While the publishing industry in Britain manages to conjure a bestselling literary sensation every few years or so, in America it is naturally an annual event, and this year undoubtedly belongs to Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Aloft on the wings of unanimous critical acclaim, Díaz recently became the first Dominican–and only the second Latino-American–to scoop the Pulitzer, a species of literary prize quite unknown on these shores, in that it has a reliable history of recognising enduring fiction. It would be quite unfair, of course, to review the hype rather than the book, but it is instructive to note the way in which so much of the praise heaped on Díaz has sounded the same note: he is ‘a powerful new voice’ (Powell’s Books); ‘an ironic, confiding, exuberant voice’ (Kirkus Reviews); ‘one of contemporary fiction’s most distinctive and irresistible new voices’ (New York Times). There has been a great deal of harping on ‘voice’ amongst reviewers, and in order to explain Oscar Wao’s significance—because it is, I believe, a significant novel—I would like to consider a few senses of the word in relation to contemporary American fiction.

One sense of ‘voice’ that we should forbear to inflict on Díaz, and which I suspect some of his reviewers had in mind, is that of a representative of his particular sociopolitical subculture. He is not quite the first Dominican author to gain an American readership–Julia Alvarez went before him–but his Pulitzer award signals his entry to the mainstream proper, with all attendant privileges like huge sales and having to answer inane questions on The Charlie Rose Show. Allowing that one happy incidental effect of Díaz’s success may be increased exposure for a vastly underrepresented immigrant group, to honour him as a ‘voice’ in this sense is to imply a view of American literature as a great pluralistic confab, a house of representatives where each community’s experience is articulated by its own anointed delegate. Whatever the imperfections of American democracy, it is a category error to expect American literature to redress them. And quite apart from the a priori objection that good fiction first of all searches out the specific as against the general example, the starting point for Oscar Wao’s drama is its eponymous hero’s crippling, mortifying atypicality.

Oscar isn’t ‘one of those Domincan cats everybody’s always going on about–he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock’. In fact, he’s a fat, sci-fi-loving nerd who seems destined to disprove the seeming law of nature that no Dominican male can die a virgin. Increasingly alienated from his contemporaries at Rutgers University, Oscar develops an obsession with the ancient Dominican legend of fukú, a curse which is said to wreak havoc on all who fall under its influence. Meanwhile, the narrative arcs backwards, tracing the upheavals faced by his mother, Beli, and his grandfather, Abelard, whose encounters with a murderous Dominican dictatorship are chilling enough to support Oscar’s suspicions of a family curse.

Given all this, it would be understandable had Díaz written a long howl of intergenerational anguish, but the impression that arises on putting down Oscar Wao is of a warmth and humour which belie its dark materials. The reason for this is found in another, more literary sense of ‘voice’: the prose in Oscar Wao is a marvellous olio of Spanglish that ranks alongside any of the recent experiments in American prose. Listen:

There are those alive who claim that La Fea had actually been a pro herself in the time before the rise of her brother [Joaquín Balaguer, President of the Dominican Republic], but that seems to be more calumny than anything, like saying that Balaguer fathered a dozen illegtimiate children and then used the pueblo’s money to hush it up—wait, that’s true, but probably not the other—shit, who can keep track of what’s true and what’s false in a country as baká as ours—what is known is that the time before her brother’s rise had made her una mujer bien fuerte y bien cruel; she was no pendeja and ate girls like Beli like they were pan de agua—if this was Dickens she’d have to run a brothel—but wait, she did run brothels!

For all its colloquial swagger, this is a highly stylised piece of writing, with its comic missteps and reversals, sprinklings of Spanish jostling smartass canonical quips and shrugging expletives, all in a sentence the momentum of which is carried by a slipstream of hyphens. It is the voice of Yunior, a homeboy machista and Oscar’s sometime college roommate, whom Díaz reprises from his 1996 short-story collection Drown, and who often addresses the reader as though he were shooting the breeze on a street corner in New Jersey. But, by an act of narrative sleight-of-hand, we do not realise there’s a first-person behind this voice until some way into the novel. The surprise is calculated and central to Díaz’s purpose, because by revealing the presence of another personality written into the margins of the text, he radically undermines the authority of the narrative—a move with obvious significance in a book partly about a dictatorship, but which has implications for its American context too.

