Review: "This Is How You Lose Her" by Junot Diaz

Another late review of another very recent book, Junot Diaz's "This Is How You Lose Her" (2012). At this rate I'm going to be putting together a Best Books of 2012 list! (I'm not actually going to make that. I read books to escape from the endless chasing of trends and fads, not to wallow in it. Books enable us to slow down and ponder; trying to read everything in the zeitgeist defeats the purpose, in my opinion.)

Diaz won the Pulitzer back in 2007 for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which I also read and thoroughly enjoyed. I learned a great deal about the history of the Dominican Republic, specifically about the reign of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the island nation with blood and terror from 1930 to 1961. And I especially liked "Oscar Wao" because Diaz relied heavily on fantasy and science fiction analogies to explain the complex politics and history of Trujillo's Santo Domingo.

"Lose Her" is a much more intimate novel. Written as a series of interconnected short stories, the book centers around the narrator Yunior, who can't stop screwing around on his girlfriend Magda. She leaves him and he just can't seem to get over it, even though he was the one who kept a truly shocking number of sucias on the side.

"Sucia" and the masculine "sucio," as near as I can tell, means "slut." With Google Translate, it would be extremely easy for me to look up the exact meanings behind all of the Spanish words and phrases scattered throughout Diaz's prose--in fact, others who've read Diaz tell me they get frustrated because they keep stopping to look up definitions--but I don't bother. One, because context usually provides clues to meaning, and two, because I know the teensiest bit of Spanish and can figure most phrases out if I give it a moment's thought. I don't often try, though. Diaz hits that sweet spot of just enough Spanish words, but not too many of them, making prose that is both readable and slightly mysterious. We can peek through the windows into these characters' world, but can't just walk in through the front door whenever we please.

Another thing I like about the Spanish-English prose is that it really gives the impression of Diaz writing for an audience of Dominican Americans. I'm always slightly bothered by authors who go to foreign countries and write about the people in those countries, because those authors aren't writing for those people; they're writing for other (white) people at home to better understand the "foreigners." That's why Isabella Bird's "The Hawaiian Archipelago" didn't get an A on my rating system and why Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony" did.

Ah, hell, I didn't review "The Hawaiian Archipelago" yet? I so clearly remember building that post in my mind. Is it possible I just thought about it so hard that I completely forgot to actually write it? This is my real problem with having a book blog: I read too much. Every time Saturday rolls around, I've got about three books I've finished that week that I can review, so I pick one and tell myself I'll review the others the next time around--by which time I've finished three more books! I'm going to have to write more reviews. Or read less books, I guess.

Where was I? Right, Junot Diaz's "This Is How You Lose Her" reads like a book written by and for an audience of Dominican Americans, and I very much enjoy that kind of writing. There's a whole sub-genre of Pidgin literature in Hawaii that seeks to legitimize the language and culture of local residents descended from the East Asian and Pacific Rim immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I took a class on Pidgin Lit in college and learned a lot about how language shapes cultural and individual identity.

For example, if Diaz had used the English word "slut" instead of "sucio" or "sucia," the true meaning of the term would have been lost. "Slut" has all sorts of cultural and moral baggage attached to it, but it's the baggage of the English-speaking society from which it originates. "Sucio" has an entirely different meaning and significance for the Spanish-speaking society that uses it. Swapping "sucio" for "slut" doesn't work because each society has different attitudes toward sex and morality. For one thing, "slut" applies only to women and has no male equivalent, whereas "sucio/sucia" is both masculine and feminine depending on the suffix and can apply to either gender. That right there says a lot about the different ways sexuality is expressed and viewed in the English- and Spanish-speaking cultures that Diaz explores in his work.

This brings us back to the plot of the book. Yunior is muy sucio, as was his father, his brother, and all of his friends. They all have clandestine sex and sometimes even children outside of their primary relationships, and they measure the strength of their masculinity by the number of women they fuck. How the women feel about this behavior doesn't matter to them, because they figure they can always find another woman if one leaves them in disgust. Yunior finds the flaw in this logic when the woman who leaves him is the one woman he desperately wants to keep, and no girlfriend he finds afterwards can replace her.

I see some similarities between Yunior and Madame Bovary, who also slept around on her partner out of ill-defined boredom and a desire to make her life fit the pattern of some archetypal romantic heroine. However, Madame Bovary models her sexual life on the trashy romance novels she reads. Yunior models his behavior on his real-life family and peers, which makes his situation almost more hopeless than hers because he has the tacit encouragement and approval of everyone around him to keep acting like a cheating piece of shit, even when it costs him everything. 

