JUNOT DIAZ reading and being interviewed with MICHAEL CHABON in the Fleck Theatre, Friday (October 19), 8 pm and reading with CHRISTINE POUNTNEY, RON RASH and AMOR TOWLES in the Studio Theatre, Saturday (October 20), 8 pm. See listing.
Don’t assume that when you win one of the most lucrative arts fellowships, you’ve got it made in the shade.
I’m talking to Junot Diaz the day after he’s won a MacArthur Fellowship, a prize that comes with – are you ready? – $500,000. But the author assures me that not everything has changed.
“It’s not like I’m talking to you from inside a fur-lined limousine,” he says wryly, on the phone while driving to his next tour date. “You do get $100,000 every year, so after taxes it’s $67,000, enough to stop writing for five years. Five years of freedom.”
The Dominican-born, New Jersey-bred, now Cambridge, Massachusetts-based author is in bigger demand than ever. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2008 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, and his new collection of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her (see review, this page) has just been shortlisted for America’s National Book Awards.
Yet he’s strangely generous with his energy, spending quality time with unknown writers and meeting student journalists at ungodly hours. He says that if there were more real criticism happening in the U.S., he’d be more likely to lie low and keep his mouth shut.
“The artist has to be out there beating the drum of the conversation,” he explains. “It’s not as if on the cultural level we’re having conversations about what an author is up to. If as artists we’re not out there keeping up one-half of the conversation, the conversation isn’t going to happen.”
Two things in particular make Diaz someone people want to talk about. First, there’s his unique prose. When he’s not writing in vivid English, he’s delivering a riotous collision of Spanish and African-American idiom.
He’s not a fan of terms like Spanglish.
“I’d never use that term,” he says emphatically, “because what we’re talking about technically is code-switching – switching between two linguistic registers. People like Yunior (his narrator) exist in two places at once. Whether he’s describing New Jersey or the Dominican Republic or New York or Boston, Yunior is interesting because of his simultaneity, and his code-switching is emblematic of that.”
Yunior has been the go-to main character in all Diaz’s works: chronically unfaithful, usually completely self-absorbed and yet possessed of canny powers of observation. In the new collection of stories, a major theme is love and how to lose it, a subject not often, Diaz declares, taken on by male writers.
“Most of the masculine narrative has everything to do with avoiding domesticity and intimacy in a heterosexual context and avoiding women in general. The love story is the one narrative I’d been taught to avoid, and being discouraged made me think there was probably something in there and I was going to do the opposite and find it.
“For other writers, the national drama plays out in war and the clashes of great nations, but I’m more interested in what happens when love works, when love succeeds and when it fails.”
Doesn’t sound like a guy who’d be facing charges of misogyny, and yet he has been accused of sexism. Yunior would definitely last a nanosecond in a women’s studies course. But Diaz’s response to these attacks is consistent: creating a sexist character isn’t the same thing as being a sexist writer.
No wonder he’s so clued in to the pressure authors face to meet “community” standards. He’s championed female African-American writers – Toni Morrison, for example – who since the 80s have been vilified for telling hard truths about the African-American experience. And he followed closely the intense criticism film director Lee Daniels came under for his devastating portrait of black poverty in Precious. As a Latino writer, Diaz has felt the equivalent.
“In minority communities there’s a sensitivity, often a knee-jerk reaction, to critical representations. There’s a misunderstanding of what an artist does. Artists are not cheerleaders, and we’re not the heads of tourism boards. We expose and discuss what is problematic, what is contradictory, what is hurtful and what is silenced in the culture we’re in.”
When I say that as a lesbian underrepresented in official culture, I’ve bemoaned predictable portraits of members of my own community in the few movies, TV shows and books that exist in a sparse canon, he gets that, too.
But he doesn’t let it lie there.
“That sidesteps what we should be really going after. We’re too afraid to attack, and we’re too afraid to criticize the forces that erased us in the first place. We go after the individual artist who’s trying to present an individual point of view.
“An artist has a right to that perspective, no matter how nutty or stereotypical.”
Interview Clip
Junot Diaz on the controversial review of Alix Ohlin’s novel Inside, published in the New York Times:
For interviews, reviews and more, go to NOW’s IFOA guide.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | twitter.com/susangcole
