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.

Carol Shields
Unless
Random House Canada, 2002
321 pages

Late in Carol Shields’s novel Unless (2002), Reta Winters, her main character, gets into a misunderstanding with her new editor. The serious-minded Arthur, trained ‘at Yale, originally’, persists in reading her novel as a parable of human yearning, of the ‘central moral position of the contemporary world’. Just a little tweaking, he tells Reta, and ‘your manuscript could become a monument’. But Reta was writing a comic fiction, a light jokey novel involving a trombonist and a fashion editor, in her search for an escape from her struggle to understand her eldest daughter, Norah. For reasons which are constantly speculated upon – teenage perversity? martyrdom? – Norah has dropped out of university to sit on a Toronto street corner, holding up a sign which reads, simply, ‘GOODNESS’. Those reasons are eventually divulged, but by the end of the novel each character has had to consider their own reading of the word, and the narratives by which they construct their own lives.

This is the familiar subject of Carol Shields’s writing: how people tell their own stories, and how those stories are interpreted by others. It’s impossible not to see Unless, her last novel, as a backward, playful look at her own passion for writing and how her own life has been read. As she was working on Unless, Shields knew that she was in the final stages of cancer. Since her diagnosis in 1998, she had also written a book of short stories, Dressing Up for the Carnival (2000), and a biography of Jane Austen (2001). When she died in July this year, she was in the middle of writing another book. She saw her preoccupation with story-telling as a form of ‘narrative hunger’, a constant search for symbols and messages in the smallest of things.

Although she began her literary career with a collection of poems, Others, in 1972, Carol Shields was best known for the sensual, glowing prose of her ten novels, seven plays, and three books of short stories which in recent years finally achieved widespread critical recognition. Unless, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2002, was voted into the top ten list of Britain’s best-loved books written by women. Larry’s Party (1997) won the Orange Prize. Her work became known in Britain in 1990 when Christopher Potter, a commissioning editor from Fourth Estate, read Swann by chance, and immediately began publishing her novels in the UK (‘Thank God,’ she once commented, ‘for Christopher’). It was her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries which firmly established her reputation. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it received the Canadian Governor General’s Award and won her the Pulitzer Prize. ‘The Stone Diaries,’ commented The New York Times Book Review, ‘reminds us again why literature matters’.

Shields herself had strong views on how literature matters. In a speech in 1996 she recalled someone asking her what she did when not reading and writing. She replied:

I walk around and think about narrative, about the telling of stories, what they mean, these stories – and why we need them.

John Barth tells us that the central question of the modern novel is not ‘What happens?’ but ‘Who am I?’¹ Shields echoes and expands on this insight, pointing out that narratives available in the public domain also ask ‘Who are we?’ From her earliest novels, she has contemplated the ‘stories that sustain our culture’, the ways in which narratives of conversation, advice, or dispute bind our lives together. ‘I depend on eavesdropping,’ she wrote, ‘to fill my narrative litter bag’.

Her writing has that immediate, compelling feel of something overheard or suddenly glimpsed. The Stone Diaries uses random narrative scraps – shopping lists, diary entries, recipes, newspaper hints – to compile the story of Daisy Flett, housewife and mother. Daisy’s unremarkable life, from her birth on a kitchen floor to her death in a Florida retirement home, is pieced together from minutely observed details, but it is up to the reader to determine the connections and to construct her biography. This kind of reciprocity, a mutual reading, is emphasized by the way in which exchanges of letters feature so strongly in Shields’s work. In Small Ceremonies (1976) and The Box Garden (1977) we see the same family through the letters and anecdotes of two sisters, Judith and Charleen. Happenstance (1980), a marriage from a wife’s perspective, can be turned around and read from the husband’s point of view. The epistolary novel A Celibate Season (1991), which deals with collaborations and compromises in a marriage, is a collaborative writing effort itself, with Blanche Howard.

Shields is excellent at capturing the ‘small ceremonies’, the special languages, of friendship and marriage. In Larry’s Party, Larry, feeling his way through the labyrinths of relationships, learns that ‘a happy marriage, whether it’s long or short, gathers a kind of density around it’. Shields evokes that density very well. Like John Updike, who has a similar mastery of the everyday, she has a knack for noting down the dialect, ‘the musical pattern’, of marriage. But most of Shields’s marriages, unlike those Updike describes, are happy, or on their way to happiness. This reflects the importance of the family bond to Shields (in interviews, her husband Don, whom Shields married in 1957, is a constant background figure). ‘I don’t think I would have become a writer if I hadn’t been a mother’, she once commented – a world away from Cyril Connolly’s condemnation of the ‘pram in the hall’ as the writer’s enemy. She often returned to the point that contemporary writing seeks to ‘record what separates us rather than what brings us together’. Why don’t novels, she asked, instead admit that ‘a long relationship…can be as complex, as potentially dynamic, and as open to catharsis as the most shattering divorce’?

