Rewriting the American dream

Arizona Daily Wildcat photo courtesy of Riverhead Trade Paperbacks Fiction writer Junot Diaz, originally from the Dominican Republic, gives voice to immigrant lifestyle in New York and New Jersey in his book of short stories, Drown.

Junot Diaz's prose rips through you with the kinetic force of a poet and the unassuming eye of a journalist. In his acclaimed short story collection Drown, Diaz explores the places and voices of the Dominican Republic, Dominican Nueva York and the immigrant neighborhoods of industrial New Jersey. As part of the Poetry Center's ongoing reading series, Diaz will be reading tonight in the Modern Languages Auditorium at 8.

Drown is a collection of stories which seem new to American literature but are, without a doubt, distinctly and classically American. Through the honest, wry humor and succinct language of his narrators and characters, Diaz offers a glimpse into the reality of the nebulous American dream gone astray.

Where It's At Junot Diaz reads tonight in the Modern Languages Auditorium at 8. Admission is free.

Diaz's ten tales vividly evoke scenes that range from disturbing to agonizing: a teenager who confronts the meaning of love through his relationship with his drug-addicted, homeless "girlfriend," boys who brutally unmask a maimed neighborhood loner, unfaithful fathers who intimidate their families into silence and a young Latino's eye-opening experience delivering pool tables to New Jersey's wealthy towns.

David Stanton of Poets and Writers Magazine writes that in Drown, Diaz "intentionally made no concessions to readers outside his community - no italics or translations for his Spanish, no filtering out four-letter words." His most distinct and, perhaps, most effective characteristic is his dialogue, which is never set off with quotes. But these characteristics, writes Stanton, "have added to his appeal as an authentic voice of his community - and perhaps distracted people from the fact that he is, after all, writing fiction."

There exists something lushly textured and profound behind Diaz's unadorned style. In "Fiesta 1980," where the young narrator explores his troubled relationship with his estranged father, Diaz writes: "Me and Rafa didn't talk much about the Puerto Rican woman. When we ate dinner at her house, the few times Papi had taken us over there, we still acted like nothing was out of the ordinary. Pass the ketchup, man. No sweat, bro. The affair was like a hole in our living room floor, one we'd gotten so used to circumnavigating that we sometimes forgot it was there."

Diaz's portrayal of the world before him through the eyes of his fictional protagonists never demands sympathy or apology. Diaz tells of life among the excluded classes with an unsentimental and unsettling truthfulness. And beyond the unsettling effect lies the astuteness of his voice. After a few lines, you are there with him and his tales demand you listen, that you live through his mini-documentaries, if only to experience the possibility for truth that this kind of authenticity offers.