"This Is How You Lose Her" isn't a very happy book, but it is a realistic one that thoroughly explores the damaged psyche of a man who lost a good woman because of his society's poisonous attitudes toward sex and relationships. We can file this one away under the "sexism hurts men, too" umbrella. Patriarchy--it's a bitch.

Final Grade: B. Recommended for those who like a tragic love story, seeing a cheater get what's coming to him, or exploring the dark side of sexism from the perspective of someone who benefits from it.

Review: "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier

Now we're cooking with gas.

"Rebecca" was published in 1938 to great critical and popular acclaim and it's considered a modern classic according to the tattered cover of the copy I found on someone's door stoop here in Brooklyn. That's right, this is a stoop find, and wow is it a good one! I didn't realize that it was written so recently. I only know it from clips of the Alfred Hitchcock movie (1940), and that footage led me to believe that "Rebecca" was a Gothic romance from the time of "Wuthering Heights."

The book is definitely a Gothic romance in plot and tone, but it's set in England in the 1930s, so while much of the setting is relatively modern--car travel and telephones are heavily featured--the characters themselves and their attitudes toward each other are holdovers from the Victorian era. There's a lot of interesting juxtaposition between the modern and the ancient in "Rebecca," embodied most strongly in the two mistresses of Manderley.

Rebecca de Winter was the first wife of Maxim de Winter, master of the famous estate and mansion Manderley. I think Maxim must be titled in some way because of the paternalistic way he talks about the people of the nearby town and countryside, and the way those peripheral characters talk about him, but you never learn what his exact title is. Rebecca herself probably has a title, too, because much is made of her good breeding and upbringing. Suffice to say that both Maxim and Rebecca are of the same landed gentry class.

The second Mrs. de Winter (and the narrator), whose first name we never learn, isn't landed gentry. At the beginning of the book, she's actually more of a maid, running errands for an obnoxious American in Monte Carlo. She meets and falls in love with Maxim there. Even though she's only known him for two weeks, and she's twenty years younger than him, AND they're at opposite ends of the social spectrum, she says yes to his marriage proposal and they bum around Italy for a while. Like ya do.

At this point, Rebecca has been dead for almost a year from a well-publicized boating accident, and the narrator is more than a little nervous about stepping into her role as mistress of the fabulous Manderley. Mrs. de Winter doesn't know how to command a staff of servants and she has no experience in socializing with people in the upper class, so she's already at a disadvantage. To make matters worse, Rebecca was apparently a joy and a pleasure to all who came across her, and everywhere she turns, the shy and diffident Mrs. de Winter finds herself compared to the glamorous Rebecca and coming up short. There are even some individuals lurking in the sidelines who miss Rebecca so terribly that they're actively plotting against Mrs. de Winter and her fledgling marriage to Maxim.

"Rebecca" isn't a ghost story in the traditional sense because there are no specters or ghouls, no doors blowing shut mysteriously or cold drafts from unexplained sources. Rebecca herself is most assuredly dead throughout the entire book. But she was such a mighty presence in life that Mrs. de Winter and Maxim feel haunted by her, by the memories that their servants and friends have of her, and by the house and grounds she decorated and designed. In a way, "Rebecca" is a more effective ghost story than one with an actual ghost in it because it is so realistic. It illustrates on how people live on after they die, in their physical possessions and in  hearts and minds of their social circle, and how difficult it is to bury the past when evidence of it is all around you.

But "Rebecca" is also a bit of a murder mystery, right down to the scene at the end where the detective gathers the players together in the library to go over the evidence and decide whodunit. But du Maurier turns this convention on its head as well, because we already know whodunit and why, and all of the characters do, too. It's a suspenseful scene where everyone is just waiting to see if the evidence will add up to the horrid truth or reinforce the comfortable lie.

"Rebecca" is a murder mystery without any mystery, and a ghost story without any ghost. It's a meditation on the encroachment of the modern world into the traditional one, and also questions just how wonderful "tradition" actually is. Does good breeding and a sparkling wit mean that one is a good person? Can someone still be good if they perform terrible deeds? What is the price of good appearances and a stiff upper lip?

"Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier: A.

Recommended for anyone who likes a good ghost story, a Gothic romance, or the movie "Gosford Park." The movie isn't considered one of Hitchcock's best, though, so I'd avoid it unless you're really into Hitchcock.