Like many of his contemporaries, Díaz is suspicious of the near-hegemony of the monoglot voice that, with the admitted exceptions of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, used to form the bedrock of English-language prose. His solution is to unveil a narrator who is not merely unreliable but who, for many readers, will be occasionally incomprehensible. Yunior is apt to address his readers as ‘nigger’, to season the prose with sci-fi arcana and untranslated Spanish (sometimes extending to full sentences) — to make, in other words, few concessions to the kind of artificial, standardised rhetoric that we normally think of as ‘literary’. It thus marks the distance travelled in the politics of American narrative voice since, say, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), which signalled the throat clearing of a different, newly confident subculture. When Bellow’s protagonist opened his account by announcing, ‘I am an American, Chicago born’, he was brassily declaring his right of access to the cultural centre ground, his right to interpret America to itself. Oscar Wao, meanwhile, bespeaks a society fragmented into a thousand overlapping cultures, comfortable with difference and distrustful of centricity. Its linguistic world is one in which we are all migrants, with all the excitement and occasional confusion that condition entails.

This distance can be measured in the way Díaz handles cultural references. While Augie March displays an almost maniacal desire to prove a mastery of cultural authorities on the part of both author and protagonist, Oscar Wao’s allusions are scattershot and irreverent: ‘The sexy isthmus of her waist alone could have launched a thousand yolas,’ says Yunior of one character, and there are some jocose nods to Flaubert, Conrad, Proust and, yes, Bellow. The book’s title refers to the Hemingway story ‘The Short Happy Life of Franic Macomber’, and contains a joke about miscommunication: ‘Oscar Wao’, the protagonist’s nickname, is ‘Oscar Wilde’ rendered in a Domincan accent. None of these references suggests a thorough engagement with the traditions they invoke—nor are they bothered to. Díaz’s deepest mines of cultural reference, in fact, are those of sci-fi and fantasy. Where Augie March would reach for Herodotus or Hegel to illuminate character, Yunior heads for the world of comic books: ‘Like Superman in Dark Knight Returns, who drained from an entire jungle the photonic energy he needed to survive Coldbringer, so did our Beli resolve out of her anger her own survival.’ These are more than just knowing lowbrow hijinx: Oscar Wao eloquently suggests that the immigrant experience is often so vertiginously strange that it can only be understood in terms of eccentric genre forms.

At the outset of the book, Yunior notes that if the influence of fukú can be discerned throughout Oscar’s family history, then perhaps his narrative can be seen as a zafa, that is, a counterspell with power to unloose fukú’s hold. Yunior seems to have in mind something akin to a ‘talking cure’, the idea in psychoanalysis that catharsis can be induced in the trauma victim by enabling the victim to express his or her experience vocally. Yunior turns out to be a historian of Oscar’s family, his self-appointed task to redeem its generational trauma by giving it a voice, and, in doing so, to deal with a related trauma of his own.

Place Oscar Wao beside a couple of other American literary bestsellers of recent years—Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated (2002), and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)—and something of a mini-genre begins to emerge. In all three, an intimate, confiding first-person voice makes significant claims for the power of storytelling to redeem an originating trauma (whether bereavement, genocide, or tyranny). There is an affinity here with the culture of the talk show–which is, of course, another form of the talking cure where a few million viewers, channelled by the host, fulfil the role of the analyst (except, with characteristic American inclusiveness, in this version the catharsis is not restricted to the analysand but is intended for everyone). Oscar Wao shares with Oprah an expressivist faith in sounding out pain, where the final release is affecting in proportion to its dreadfulness. ‘Negro, please’, says Yunior at one point, ‘this ain’t a fucking comic book’. But when the rhetoric of self-expression lapses into pure hyperbole, Oscar Wao is just that: wonderfully, hilariously, but unremittingly overstated. Its voice is so compelling that when, teen-flick-style, the loser implausibly gets the girl in the end, you can barely bring yourself to demur. And yet, for my part, I hope we’re not in danger of forgetting that literature can be more than just a talking cure.

Matt Hill recently completed a BA in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and is now a night porter at a hotel in Bristol.

