Oh no she di-in’t. You’ll have the Latino literary mafia on you in no time.

although i really liked it, i was a little surprised when it was received so well so universally. i mean, i can’t believe not a single reviewer pitched a fit about all those footnotes.

you gotta wonder, though, how many more books he can write in his very distinct ghetto mash-up style before people start thinking of it as schtick.

Race traitor!

Totes jk lol. I’m actually glad you didn’t like it, but I’m not sure why.

@Marco: because you’re e-ville.

Thank you.
I couldn’t get past the second story in Drown. Diaz is an excellent writer (and totally sexy) but having both street and privileged personal experiences, I am ready for something different. Something that can seamlessly mix the two worlds together without relying on fashionable McSpanish or “woe is me, I’m a darkie” to propel it forward. We’re stronger and smarter than that. Like if a novel was written in the style of Guanabee…I’d be all over that.

It’s good to have a variety of responses to any work of art. Juno provides a unique perspective, and I think he deserves to be praised. But it’s not for everyone.

@isobel: you said, “I am ready for something different … without relying on fashionable McSpanish or “woe is me, I’m a darkie” to propel it forward … Like if a novel was written in the style of Guanabee…I’d be all over that.”

I beg to differ. Guanabee is, for the most part, all about the darkie. Most of the posts on this blog are trite and uninspired. That usually annoys the hell out of me, but I understand what they’re doing: Guanabee has to give the target audience what it wants. This is a clever blog in some ways, but it’s totally McSpanish. Of course, that’s to be expected.

If you want something stronger and smarter, then you’ll have to look elsewhere. I’ve read some great Spanish, Mexican, and Argentine blogs (as well as others) that are as good as their American and European counterparts. Guanabee casts too wide a net and can’t satisfy every type of Latino. However, if you’re a smart Brown person, this is the blog for you.

These types of books are written for well educated East-coast Americans by well educated (and connected) pseudo-ethnic writers (ie like Jamaica Kincaid or Salman Rushdie or any popular writer in America today who is non-white).

At the end of the day it’s just masturbatory racism recompiled to look like “authentic” ethnicism so that white people can feel better about themselves because they read the latest Afghan novel about orphans or African novel about poor people.

Junot Diaz couldn’t write a novel like “MiddleSex” for example, because people would get angry - “There’s not enough Latino in it…!” Etc. You know I’m right.

Stay Away! Thanks for writing this.

@.G…A nut

I don’t live in Argentina, Spain or Mexico. I am a smart Brown person living in the US where it means something different to be Latino than it does abroad. This blog relates that perspective and is far more entertaining for casting it’s net widely. It also isn’t the writers’ -of this blog or the beloved Diaz - responsibility to satisfy or represent an entire group of people. It’s to tell a good, honest story.

I stand by that Guanabee is different. Of course they talk about the darkies. You can’t spell Latino without T-A-N. And any blog that can come up with “wundervato” or “spic lit” is soo not McSpanish.

Guanabee may not be obscure enough for some people’s super culto tastes, but it is funny and smartly written. Provided, of course, the readers have a sense of humor and aren’t looking down their nose at anything that isn’t written in the vosotros.

i just started reading his new novel, so i can’t weigh in on it yet, but i wasn’t that into drown. i didn’t really think about it in terms of its “ghettoness,” so much as its hypermasculinity. its the latter that really put me off, but i thought i’d give oscar wao a chance.

thanks for putting your divergent opinion out there, cindy.

As far as writing brown goes, you’re damned if you do or damned if you don’t. It’s either “oh of course they’d write that” or “where’s the beaner?”

I am glad you are writing a dissenting piece on a writer everyone considers great. I hated The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby. Though I think will read this book just to be able to form my own opinion. I think there should be more pieces like this one.

and P.S. awko taco does not equal McSpanish!

Bukowski would have kicked his ass for being a pansy.

This is SO HILARIOUS. Diaz gets lambasted for not being ghett0 enough, for being too Ivy League, for being too (say it) SMART and now he’s too ghetto?!!! That’s why I love him; he’s more complicated than the Cindy Casares of the world give him credit for. I figured it wouldn’t take long before the Diaz backlash started and here it is!! How very brave of guanabee! How surprising! How ORIGINAL! And for the recrod: If Diaz is ghetto then the ghetto sure has changed a lot since the last time i was there. It certainly reads a lot, the ghetto goes now. It loves science fiction and it loves Dominican history! I haven’t been to that ghetto yet. Please send me the address quick so I can move there!

Diaz’s writing is not your cup of tea, Cindy, that’s cool. As someone who loved the novel, who thought it went well beyond “ghetto” or sex or “he said shit,” I am still a little overwhelmed by how EVERY critic creamed themselves over Wao.

But I agree with ysabel mars and onthatnote: Junot is damned if he’s “ghetto” (which is what some readers latch onto, but is not all that’s going on) and damned if he’s not.

The piling on by the commenters is typical of the just-to-be-contrary attitude that Guanabee promotes. Sometimes it works, and for me, sometimes doesn’t. Doesn’t mean I’ll stop reading, but let’s not pretend it’s a deeper cultural judgment than one reader’s opinion (lots of people in publishing are lazy and don’t keep up — you’re getting paid to READ people, stop whining!)

