Back in 1996 I had a little jolt of surprise when I opened Paris Review and saw a short story by Junot Diaz called “Edison, N.J.” — because, to overstate the obvious, how many times does Edison, N.J. get mentioned in the Paris Review? It was a good story: smart young man adrift in his own life; working class, making a living criss-crossing New Jersey and installing pool tables; Dominican background filtered through American pop culture. A few months later, Diaz’s fine debut collection, Drown, was published to great acclaim, and I interviewed him for the local print — he had, after all, grown up mostly in Central New Jersey and gone to Rutgers University. A certified Local Author, even if he was living in Brooklyn at the time.
It was a fun interview, but Diaz was obviously a little disoriented by the attention coming his way — Newsweek had dubbed him one of the Hot Young Something Or Others of 1996 and everyone was waiting for him to finish his first novel, which at that time was going to be called The Cheater’s Guide to Love.
A year went by, then another — no novel. At a party, I ran into a young woman whose first story collection had just been published to great reviews, and she idly mentioned teaching creative writing along with Diaz in a college course. When I quizzed her about what Diaz was up to, she said he was doing research on Dominican soldiers in the Vietnam War. That must be a tough subject to research, I said. She cocked a smile and suggested that was the whole point: Diaz was using the research to keep the world at bay until people stopped bugging him about his next book.
It would be easy to snark and make fun of the sad problems of the young literary lion — boo hoo, too many great reviews, poor thing has to write his followup, publishers and institutions waiting to shower him with money, what a terrible burden. But I believed it. Diaz went from obscurity to literary fame at an age when most artists are still licking themselves into shape, and I find it perfectly understandable that somebody with lots of talent but unsure of his next step would want to tell the world to get the hell out of his face, though maybe not in so many words.
Diaz has finally published his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and that conversation about the defensive uses of research came back to me as I read this Bookslut interview:
I’ve heard it said from other writers before that research is more fun than the actual writing. But I’m kind of this crazy history person — I basically knew all the texts that I needed to read for this book, so what ended up happening was I would just find myself going, “Hey that reminds me of something on page 70 of this one monograph I have, so let me go dig through and find the reference.” And so it was kind of like, I had this enormous amount of historical knowledge in my head and nothing to do with it. It was more like reverse engineering. The book sort of gave me the map work and the instructions of what to cherry pick.
Most of the research that I did was on a lot of the nerdy stuff. I had mostly packed that, more than any of the history, into my head pretty tight. But there was a bunch of nerdy stuff I had to go back into. I had to actually watch some of the movies that the narrator and the protagonist were obsessed with, so I found myself watching a lot of crazy movies . . . things like Zardoz, which is like one of John Boorman’s early films. I found myself watching Virus, which is this really crazy American-Japanese production. You know, I found myself reading The Lord of the Rings three times back-to-back. I would finish it and start it again and finish it and start it again. It’s so I would have it fucking locked in my head in the way the narrator and protagonist would have it locked in their heads, you know? There’s a lot of crazy stuff. I went back and had to read all this H.P. Lovecraft and all the E.E. “Doc” Smith Lensman books. I found myself really just doing a lot of fucking nerdy reading. Again I can’t stress how easy the history stuff was. I have a good memory for historical marginalia.
Okay. Dude needed to spend a few years renting movies like Zardoz and reading Fantastic Four comics so he could get Galactus down right. Whatever. Kidding yourself is only one of the skills necessary to completing a long writing project, as long as you actually do complete it. Diaz got his novel done, and judging from the reviews he did it well. Can’t wait to read it.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Diaz and I have at least one thing in common: we both consider college the start of our real lives. Here he is talking about our mutual alma mater:
Oh, I’m a Rutgers grad. I’m a Rutgers boy. I went to Rutgers from 1988 to 1992, a long time ago, but that was before colleges turned into corporations. It was madness. They hadn’t figured out yet to lock us down, and I swear to God that things were as crazy as they are now, but I was like, “Kids, man, you have no fucking idea how over-patrolled you guys are.” They didn’t even notice us, dude. College was like some empty space. I was always obsessed with Rutgers, and I’m kind of like the Dominican version of Sonny Werblin, you know? Any chance I get, I fucking talk about Rutgers. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, I will not lie. From the neighborhood I came from, I was literally intellectually starving. I was an incredibly bright kid outside of Perth Amboy, and going to Rutgers was sort of like someone who never had vitamin C their whole life. They’re dying from fucking intellectual scurvy and rickets, and somebody gives them a fucking orange. It changed my life.
Very well put. Can it be long before the Rutgers alumni association starts hitting Diaz up for appearances and events?
