The Outsider Is In: An Immigrant's Stories

As it turned out, she needn't have worried.

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"The work is fresh and pulsing with a vitality rare in American literature," Proulx wrote in her letter of support. It is "richly slangy, gliding in and out of Spanish and English in almost a newly-invented lingua, threaded with reeking doom, heat, hair, inquieto, and the unsatisfiable yearning of alienated yet closely-bonded characters."

All this plus hilarious footnotes, extended metaphors from Tolkien and characters out of Marvel Comics, too.

Díaz says he borrowed the footnote notion from a favorite Caribbean novel, Patrick Chamoiseau's "Texaco." Written in a wildly non-academic voice (yet nonetheless educational), the notes offer edgy evocations of the largely forgotten horrors perpetrated by Dominican dictator-for-life Rafael Trujillo, without whom the Dominican diaspora is impossible to understand.

Tolkien shows up everywhere -- Trujillo is Sauron, his henchmen are Ringwraiths, a guarded upper-class enclave is "so Minas Tirith" -- but the references are never explained. Neither, for the most part, are allusions to the Marvel universe and to numerous other works of pop or high culture. If you're unfamiliar with Galactus the planet-eater or the works of Joseph Conrad, you're on your own, just as you are in the many untranslated Spanish passages.

Díaz's failure to explain and translate was in part an effort to suggest the immigrant point of view.

"There's always a space in every immigrant's life which is reserved for what you don't understand," he says. "In this book, I wanted there to be for everybody an area that they didn't understand, so that we would all share, in one place or another, this moment of unintelligibility."

A related point: Those pop-culture references aren't there just because he and Oscar love what Díaz calls "the genres." Immigration is such an apocalyptic upheaval, he says, that "the quote unquote realistic novel," which tends to "marginalize extreme experiences," has trouble evoking it.

Time-travel narratives come much closer, he thinks.

And hey: "Some of the myths that nation-states hold dear are no less absurd than Hobbits."

By way of example, Díaz mentions "benevolent occupations," "exporting democracy" and "American exceptionalism." He discusses the myth of painless immigrant assimilation, which, like the magician's trick of misdirection, "exists so that no one looks any further."

Mythology, he concludes, should be an equal-opportunity realm: