Books

More than 10 years ago, New Jersey writer Junot Díaz (a Rutgers graduate whose family emigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic) made a huge splash with his first book of fiction, a collection of stories titled Drown. A few of the stories were extraordinary, some merely terrific. The book augured well for the work to follow.

Years went by, and the word, beginning with testimony from the writer himself, was that Mr. Díaz was floundering in his attempts to write his first novel. Too much attention for that first book had clouded his mind. In the Republic of Publicity, otherwise known as the U.S. of A., his struggle to keep writing was not going well.

Somewhere during the past decade the fog cleared. After some false starts, Mr. Díaz began writing the novel that we now hold, a book whose imaginative energy, linguistic volatility, historical passion and all-around love of life (and its characters) make it one of the best first novels of the past few decades. It's a Dominican-born New Jersey American's love song to our country and a Dominican-born New Jersey American's homage to his Latin roots, a profane and sacred, playful and serious, light and dark, filthy-throated and bittersweet treatise on life as we need to know it.

The Oscar of the title is Oscar de Leon, an overweight kid from a Dominican neighborhood in Patterson, N.J., who is madly in love with reading (mostly fantasy) and, later, writing (mostly fantasy and science-fiction). But the only love he gets back comes from his sister, Lola, and a few pals. His mother, the beautiful Belicia, shows love for her children but in odd ways. As he grows older, and heavier, Oscar keeps trying to find a girl without success, and his failures become legendary.

His pathetic quest for love, told mainly in the spicy, lively, jivey Dominican-American voice of his sister's on-again, off-again college boyfriend, takes on near-mythic proportions. The story carries us from the streets of Patterson back to his family's old country under the monstrous dictator Trujillo. It returns us to Patterson and then to the campus of the state university, all of this under the cloud of the terrible "fukú," or curse, that our narrator portrays as the downfall of all Dominicans.

Mr. Díaz, given the decade and more it's taken him to finish this novel, may have suffered from fukú himself.

Those days, as this wonderful – or should we say "wondrous"? – novel demonstrates, are over.

National Public Radio commentator Alan Cheuse's latest book is The Fires: Two Novellas.

Junot Díaz

(Riverhead Books, $24.95)

Junot Díaz will sign his book 7 p.m. Sept. 21 at Borders, Preston Road at Royal Lane.