What the Dead Know v. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
presented by
ROUND ONE
What the Dead Know
v. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Judged by Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (stories); The Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again (novels); and the forthcoming An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (memoir). She lives nowhere in particular, and is teaching this spring at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Connections to this year’s competitors: “I once sat next to Junot Díaz at a dinner with a bunch of other people. I once relay taught a class with Jonathan Lethem but never actually met him. Ann Patchett and I are inextricably linked. Denis Johnson once sat on my sofa at a party before a reading. I am about to meet Brock Clarke. Joshua Ferris and I share an editor but have never met.”
The Tournament of Books came at the right time for me: I’d spent the fall semester teaching three classes of undergrads while juggling a baby and had scarcely read a whole book in months. The undergrads were sweet, but occasionally wrote sentences like this: “Her eyes reeked of curiosity.” The baby was also sweet—I even preferred him to the undergrads—but he left me so sleep-deprived that one day I got in a car with him and a friend from Des Moines and headed out to New York City from Saratoga Springs; after driving three and a half hours we arrived in Syracuse, even further away from our destination than when we’d started.
But by January classes were over and the baby was sleeping through-the-nightish, and I was ready to read some excellent sentences. And then I got my assigned books, and one of them was Run, by Ann Patchett. However, I imagine that if you can answer “Yes” to any of the following questions, you should probably recuse yourself from judging a book:
Has author ever given you first aid?
Have you and author ever sung along to Edwin Starr’s “War” on a jukebox in a smoky bar, and found yourself agreeing, when asked, that War was good for (Hunh!) absolutely nothing?
Has author ever dedicated a book to you?
Has author’s dog ever eaten a pair of your underpants?
To be honest, said dog did not consume the entire pair of underpants, said book dedication was shared, and said jukebox in said smoky bar was nearly 20 years ago, but we still (say it again) feel that war is good for absolutely nothing, and I could not possibly even pretend to be unbiased about Ann’s work. So instead I was sent Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Laura Lippmann’s What the Dead Know.
Shame, I thought, because I could judge this contest looking at the covers. I’m a huge Junot Díaz fan. I teach his stories. Like all Díaz fans I’d been looking forward to this book for more than a decade. The Lippman book, on the other hand, identifies her as a great “crime writer,” and I don’t read much genre fiction.
Don’t get me wrong: I like murders in fiction. A lot. And I don’t mind the trappings of genre; I adore genre straddlers like Lethem, Lehane, and Kelly Link. But I want glorious language first, depth of character a close second, and everything else after. Cram all the Pinkertons, Shamuses, Cold War spies, werewolves, unicorns, and rainbows you want in a novel; I’ll read it as long as it has great language and interesting characters. (Not vampires, though. I can’t abide vampires.) But a straight crime novel? Clearly it was going to be Díaz in a walk.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was everything I’d been led to believe it would be: hilarious, wonderfully written, with great sympathy for its oddball characters. It also manages to give a picture of the Dominican Republic during and after the reign of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Díaz switches narrators and decades; he footnotes shamelessly; he writes about the intersection of historical figures on his own fictional characters with chutzpah and grace. I finished it feeling I knew more than I had when I started, and I was grateful for its weird blend of high-mindedness and low culture, its jokes, its fearlessness.
And yet. And yet I was missing something. Specifically, I was missing the characters, because Díaz introduces one character, infuses that character with a complicated soul, with passion and fascinating shortcomings, and just when I thought, “Great! Now let’s see what this character does!” the book would jump forward or backward to another character and do the same thing. The eponymous Oscar is, as reviews have pointed out, a terrific creation, an enormous heartsick science-fiction nerd, frustrating and heroic and true. And I spent much of the book missing him, even as I admired Díaz’s love for Oscar’s sister, mother, aunt, grandfather, etc. The book is great but frankly, it feels long on back-story and short on plot.
There, I said it. I want language and character but I also want plot, by which I mean: I don’t want to be merely shown all the things that shaped a character’s soul: I want all that, and to know what, given the shape of that soul, a character actually does. The last 40 pages of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are stupendous. That’s when the plot finally grabbed me by the ear, and I wasn’t just admiring but enthralled.