Matt Hill

Howard Jacobson
Kalooki Nights
Vintage, 2007
512 pages
£7.99
ISBN 978-0099501367

When John Updike created Henry Bech, his alter-ego and protagonist of a series of books satirising the minor celebrity of the modern American author, it was natural enough to make Bech Jewish.  Updike, not being Jewish, is recently something of an anomaly in the ranks of major American writers of fiction.  Take your Bellows and Hellers and Mailers, your Malamuds, Salingers and Roths, and the postwar-American canon has something of the appearance of a Jewish racket.  Add our own Howard Jacobson to that august company—here is, to my mind, no doubt that he belongs there—and the mainstream of English-language fiction begins to look a little like an international Jewish conspiracy.

Tasteless? But the reader will forgive me, I hope, when she considers I’ve been reading Kalooki Nights, a book of such glorious and exuberant tastelessness it’s difficult to imagine any reader—Jew or Gentile—putting it down without finding something to be offended by.  Don’t believe me?  How about the description of the narrator Maxie Glickman’s wife’s hand as ‘a vexed crisscross of Judaeophobia like the railway lines running in and out of Auschwitz’?  Or Maxie’s erotic fantasies of masochistic submission to Ilse Koch, wife of the Camp Commander at Buchenwald, who among other cruelties would make lampshades out of the skin of Jewish dead?  Or Maxie finding himself aroused on viewing, in an illustrated history of the Holocaust, a photo of naked Jewish women being paraded for medical inspection?

If all this eroto-literary brinkmanship sounds a lot like another great Jewish writer—I mean, of course, Philip Roth—that’s because it is.  As a boy Maxie Glickman’s best friends are the gauche, ultra-Orthodox Manny Washinsky and the violent, decidedly unkosher Errol Tobias;  all three are connected by an unhealthy interest in the Holocaust (is there such a thing as an entirely healthy interest in the Holocaust?).  Like Roth, Jacobson likes to structure his novels by pairing characters who represent conceptual opposites—a trait half Talmudic paradox and half continental dialectics—and then confounding them.  For it is not Errol but Manny who inexplicably grows up to murder his once-beloved parents by gassing their bedroom.  So when, as an unsuccessful cartoonist in late middle age, Maxie receives a call from a TV production company seeking to investigate this most emphatic contravention of Commandments Five and Six, he sets out to try and understand, in retrospect, the nature of Manny’s offence.  (One of the many joys of this book is structural: the way Maxie not so much circles his subject as orbits it elliptically, with a thousand wonderfully garrulous digressions.)  Holocaust pathology and matri-patricide: not the stuff of uproarious comedy, you might think, but Kalooki Nights is a darkly hilarious tale about the legacy of what Maxie calls ‘Five Thousand Years of Bitterness’—that is, the sum total of all the indignities visited on the Jews throughout history.  ‘I was the fruit of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness,’ says Maxie;  ‘which meant I was heir to Five Thousand Years of Jokes.’

Jacobson’s pugnaciousness, his relish for the socially and sexually inadmissible, his eye for the paradoxes of Jewish identity, and most of all his wit—all these are reminiscent of Roth in the great comic mode he rarely now uses. Even Jacobson’s prose style—rangy, limber, at once unabashedly intellectual and bitingly colloquial—has more than a whiff of Roth about it.  (Also of Kingsley Amis: figure that one for a Jewish paradox.)  Roth once wrote a novel—Operation Shylock—that included two characters called Philip Roth.  Do we really need another one?

Would that we had more Howard Jacobsons.  The author of eight previous novels and four works of non-fiction, Jacobson is British fiction’s great ungarlanded comic genius.  Most of his books remain in print —just—but over the course of a writing career that began in 1983 with Coming From Behind, he has somehow failed to command the reputation—a value calculated by some equation of sales, column-inches and prizes, on a calculus known only to broadsheet journalists—accorded to the literary Premier League.  This is, I think, partly a consequence of Jacobson’s humour:  if you’re too funny you risk being labelled that literary pygmy, a ‘humourist’.  Do we inevitably suspect the comic of a certain servility in his desire to make us laugh?  Never mind that comedy is much harder to pull off than solemnity, the comic always appears before us in the pose of a jester, a brief and slightly contemptible diversion before the serious business of state begins.

