{"id":2425,"date":"2014-08-31T08:16:12","date_gmt":"2014-08-31T12:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2425"},"modified":"2014-08-31T08:16:12","modified_gmt":"2014-08-31T12:16:12","slug":"junot-diaz-difficult-characters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2425","title":{"rendered":"Junot D\u00edaz & Difficult Characters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Junot<\/a>Junot D\u00edaz, fellow New Jerseyan and one of America\u2019s top young writers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<\/a><\/em>(2007) and a certified MacArthur Foundation \u201cgenius,\u201d is interviewed in the fall 2014 issue of Glimmer Train<\/em>. Last year, he published a book of short stories, This is How You Lose Her<\/a><\/em>. (This is the book a friend of mine starts reading whenever she and her husband have a disagreement.)<\/p>\n

\u201cShe’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.\u201d(TIHYLH)<\/em><\/p>\n

About his recurring character Yunior, who narrates much of sci-fi addict Oscar\u2019s story, and who also features in the short story collection, D\u00edaz says \u201cHe is the classic dumb-ass character who makes all the right mistakes to produce, for me, in my mind, great stories.\u201d Yunior shares some biographical details with D\u00edaz, a parallelism that he believes makes writing\u2014or reading\u2014a little easier. \u201cYou get free heavy lifting from readers . . . by blurring that line between fiction and biography, a confusion that adds an extra serving of real to the tale.\u201d Getting readers to do some of the work for him, some of the world-creation that keeps them on the page, is especially important in fiction, he believes, when writers \u201care asking them to confuse our work for the world and often to connect to characters who are difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn\u2019t have passed for Normal if he\u2019d wanted to.\u201d(BWL)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cHer rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow.\u201d(BWL)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Junot<\/a>One of the ways Yunior is difficult is in his relations with women, his infidelities, and his objectification of women, and D\u00edaz explains that he includes that aspect of his character because it’s \u201cone of the standard ways our culture operates.\u201d D\u00edaz gets some blowback on this, and says the shock of recognition when readers see this aggressively masculine point-of-view on the page \u201cin what I think is so honest a way, it often repels us in ways that the very presence of it in our real lives doesn\u2019t. . . . It\u2019s as if it\u2019s only in this book where these guys exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.\u201d(BWL)<\/em><\/p>\n

While the writer of the Door Stop Novels<\/a> blog called Brief Wondrous Life<\/em> \u201cincredibly offensive,\u201d she added, \u201cit is also absolutely one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life.\u201d Her bottom line: \u201cI think that is what I like most about D\u00edaz \u2014the man goes for broke.\u201d He isn\u2019t writing allegory, with a lot of message overlaid about his real political views; he isn\u2019t writing religious. He is describing the worldviews of very particular people, and it\u2019s in the detailed rendering of those views that make people love or hate his work, but, either way, to believe it\u2019s real.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe half-life of love is forever.\u201d(TIHYLH)<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Junot D\u00edaz, fellow New Jerseyan and one of America\u2019s top young writers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2007) and a certified MacArthur Foundation \u201cgenius,\u201d is interviewed in the fall 2014 issue of Glimmer … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,61,40,174],"tags":[30],"class_list":["post-2425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-character","category-fiction","category-first-draft-blog","tag-novel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-D7","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2428,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2425\/revisions\/2428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}