I went into Laura Lippman’s book looking forward to the promised plot and suspense, and indeed she serves it up: A woman in her late 30s flees the scene of a car crash on a slick road in Baltimore, and then claims to be “one of the Bethany girls,” a pair of sisters who’d disappeared from a mall 30 years before. But is she? What the Dead Know jumps back and forth in time and point-of-view: before the disappearance and after, and between both sisters, both parents, the mysterious woman, her social worker, her lawyer, the detective assigned to the case in the present, and the detective who’d covered the disappearance when it happened. The sort of jumps, in other words, that in a straight literary novel might be referred to as “tour de force” but which for Lippman are simply the techniques she needs to use to create the sympathy, suspense, and mystery necessary to keep her readers interested and guessing. In other words, she kept me dancing around the story so effortlessly that I never looked down at my feet, I just made the leap. And she managed to let me guess the final plot twist at exactly the right time: I nearly throttled the book as I read on to see if I was right.
And yet. The prose is good, but it’s not glorious; the characters are vivid on the page but I didn’t miss them when the book switched away from their point-of-view, and I don’t miss them now.
I still miss Oscar. Díaz. In a walk.
Advancing:
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
JOHN: I recently went to one of those book sales where they temporarily rent out un-leased retail space and then stack a couple of thousand copies of remainders around the room, organized (very loosely) by genre, but not much else. I love these things for their possibilities, for the thrill of the hunt. I picture myself as a rescue boat converging on a shipwreck, on the scene to salvage as many survivors as possible before they cross from the remainder bin to the incinerator.
Invariably as I scope the room, I gather more and more books into my arms—this highly praised debut story collection, that novel by the author whose other book I liked that one time, any title by someone I know (whether I’ve already read the book or not), and so on—and by the time I reach the checkout table with aching arms, I have a significant haul, though since nothing is more than $5, it feels almost like stealing.
But then, when I get home, inevitably these rescuees wallow in stacks, often unread because there are books constantly being released that, instead of requiring a last-minute reprieve, I’ve been anticipating like a 10-year-old space nerd in 1969 waiting for the moon launch.
These emotions invariably color our response to the work. Sometimes it’s in the form of an unexpected surprise, the “that’s better than I thought it would be” phenomenon. Other times it’s the “that’s not what I thought it would be, or wished for” phenomenon. For example, when I was a child, my mom had a brief spasm of injecting some health into our baked goods and tried substituting carob for chocolate. She made the tactical error of telling me. I knew that I already liked chocolate, loved chocolate; this carob, on the other hand, I did not know. I took one bite of the carob brownie and promptly spit it on to the plate. If mom had just slipped the stuff in Jessica Seinfeld-style (or is it Missy Lapine-Chase-style?), I never would have noticed and today, as an adult, I’d be much less likely to have a handful of peanut M&M’s for breakfast.
What does this have to do with this round of the ToB? Read the subtext, people. Laura Lippman didn’t have a chance.
KEVIN: I was signing books in Virginia once, and this guy comes up to the table and starts asking me a whole bunch of questions about the craft and business of writing, the kind of questions you always get at these things—What compels you to write? What time of day do you write? How did you get your agent? These are usually the questions you get right before someone pulls out the tattered manuscript they’ve been working on, so I try to cut to the chase and I ask the guy, “Are you a writer?” And he looks at me like that was a strange question to ask and he says after a thought, “No. But I’ve always been a pretty good speller.”
Everyone is always asking me the difficult question, “Why do you write?” But no one ever asks me the far more important question, “Why do you read?”
Maybe because we think the answer to that is obvious. But Elizabeth’s defense of her decision is, in fact, an eloquent essay about just that. She spends most of it telling us how good Laura Lippman is at her craft, detailing the reasons Lippman novels are so satisfying and entertaining, even admitting, quite archly, that when a literary novelist is able to tell a story with the skills Lippman employs, he is called a virtuoso. And then also admitting, as you say, that What the Dead Know never had a chance.
Over the past two years I’ve spoken to something like 70 book clubs that were reading Cast of Shadows. And if I took this essay and read it to that mostly homogeneous group (white, female, over 30) that nevertheless is a pretty good representation of the majority of fiction readers, I think it would be fairly controversial. I think a great many would say, “Elizabeth is exactly right. That’s why I read.” And another group would say, “No, I mostly want someone to tell me a good story.” And I think another would say that they want to be transported to a place or a time, and that story and character are secondary. And another would say that they want information. That they want to learn something. They want to enjoy the license of fiction, but they want the nourishment of non-fiction.
So I just want to point out, for the millionth time, the marvelous absurdity of this exercise. That it’s not just enough to say that the appreciation of literature is subjective, but that this subjectivity is moving constantly along several different axes. The great lesson you learn when you write a novel and then go out and talk with people who have read it is that every single one of those individuals has read a completely different book.
It’s also the biggest thrill.