Those of you familiar with Victoria Lautman’s Writers On The Record series may already know that the series has moved from Lookingglass Theatre to the Chicago Public Library.  Victoria’s first taping in her new home was this past Friday, September 12th, and she interviewed Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz about his new book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

I wasn’t really in the mood to see him speak in the first place, but like most writers, I have to force myself out of the house so I don’t turn into a lady-with-cats, and I was promised a free drink by the friend who went with me.  Plus Díaz is a hot ticket right now.  In addition to all of his fancy prizes, “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” from his 1996 collection Drown, appears in the anthology I use with my fiction students, and his current book was recommended to me by a member of the Oprah staff who’s required to know such things. So I pretty much had to.

I got there a little less than an hour before the show.  When Salman Rushdie was at the Library last month, I made the mistake of showing up only ½ an hour before the talk and wound up in an overflow room watching him speak on a TV, and I wasn’t about to have that happen again.  15 minutes or so before the show started, Lautman and Díaz came out.  He was completely silent as she warmed up the crowd and seemed to be looking for an escape route.  I assumed he would fumble nervously, but instead he came on like that dude on your bar league softball team who insists that winning is very important.  Every description of a passage from his book by Lautman was followed up by a “well, actually.” It got to the point where the usually unflappable Lautman presented him with an either-or question, joking that one of the answers had to be right, only to be told that “a book is not a test.” Sorry, guess you got that one wrong too, Victoria. 

Snotty-pants attitude aside, Díaz had some important things to say about authority and identity.  His attitude was, in part, explained by how he looks at writing.  His sometimes trivial footnotes, un-italicized Spanish, and the hub-bub over his character narrator (spoiler alert: the narrator’s identity isn’t revealed until later chapters of the book, but is discussed in this interview) have everything to do with his being a Dominican writer.  Like Langston Hughes, he questions those writers who want to be “just a writer,” a term previously reserved for, as Díaz puts it, “some white dude”.  He maintains that he cannot honestly claim a “universal transcendence” for his writing that he doesn’t see in his life, and he emphasizes that only through the particular can one even approach the universal.

As a “woman writer” I found these ideas to be relevant to my own search for a writerly identity; those who have been excluded from the traditional canon will always be asked these questions whether they want to deal with identity or not, and Díaz confronts it outright.  He was particularly gracious with questions from audience members that spoke to that confrontation.  Perhaps he gave them the benefit he would not give Lautman because they could better understand the source of his particular brand of what he termed recalcitrance.

I wouldn’t want to go to a tea party with the guy, lest he unleash his ire on me, but his verbal dexterity, and his passion for creating a realistic multiplicity of voices make him an important writer to know.

You can listen to the interview on Victoria Lautman’s website.  It aired on Sunday, September 14th on WFMT.