The Outsider Is In: An Immigrant's Stories

"If it's okay for people to have these fantastic myths to help them organize their beliefs, I might as well deploy the fantastic myths of my childhood to help me organize and give meaning to things which there isn't language to give meaning to."

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'Consequences Catch Up to You'

But perhaps the central myth of Díaz's childhood -- one with which, in his novel, all the major characters must contend -- is the myth of hypermasculinity, the notion of how real men are supposed to behave.

Short version: They're supposed to chase every skirt they see.

The specific culture Díaz grew up in, he says, was one "where having a lot of girlfriends was a given, and, for my father, was a big part of what he considered his identity."

In "Drown," Yunior's father drags him along when he visits a lover. In real life, Díaz decided not to be like his dad, but he couldn't seem to help himself.

"You say to yourself, 'I'm not going to be like my parents in this way,' " he recalls. "And I can still remember the day when I betrayed that constant mantra."

He was at Rutgers. He had a girlfriend, "and I was always super-serious about my girlfriend." But one day some friends showed up at his apartment with a bunch of eager women who had just failed tryouts at a local strip bar.

Díaz excused himself: "I was like, 'Oh, I've got to go to bed now.' " His friends derided him. As he sat on the edge of his bed, he remembers thinking: "I'm weak. I'm [expletive] weak. I'm just going to do this."

A few years back, he published a nonfiction piece in the New Yorker that hinged on infidelity. In it, he's about to travel to the Dominican Republic for the first time in almost 20 years when his traveling companion, a woman he cares deeply about, learns that he's cheated on her. The relationship does not survive.

"She broke my heart, that girl did," Díaz wrote, "which was a fair trade, considering that I'd broken hers first."

"Consequences catch up to you," he says now. "There comes a point where you're taking more out of the world than you're putting in." He started asking himself, "Why am I always so miserable, and why is it that all the people that used to date me hate me?"

"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" is dedicated to Díaz's fiancee, Elizabeth de León, who is a lawyer in the New York attorney general's office.

Writing his novel, Díaz says, he was obsessed with the concept "of a society that so values certain kinds of masculinity."

He created Oscar -- the nerd who doesn't look like he has an ounce of macho in him, the terminally lonely guy who wants desperately to be a Dominican ladies' man -- as "my foil, my way of talking about these kind of issues."

He created Oscar's fierce mother, the beautiful, scarred Belicia, whose life is almost destroyed when a Trujillo lieutenant takes her as a teenage mistress. (Díaz got so enamored of Belicia, in fact, that she almost took over the book.)

He created Lola, Oscar's equally fierce and beautiful sister, who shares narrating duties with Yunior and would be his perfect love if his "completely normal" male ego would only shrink enough for him to stop running around.

Díaz, says Francisco Goldman, digs into the macho hang-ups of Latino men the same way Philip Roth took on "the things that most discomfited Jews -- savagely and comically and bravely." But Goldman, whose mother was born Guatemalan, is also concerned that writers such as Díaz and himself "break this stereotype people have" of Latino writers.

"It's not our job to explain ethnicity," he says.

As for Díaz himself: In the course of a two-hour conversation, he repeatedly confirms that immigration is "the root of who I am as an artist." Yet he's just as comfortable weighing in on innumerable other literary topics.

He brings up the English children's writer Enid Blyton, another of his childhood favorites. "As a kid, I was comforted so profoundly by writers who could never have imagined me," he says.

He holds forth on writers he loves, from Kiran Desai to Edwidge Danticat to Alexandre Dumas. Right now, he's immersed in "Grotesque," by the Japanese writer Natsuo Kirino. He thinks the greatest living American writer is Samuel Delany, a name better known to science-fiction aficionados than to the reading public generally ("his text that I recommend to everyone is his labyrinth novel called 'Dhalgren' ").

What will he be working on next?

Well, there's one of the projects he started before "Oscar," a historical fantasy that sometimes gets referred to as "a Caribbean 'Lord of the Rings.' " He's written one volume, but doesn't know when he'll get to the three more he's planned.

But first, he'll go back to something he calls "my destruction of New York City" novel, of which he'd written a couple hundred pages before the Sept. 11 attacks. In it, he invents a persecuted minority -- people so neurologically sensitive that they can't be lied to, and die of emotional burnout before they're 30 -- who turn on the humans oppressing them.

It's hard to know what to make of this without reading it, of course, but it does make one thing perfectly clear:

Junot Díaz has outgrown the need to conceal his inner nerd.