Fiction Mondays: Drown

Junot Díaz’s “Drown” was on my to-read list for a really long time, so I finally bought it and got around to reading it. I loved “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” and the short stories I had read, like “How to Date a Whitegirl, Blackgirl, Browngirl, Halfie,” were so intelligent and engaging and funny that I knew I had to read the whole collection. The book didn’t disappoint.

Junot Díaz’s greatest strength, I think, is his voice. The stories are often in the first-person and feel so natural, like you’re hearing them told rather than reading them. This is a tough trick to pull off, I think. It requires a really delicate balance of details to remain realistic, and I think Díaz excels at providing enough information to really flesh out his characters without making it seem like they’re noticing things that no real person would notice. Not that the details are scant in any way: there are small things in all of the stories that the characters notice because of how he develops them, whether it’s the pool table deliveryman who notes the details on all of the models because he’s trying to save enough money to buy one for himself, or a guy going through a breakup at the same time as the woman in the apartment underneath his, who knows her route around the apartment because it mirrors his own.

There’s also an excellent sense of place in these stories. The ones that take place in New Jersey travel on the New Jersey Turnpike or the Garden State Parkway, or they take the bus to Paramus, while the ones in the Dominican Republic evoke the place so well that I can see it even though I’ve never been there. Díaz has a real talent when it comes to setting; the story “Boyfriend,” about the breakups on separate floors, was one of my favorites. It used the layout of the apartment so well, and gave the story a geography that made it incredibly concrete and visual.

I don’t know if I’d call it a collection of linked stories, exactly; while many have the same characters and background, there is a lot of variation and a number of stories that involve separate characters altogether. The connections between the stories are really interesting, though. There are themes of missing fathers (or fathers who vanish and then return), and a recurring question of what it means to be financially stable. While the stories that take place in the Dominican Republic often touch on how the poorer characters scrape by, the New Jersey stories find them a little wealthier, but there is always a price. There’s a character who supports his mother by selling pot, but he worries that she might find out where the money comes from, and he has higher aspirations; the pool table deliveryman has a stable income, but used to steal money from the register to buy presents for his girlfriend.

Díaz is a really powerful writer, and his ability to develop characters makes these stories resonate long after you’ve finished the book. Even in the most broken characters, he has such a huge amount of empathy toward them that you can’t help but hope things will turn out for them. The second-to-last story in the book, which revisits a character seen in the first story, takes a deformed man and makes him into an odd kind of hero, running around his town and trying to perform good deeds. It kind of acts as an explanation for the rest of the characters in the stories: yes, they can seem like monsters at times, but their intentions are not necessarily malevolent. It just takes a different way of looking at them to understand what they’re trying to do.