The Outsider Is In: An Immigrant's Stories

Díaz was jarred by his success. "When you get a break from fighting for your life," he says, "all these debts that you've been deferring suddenly come due." He now had the luxury of getting depressed.

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"It changed his identity," says novelist Francisco Goldman, a close friend. "It was very, very difficult." He'd been an outsider, then "all of a sudden he was a successful American."

Díaz made several attempts at the promised second book, but they didn't work out. He earned his living teaching, at Syracuse and then at MIT. A decade went by.

Finally, he finished "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani promptly praised as "original" and "galvanic."

Like "Drown," it is narrated in large part by Yunior. Like that first book, too, it centers on a family of Dominican immigrants. But that's where the obvious similarities end. "Oscar" is filled with strong women. And the title character -- at least on the surface -- is as unlike Yunior as he could possibly be.

Oscar de León (the "Wao" is a nickname derived from a mispronunciation of Oscar Wilde) is an overweight, fantasy- and science-fiction-loving, impossibly un-macho kid who "looked straight out of a Daniel Clowes comic book." At one point, he upsets Yunior, with whom he's sharing a Rutgers dorm room, by chalking a phrase from "The Fellowship of the Ring" on their door.

"In [expletive] Elvish!" Yunior reports.

Then: "Please don't ask me how I know this. Please!"

Superhero twist, anyone? It's hard to read these lines and not see Yunior as Junot Díaz, trying to keep his "completely normal" mask on.

Which would make Oscar his secret nerd identity, revealed at last.

'No Less Absurd Than Hobbits'

Annie Proulx met Díaz not long after the publication of "Drown." The author of "The Shipping News" and "Brokeback Mountain" had pegged him as "an exciting young writer." But some years later, when Díaz was up for tenure at MIT and Proulx was asked to read a portion of "Oscar" before writing a letter of support, she "approached the task with trepidation."

Too many wonderful first story collections, she explains in an e-mail, are "followed by less exciting novels."