparently I’m going through a “guys who don’t easily fit into the world, in fact and fiction” phase. This one is the memoir of John Elder Robison (brother of Augusten Burroughs), who lived most of his life with undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. In addition to a disastrous family life, John discovered he didn’t relate to the world the way that everyone else seemed to. He missed facial cues, didn’t get sarcasm, and found names and small talk confusing and lacking in logic. He more than understood machines and electronics, and because of his finesse with sound systems, found work as an engineer with rock bands. Although he applied the logic with which he was gifted to social life, he didn’t understand how he was different from most of the world until a therapist friend suggested that he might have Asperger’s.
The profoundly honest way in which Robison describes and analyzes his life is what makes this book remarkable. It is not a tear-jerker, though it could easily be; it is neither trite nor pious. It is thoughtful and…just a little odd. It is dark and very funny and the author understands this. It is an anthropology of the “neurotypical” world by a brilliant outsider trying to piece together its cultural mechanisms.
The book is magic, if only for the section on how John names people and things:
My names for nonhumans are clear and descriptive. They are never tricky. For example, consider Dog and Poodle. There is no mistaking what they are. These are good, true, functional names.
My brother, who does not have Asperger’s, got a dog and named it Kitty Kitty. I would never do that. One day, my brother came to visit and we took Kitty Kitty for a walk in the Berkshires. He fell into a pool of road-repair tar. I would never name a dog Kitty Kitty or Cat, and my dogs would never fall into road tar.
posted by Dana | 2:53 PM
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