NYPL: Interview With Junot Diaz

One of my favorite meetings of 2016 was with the writing of Junot Díaz. I began with his only novel to date – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – and moved on to his two short story collections. His writing is colloquial, simple, neither directing nor invasive, and terrifically compelling. The worlds he creates and the characters he puts in them are very unique. And perhaps the thing I love the most, amidst all the poor decision-making and harshness, is the pitilessness – the idea (very antithetical to all Beat Generation writing, I think) that people are dealt a hand, and all they can do is play that hand. No shame, no remorse, no complaint. It’s not a common occurrence in modern fiction.

This podcast unites Díaz with one of my favorite interviewers, Paul Holdengräber, in a long and lovely conversation. In it, Díaz spends some wonderful time considering intimacy, and different responsibilities he affords (and expects from) his reader. As in:

There's that idea that every book teaches its reader how to read it and that you've got to have faith that there will be some people that will be willing to stay in the game that you create. For me, there's a game in every one of the books I've written. There's a game that I kind of want participation from my reader not only to help assemble the book at a line by line level but at a larger textual and characterological level, so I guess part of what's going on with me is I just kind of assume that I have this great trust that people will have as much tolerance for unintelligibility as I do.

He then spends a moment on a concept I love -- the spaces between things (Yo-Yo Ma comes to mind here) -- and the idea of "seduction" in fiction. His directness and candor is so easy to follow, and so rare.