The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao v. The Savage Detectives
presented by
ZOMBIE ROUND
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
v. The Savage Detectives
Judged by Andrew Womack
TMN Co-Editor in Chief Andrew Womack lives in Austin, Texas. He co-founded The Morning News with Rosecrans Baldwin in 1999 and hasn’t been away from a computer for more than six hours since. Connections to this year’s competitors: “Nope.”
Last fall we asked TMN readers to submit their favorite books of 2007. That list was one of the factors we used to choose the 16 books that ultimately made the Tournament. And now we’re going back to our readers’ favorites one more time.
Fourteen novels have been eliminated from the Tournament so far. From those books we’ve rescued the two that were best loved by TMN readers last year—Remainder and The Savage Detectives—and brought them back in a pair of resurrection duels we call the Zombie Round. In order to get to the finals, Ferris and Diaz will each have to get past a book left for dead: a book that’s hungry for brains.
Prior to this year’s ToB, I was unfamiliar with either Bolaño or Díaz. Halfway through The Savage Detectives, I placed an order for Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666. (UPDATE: It arrived! In Spanish. Oops. The translation will be out in November.) Once the Tournament is safely over and I’ve got some reading time to spare, I’ll happily be diving into more of both authors’ work. Because as much as I enjoyed The Savage Detectives, it never took hold of me like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Though I’m a nascent Bolaño fan, I’m a full-on groupie for Oscar Wao.
You know that part at the end of Revenge of the Nerds, where Betty says, “I’m in love with a nerd?” And then all the alumni reveal their inner dorks? In Oscar, Junot Díaz has tapped into that archetypal nerd, though not simply painting him as such—under-developed conversation skills, prolonged virginity, Dr. Who scarves no matter what, etc. Instead, he hits up the defining nerdish element, the essence of the opposite of cool: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is about letting emotion reign over caution.
As Louis and Gilbert demonstrated, inside each of us beats a tender, geek heart. Even Oscar’s narrator, Yunior, struggles against his inner dork, nerding out only to us—never to his acquaintances. If we are all nerds, then The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is about all of us. Likewise, the strange, fascinating Savage Detectives is about other people—other, cooler people (poets! “Visceral Realist” poets!) leading more interesting, cooler lives. And yet for Oscar, as life becomes more interesting (and actually, really, almost even edges on cooler), it signals his demise. And with the death of the nerd arrives the death of Oscar Wao.
And so, because his novel was, ironically enough, the more visceral of the pair, Díaz goes to the finals.
Advancing:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
KEVIN: I love that Andrew even bothers to ask, “You know that part at the end of Revenge of the Nerds…?” I suspect that anyone following a competition called the “Tournament of Books” pretty much knows every frame of that movie, which is why one could almost imagine circumstances in which The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was as cynically conceived as a book titled The Da Vinci Clone. Picture Junot Díaz sitting at his desk, wondering what sort of character he should create: “Let’s see, what should I write about? Well, who reads literary fiction? I’ve got it! Nerds!”
And now the finals are set. I hesitate to make too much of the significance of the match-up. Remainder certainly had its share of critical acclaim and quite a lot of reader support (not for nothing did TMN readers put it in the Zombie Round), so it didn’t come from nowhere, exactly. Still its journey to the finals was improbable, having been left for dead in round two when Mark Liberman promoted The Shadow Catcher instead. (If you’re tired of our commentary, you can read ToB judge Helen Dewitt’s take on that decision at her blog.)
The Rooster has something of a history of these unexpected match-ups in the late rounds. John, you mentioned it earlier with reference to Remainder, but I note that this is the third time in four years that a paperback original has made it to the finals (previously there has been Cloud Atlas, which defeated The Plot Against America; and Home Land, which lost to The Accidental).
I’m not sure if the publishing industry will take notice, or even what they would do with that information even if they did. As a focus-group facilitator in a former life, what conclusions might you draw from that information?
JOHN: As a former focus-group facilitator I would pause, look thoughtful, then offer up some reasonable inference based on the available evidence that is indisputably true, but also, kind of useless and 85-percent bullshit:
“I think what this shows is that people are willing to take a chance on a book that costs $12.”
Or:
“It’s not the size of the book in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the book.”
Or:
“Next time, I think we should skip the sushi in the viewing room.”
Seriously, though, who knows? I do think that it’s relatively easy to make a recommendation to a friend for something that’s going to only put them out $10 to $12, as opposed to $25 or $30. For $10 I’ll try just about anything, including street-vendor sushi.
(But I’d never feed it to clients again.)
One of the troubles with the book industry, or any industry for that matter, is consistently looking backwards for what’s going to work in the future. I think a lot of people believe that releasing more paperback originals, particularly for not-yet-established authors, might be a good strategy, but it’s entirely possible that the cost and the format has nothing to do with the success of these particular books and that the publishers actually left tons of money on the table by not first releasing higher-margin hardcovers.
That’s the hard part. With all the variables, it’s impossible to say which one is determinative. The actress Katherine Heigl is reportedly looking to get out of her Grey’s Anatomy contract so she can capitalize on the big-dollar offers she’s getting for movies based on the success of 27 Dresses and Knocked Up. Now, I think she’s a perfectly serviceable Hollywood actress, but you’d be hard-pressed to make a case that she is the reason those movies succeeded. When she was coming off the made-for-TV prequel Romy and Michelle: In the Beginning (picking up for Lisa Kudrow in the role of Romy), I’m going to say that Katherine Heigl had a hard time finding work. Now, she’s apparently a bankable actress. Now, she’s getting offered many millions of dollars to star in movies. To me, this seems like the peak of irrationality, but if one of those movies hits, the studio heads that made the call will be hailed as geniuses.
This is why the book industry needs to keep experimenting, looking forward, not back. MacAdam Cage reports having good success simultaneously publishing books in hardcover and paperback. Other publishers are doing ultra-expensive limited-run titles, like a 20-pound book about Pelé signed by all the living members of the 1970 Brazilian World Cup team that runs $20,000. I hear Anne Rice is printing her next book in her own blood and Stephen King is looking to print his next book on human flesh.
Me, for my next project, I’m offering it as a limited-edition printing of one copy, price $100,000. (I’m throwing in a kidney with purchase.)