Perhaps those long marriages, those close friendships, account for her dismissal by a reviewer who commented that she did not do ‘sadness well’. Unless, a novel of ‘great unhappiness and loss’, seems to be a typically shrewd answer to such criticism. Reta is well aware that she may be seen as a writer of ‘whimsy’, confined to a limited literary sphere. She is fearful ‘of being in incestuous waters, a woman writer who is writing about a woman writer who is writing’. Set against this is her anger at the ‘callous lack of curiosity about great women’s minds’, ‘those who are routinely overlooked, that is to say half the world’s population’. Reta’s anger works as a forceful vindication of Shields’s beliefs. In her novels, her plays, and her biographies, Shields set out to redress what she saw as a neglect of ‘ordinary life’ in fiction, which she linked to the ‘casual dismissal of women’ by the literary establishment. She vividly remembered listening to a lecture by George Steiner, and asking him about the women writers he had not mentioned. There weren’t any, he replied, unless you counted a couple from the nineteenth century. A talk by Martin Amis yielded much the same idea: ‘I didn’t bother asking any questions that time’, Shields recalled.

Running alongside this dismissal of Shields as a ‘women’s writer’, another reading brackets her as a ‘Canadian’ author. It’s certainly tempting to compare her to novelists such as Margaret Laurence, with her careful evocations of Manitoba domesticity, or Margaret Atwood, whom Shields playfully mentions in Unless. There are obvious parallels between her graceful explorations of family relationships and those of Alice Munro, with her luminous short stories. But to place her firmly in this tradition is to circumscribe her writing. In her study Susanna Moodie: Voice and Vision (1977), Shields argues that Moodie has suffered from critics who want to force her into being a ‘shorthand symbol’ for Canadian national character. She is keen to point out that Moodie’s work forms part of a larger literary dialogue, a dialogue in which Shields’ own writing constantly participates.

Her sense of a far-reaching community of readers and writers emerges strongly in her biography of Austen, where she shows how Austen’s reading shaped her treatment of ‘reflective men and women’. Her own novels show traces of her love for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing, for George Eliot and Henry James. Unless takes its epigraph from Middlemarch, and it is in part shaped both by Eliot’s attention to the microscopic and by her vivid symbolism. ‘Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head’, thinks Reta in the opening paragraph of the novel. ‘It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life’. Reta’s voice is companionable, immediate, lively – but behind Shields’ transparent prose lie layers of allusion. In a moment of self-mockery Reta describes one of her own short stories as ‘rather Jamesian’, but as we read further we realise this is a knowing comment. Shields herself plays with Jamesian ideas of language and perception, with what she terms ‘the crippling limitations that language imposes’. That ‘pane of glass’ is also a deliberate echo of James’ golden bowl, a fragile symbol of marital happiness which turns out to be ‘glass – and cracked under the gilt’. There’s also a whisper of Eliot’s description of Lydgate contemplating his growing marital unhappiness: ‘it was as if a fracture in delicate crystal had begun’.

Shields was well aware of the literary weight behind her prose. Her genius lies in balancing the symbolic weight of her writing with a lightness of touch, a capacity for illuminating the ordinary from the inside. ‘I could easily have been a Daisy Flett,’ she once said, marvelling that she had discovered her gift for story-telling. ‘One of those women who erases herself, who somehow slips out of her generation’. A poem by Daisy Flett’s fictional granddaughter, placed at the beginning of The Stone Diaries, celebrates how, despite its ordinariness, ‘her life could be called a monument’. Carol Shields’s ‘monument’, appropriately, is that her novels will continue, with undiminished power, to tell the stories of her extraordinary ‘ordinary’ characters.

Felicity James is a final-year DPhil student at Christ Church, Oxford, where she is working on Charles Lamb and concepts of friendship in the 1790s.

Notes

1. Quoted in Carol Shields, ‘Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard’. In Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger and the Possibilities of Fiction. Ed. Edward Eden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). p. 29.