Jacobson wears the coxcomb and bells with admirable chutzpah.  He is a master of the wry aperçu, as when he notes that, on the bookshelves of the holy, ‘everything is written by God or Enid Blyton’;  or when he imagines his shikseh wife, during coitus, silently wondering ‘How long O Lord, How long’.  And he can do caricature in wonderfully thick strokes, as in this vignette on his first words as a child:

‘Sounds to me that he was imitating the train,’ my father guessed when my

mother excitedly told everybody about it later.  ‘Am I right, Maxie? Was that the
sound the engine made? Choo choo, choo choo?’
Jew Jew,’ I said, clamping my teeth around the Js.  ‘Jew Jew, Jew Jew . . .’
‘What about the whistle, then?  Whoo whoo!  Whoo whoo!’

I shook my head.  ‘Jew Jew,’ I said.  ‘Jew Jew, Jew Jew.’

But for all its overstatement and travesty, Kalooki Nights is also an eloquent argument for the seriousness of comedy.  By making Maxie a cartoonist who must constantly defend his art against the disdain of the pious and high-minded, Jacobson can be reflexive about his own comic mode without ever seeming tendentious:  ‘Caricature is a methodology for telling a greater truth—that’s where I stand—but even I accept that what the artist caricatures, the ordinary eye must recognise as just.’  Characteristically Jacobson can make a joke about the evil of an Ilse Koch, and then make another joke about the joke:

‘Oh, is she the one who made the lampshades?’ my mother asked.  It’s the obvious joke, but she made it sound like an interior design query.  And even if she hadn’t, it’s my obligation as a cartoonist to make out that she had.

The justness of a caricature like this lies in the way it nimbly draws attention, not so much to the banality of evil, but to the way in which evil inevitably becomes banalised after the fact.  And Jacobson’s irony is the perfect instrument for taking the measure of those who, rather than banalise evil, would deny it:  ‘There is an intriguing contradiction in the position of those who question whether anything as terrible as Ilse Koch and her lampshades ever happened, in that they invariably let you know they wish it had.’  This is no less funny for the fury with which it bristles.

Beneath the fury, this book floats a discomfiting argument about the Jewish psyche—which Jacobson diagnoses or hypothesises as essentially masochistic—and its equivocal role in the punishment it has endured:  ‘Do we make it all up, this anti-Semitism?  Is it a fire in us we need to feed?  Could we possibly have called the Nazis down on us because we couldn’t exist without them?’  This doesn’t necessarily represent Maxie’s decided opinion—he soon snaps out of it to get on with the business of being persecuted by his veritably anti-Semitic wife—nor, obviously, should we assume it is Jacobson’s.  But there are quarters where even to have a fictional character suggest that the Jews may have some psychic complicity (Maxie’s word, not mine) in their suffering is considered such bad taste as to be tantamount to crypto-Nazism.  But, as Maxie observes, ‘Bad taste narrows the gap between the sentimental way you see yourself, and the scorn with which others see you.  Half of what’s for sale in Israel you’d consider anti-Semitic if you saw it anywhere else.’  This is subtle, and it is daring to try and be subtle about so incendiary a subject as mass murder;  much safer simply to howl in blame or lamentation—and Maxie, by the way, is noble enough to know that he’s not too noble for his share of both.  Masochism, in any case, isn’t an uncomplicated impulse for Jacobson, who writes subtly and passionately on the subject;  it is the thin line where active complicity meets enforced submission.  It can even be, with a kind of ambiguous heroism, an affirmation of defiance in itself.

In the furore that followed the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, a New York Times reporter contacted Philip Roth’s mother and asked whether she was a ‘Jewish mother’.  ‘All mothers are Jewish mothers,’ was the reply:  a very good and, in its paradoxical logic, its inverting of the particular and the universal, very Rothian quip.  Unlike Roth, Howard Jacobson is happy to accept the label ‘Jewish fiction’ for his work;  it’s difficult to argue with his own description of Kalooki Nights as ‘the most Jewish book written by anyone, ever’.  But if Jewish fiction is writing that explores, with great panache and insight, the messy, contradictory stuff that we call selfhood, perhaps all great fiction—figuratively if not literally—is Jewish fiction.

Matt Hill recently completed a BA in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford, and is now a night porter at a hotel in Bristol.

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