Junot Díaz will read at the Brattle Theatre on Wednesday, September 12, at 6:00 pm. Tickets are $5 and are available through Harvard Book Store.

Some books are interesting. Some books are memorable. Some books may eventually win prizes. And then there are the books that, one day, will be taught in classrooms as an example of how writing is really done.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by author and MIT prof Junot Díaz, is one of those books. Díaz follows a family from the Dominican Republic who flees the Trujillo regime and winds up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar is the son of the beautiful, tough, abused Beli, whose loves brought her nothing but pain and exile from her home country. Oscar appears to us through the eyes of one of his sister's friends, and he emerges as a huge, geeky sci-fi nerd with a habit of posting signs in Sindarin on his dorm room door. He doesn't have the beauty of his mother or his older sister, Lola, but his heart is as huge as his body.

Díaz spoke to us about how Oscar came to be, the fact that it's been years since his last published work (the short-story collection Drown), and chromatropes.

Why did you decide to use your particular narrative approach instead of the standard third- or first-person format?

Part of it is that there's a lot that the narrator is hiding in plain sight. A better way of saying it - this is one of those weird books that's about what's not really being said. I thought one of the most interesting things about the book for me is that it is constantly about these missing things that we have. The mother's entire childhood is missing, no one knows what is really going on. The grandfather is disappeared by the government, imprisoned, tortured, a whole slice of his life disappeared. I felt like one of the biggest absences was hiding in plain sight, which is that we actually never meet directly the protagonist. The protagonist, Oscar, is always filtered through this other narrator, Yunior. Part of it was this desire to make Oscar simultaneously present but also entirely invisible. It was a strategy to talk a lot about how do you put a story together from fragments and how you put a story together from absences.

Were you geeky? Where did you tap into the loneliness that is described in the book?

Were you geeky? I can't imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn’t pass through a time of geekiness. I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading. In the neighborhood I grew up in, that was about as geeky as you could possibly get. No one cared what the hell I read. I could have been reading books on high-energy physics, or I could have been reading Hardy Boys. It was all exactly the same things. Part of what really mattered to me was whether you come from the kind of neighborhood I came from or whether you came from a place like Cambridge, I think that the intellectual life is amazingly lonely in a country like ours.

More particularly, Oscar's interests guaranteed him an enormous amount of isolation, being interested in science-fiction, being interested in fantasy and living in the world these days. Nobody really cared. He didn't have that many interlocutors. But I think that probably what is more problematic was that he was a kid who couldn't find it in him to pretend to be something he wasn't. And that was something I always kind of admired about Oscar as protagonist. I knew that I couldn't myself personally risk the censure and the ostracization to be so honest to myself. Like I said, anyone who has ever been a kid knows how deep loneliness can go. Part of where I get the writing from is being honest about what childhood was like.

More interview after the jump! Image of the book cover from Amazon.

There's a lot of suffering in the book. One character faces tragedy after tragedy, and a reader might think, "Hasn't this poor character suffered enough?" Is there a point where a writer goes, "OK, this character has learned enough through suffering."

It's like a discussion of chromatrope, of time-space. What Belicia suffers in this book, for me it is unbearable. But when I think about the time-space that she came out of - a third-world country in the grip of a horrific, violent dictatorship … in some ways she got off pretty easy. One of the things I found myself is that the further you move away from Oscar, who is trapped in his own body, he is trapped in his own body-prison, both of being a person of color in the United States at a certain time but also of being fat, but then I look at Belicia, and terrible things happened to her. The real thing, the end point is that she survives. Then you look at the grandfather, and he doesn't survive at all. Part of me felt that I wanted to be honest to what was happening to a lot of people in that time-space. The narrator makes it quite clear when he says, "Hey, if she'd been in Korea at this time, she would have been in worse shape than she is now!" It is not that I'm like, some sort of fucking evil brute. I think that one has to be honest to what these other worlds were like. In a way, Belicia would never have traded her life for what her grandfather experienced. If you look around, there's always someone who has it worse than you do. Part of me was trying to be honest to that time-space, the consequences of being in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo Regime were unspeakable.

Yunior [the narrator] name-checks Iraq a few times and criticizes the US government's tendency to prop up strong men in other nations. Was it your intention to make a political statement in the book, not necessarily about Iraq but about propping up regimes, or is politics inseparable from any family or any individual's history?

I just can't imagine that one is a writer in the Americas and not in some way directly confronting the enormous, the tremendous, the colossal power of the United States and the consequences of that power. Even if you're writing a comedic novel, something of this is going to leak in somewhere. I think for me, it's not so much that any more political or any less political than anyone else. My problem was that I was writing a book in the Americas. And no matter how much you try, you are eventually going to graze against that question, what it means to live in a world where there's one country that is so asymmetrically powerful and what are the consequences of that power? It's a hard question to avoid.

You've probably been asked this a million times. Why such a long wait between your first collection and this novel?

I don’t know. There's no real answer that would satisfy anybody. In other words, I have no fuckin' idea. The book took what it took. What really wigs me out is for there to be a wait means that people are waiting. What really flips me out is that readers are incredibly loyal. Had I been an MC, no one would have been waiting around for an album after three years. I would have been completely forgotten. What really wigged me out was how many people were actually waiting, that there was this very small core of loyal readers who had been moved or touched or a part of themselves had been awakened from reading earlier work, and they really wanted more. I've never seen anything like it. What we do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.

Did you have a game plan when you started writing this novel? Or did you start writing and see what happened?

Like most people, I had a game plan. But most people have a game plan, and it doesn't collapse underneath them as frequently as mine did. What was crazy about me was that I had 8 or 9 game plans, and each time I had to revise those and change them and abandon them. It was a novel that was very much like one of the mythical characters in the book. It always eluded me. It always eluded me. I'm glad it did because it meant that I had to sit in it longer and I had to really understand the character and to balance the humor and the tragedy. Believe me, when I was going through the process, I wasn't happy that it eluded me. The best way to put it, yeah, I had about 25 game plans, and each one got thrown in the garbage.

What classes do you teach at MIT, and how your teaching affects your writing?

I don't know. It's hard to understand how anything affects such an unconscious process as writing. The one thing I know is that being at MIT, which is such a singular, bizarre, exciting, challenging, and often ominous institution - for me it was, like, really cool. I had a lot of fun there with my students. My colleagues are really wild. It's not every day you get to work at a place where everybody, even at the bottom end, is a fuckin' genius. For me, I learned so much. You meet people who work while they're awake or while they're sleeping. MIT exposed me to a world that I had never imagined before. That more than anything else probably had an impact on my writing, to meet all these people doing all these kinda fuckin' cool things who are really exciting and who are at the top of their field, and meeting students who are suddenly thrown into this world, students who at their high school were geniuses and now have to wrestle with the concept that they're just one genius among a couple thousand other geniuses. It's been a deep pleasure for me.