Dazzling return for Díaz

Jenny Shank, Special to the Rocky

Published September 7, 2007 at midnight

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Plot in a nutshell: Yunior, the same mouthy, lady-loving Dominican-American young man who won readers over in Díaz's previous acclaimed book, Drown, returns to narrate this story of a family suffering from fuku, described as "the Curse and the Doom of the New World" - something many Dominicans fear.

In the Dominican Republic of the 1940s, the Cabral family has the misfortune to tangle with the "high priest" of fuku, Rafael Trujillo ("the Dictatingest Dictator that ever Dictated"), resulting in the deaths of everyone in the family except youngest daughter Belicia. The curse follows Belicia as she grows up, but her aunt manages to save her after a brutal beating and send her to America, where she has two children, Lola and Oscar.

Oscar is an overweight nerd, obsessed with science fiction and fantasy, who used up all his lady luck in elementary school. He reaches his 20s still burdened with his virginity, pining after every girl he sees. Yunior enters the picture as a love interest of Lola, and she persuades him to room with Oscar at Rutgers so he can watch out for him.

As the title suggests, fuku catches up with Oscar eventually, but not before he's had the chance to reach for redemption through a passionate love for a middle-aged prostitute. Throughout the book, Díaz uses slangy, opinionated footnotes to fill the reader in on Dominican history relevant to the story.

Sample of prose: "[Belicia] was defensive and aggressive and mad overreactive. You said something slightly off-color about her shoes and she brought up the fact that you had a slow eye and danced like a goat with a rock stuck in its a--. Ouch. You would just be playing and homegirl would be coming down on you off the top rope."

Pros: Díaz's language is a delight: funny, energetic, often crude and without boundaries, mixing in lots of untranslated Spanish. There's a hip-hop verve to his prose that's transporting, and for all its macho bravado, latent sensitivity comes through in strong scenes about female characters.

Cons: The narrator, revealed 100 pages into the story to be one of the book's characters, is able to describe in detail scenes he couldn't have been present for, and in places the perspective shifts radically between characters and narrator within the space of a paragraph. This free-form narration can be confusing but also produces much of the book's charm.

Final word: Díaz fans who have been waiting more than a decade for the follow-up to Drown won't be disappointed. The author's unique voice comes through bullhorn loud.

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