DROWN. - Review - book review

DROWN by Junot Diaz. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. 208 pages. $12 paper.

Junot Diaz's collection of short stories, entitled Drown, received an unusual amount of press when it first appeared. Diaz, the name usually coupled with the words "hot young Dominican author," was packaged as an "authentic" voice from the streets. There's no doubt that this collection boasts a winning voice, a modesty of intent and an unvarnished spareness. Much, however, was staked on the author's "street credibility," and this turns out to be the least interesting part of the book.

We find in these 10 stories the tale of at least two cities: the cities that Diaz depicts in his minimalist fictions, and the cities that reviewers and publicists have built around them. And while the despair of urban youth casting about for lifelines of sex or drugs plays a large part in them, real inner-city experience is hard to find in these stories. He is writing not so much about cities as about the interior lives of characters in communities--perhaps bleak ones, fraught with dead-ends, but nothing you wouldn't expect to find in John Updike's "A & P" or Raymond Carver's suburbs. Critics, perhaps uneasy about publishing's lack of Latino voices, seemed eager to give credit for a searing portrait of mean streets when the streets actually pictured in the stories are suburban-empty rather than city-mean.

Perhaps nothing reflects this better than "How to Date a Brown Girl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie." In this story, a young Dominican narrator imagines an edgy suburban mother dropping her daughter off with him, a dark and perhaps dangerous city boy: "Her moms will say hi and you'll see that you don't scare her, not really. She will say that she needs easier directions to get out and even though she has the best directions in her lap give her new ones. Make her happy." Diaz's narrator placates the mother's fear of the city, and Diaz's book does the same. Diaz seems to be saying to the apprehensive white middle-class readers, "bad things happen in the inner-city, but take comfort in the sameness of family life, and the essential goodness of the working class." In his story "Aurora," even crack addicts and dealers are domestic.

Diaz's style is lucid and often funny. But there is too much reliance on "street" constructions that already sound quaint, such as the use of "mad" or "crazy" as an adverb, and "dope" as an adjective, as in "all the adults were crazy dancing" or "everybody thought it a dope idea." Even artifacts like "getting busy," "homegirl," and "back in the day" make an appearance. Add to this the substitution of "moms" for "mom," and modifiers like "cold-ass" (as in "cold-ass stare"), and you have street lingo only an upper-eastside editor could see as cutting-edge.

With all of the attention given to the stories as documentary evidence, what is missed is the slicing emotional realism in stories like "Drown"--about two boys whose friendship becomes unexpectedly complicated by homoeroticism and different educational destinies, or "Fiesta, 1980"--about a cheating father and the family secrets that children are "entrusted" with.

Like Updike's "A&P" and other literary evocations of coming-of-age, "How to Date a Brown Girl ..." and "Edison, New Jersey" depend on rigorous understatement, a feeling of the narrator's potential inadequacy, and the divisive nature of class that surprises and divides young people. Diaz just adds the crucial ingredient of race to the "boy-sees-girl, boy-fantasizes-about-but-never-had-a-chance-with-girl-in-the first-place-story," and ratchets up the stakes of Updike's deadened New England community.

In a twist that no marketing strategist could have foreseen, in most bookstores, Diaz shares shelf space with Dickens, often sitting cover-to-cover. He shares something else as well: young, working-class characters haunted by a sense of difference from their peers in bleak industrial settings. It is this sense of being apart from, sometimes rising above, sometimes being left behind by peers, that links the two. In Dickens, it's mealy potatoes, Steerforth, and label-pasting; in Diaz it's Wayne, Beto, furniture delivery or "dealing," but it is essentially the same Bildung. This sense of personal integrity in the midst of disintegration seems the best part of Diaz. And so rather than a "front-line report" as one critique suggests, what we have is a missive from the literary past: Diaz is working in a classic, not a street mode.

ROB JACKLOSKY College of Mount Saint Vincent

COPYRIGHT 1998 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group