I’m with you, Cindy. I don’t get the Junot Diaz thing at all. I’ve heard him describe his rise to the literary top as “sheer luck,” and I’d have to agree…

As for the appearance of “inspiration” behind his stories, I was forced to meet him and hear him speak back in undergrad for a creative writing class. He really is Yunior, and he will will tell you so. He is the hypermasculine-douche-nerd he writes about. How inspired is that? If you get to meet him at a reading, don’t get me wrong, he’s perfectly charming, but after a a brief exchange, you will soon wonder if all of the “sucio” infidelity he writes about is not his own.

And who in bloody HELL thinks this guy is sexy?

Muchacha Mala: you met Diaz in one class? For an hour? ANd in that hour you know everything about him? You know for a fact he is the ‘hypermasculine-douch-nerd he writes about?’ This isn’t just your speculation or your own projection? No Way! That couldn’t be. If these are our future minds we’re doomed. The lack of generosity, insight and compassion is really a startling thing.

Who said I met Diaz for an hour?! And who said I know everything about him?! Clearly, we’re only doomed, Ysabel-Junot-darling, if people like you continue to politic and win awards for mediocre fiction.

As for JD, he had one of those visiting writer gigs where he was with us for 3 days or so in the creative writing department. I had ample time to speak with him.

And what is more, Ysabel-Junot-in-drag, please READ the post before you comment. I said that we had a conversation, and Junot told me HIMSELF that Yunior is based on his own experiences. This coupled with the fact that he voraciously eyed every pretty girl in class, it is my own assessment that he is more like Yunior, albeit the douche bag, I spoke of earlier. Just check the other posts where many women allege to have slept with him while he cheated on various girlfriends. Better yet, why not ask his “fiancee.”

And please, Junot, give it up and just post your own name from now on. We all know Ysabel is you.

LIke a bad rap song that overemphasizes all the shootings going on in the hood, “Drown” is a huge exaggeration for Whitey in the suburbs to cream over. After his crack head girlfriend sprays the walls of their squatted apartment, they find the door with a new lock and the broken window fixed yet they still find other apartments available. What? One of his characters goes through 2 six packs of Presidente a week. Huh? Is he suppose to have a problem with drinking? I get the feeling that Diaz has never really been there and is trying to wing it through talking to people who have. “Drown” reeks of fakery gone wild. He’s trying too hard. I know because I’ve been in the crack houses in the hood and I’ve smoked the rock. He realizes that his girlfriend was writing him after rifling through his partners pants pockets? What is this? Oh it’s shit. That’s what it is. Diaz needs to keep up the swearing because it “keeps him real.” Perhaps he’ll keep himself up in Cambridge teaching those MIT kids what the ghetto is all about. Yeah Booooyyyy Cambridge up in this mofo beyaaaach.
It’s so fucking awful.

i can’t stand this book. I’m not Latino, but it just seems so full of shit. I liked Hijuelos’ Mambo Kings. that felt real. Maybe I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t even get through it. i cared about Oscar but then it went into all the other family members and I lost it. I do not understand how everyone, I mean everyone, loved this book so much. The style seems so overdone and Sandra Cisneroish or just bullshit. it didn’t seem authentic at all. just cliche after cliche. I think A.O Scott’s NYtimes revew is the only negative one. is everyone kissing up to this guy because the New Yorker published his stuff years back? I usually like the New Yorker too. this feels really polticically motivated to me. i guess i’m not the target audience. I wonder what George Lopez would say about this? I loved his stand up. Maybe we should ask Big Papi or Manny being Manny? i doubt junot knows anything about baseball. I’m rambling. it seems the only thing authentic is the thread of narnia or tolkien geekville fantasy pimple stuff .. so why not stick to that? dorkville! Man Gone Down by michael Thomas? now there’s a book.

btw- i know nothing about Trujillo or DR history so if Diaz hit the mark, that’s a good thing. But the delivery is just mad annoying yo and like, teenagerish. I heard “feast of the Goat” is a good one about Trujillo and the DR.

now I haven’t read “Drown” but what’s this I hear about a character drinking 12 beers in a week and having a drinking problem? please don’t tell me Diaz wrote that.

Diaz is not a good writer; I’m not even sure if he’s mediocre. I’d say he’s a creative typist but I have no interest in insulting keyboards and typewriters nationwide, friendly little punchbuttons that they are. It’s always been perplexing (and suspicious) how no one could see how poorly constructed the novel is, so full of cliches, futile and uninteresting meandering, lazy musing, and jokes so unamusing Mr. Diaz would have done well to have gone searching for the Muse to end all Muses. Perhaps getting drunk on actual alcohol instead of succumbing to the sugar rush induced by green tea would have done him some good (man up, Diaz!) I can go on and on, elaborate insulting metaphors, but doing so to an unruly extent seems pointless.

Just know that there are writers out there who are gunning for you, Diaz. Because we know that you’re full of shit (you lived in the burbs, pal, not the streets—I’ve seen your so-called hood, so I know all about your game), we know that you can’t write worth a lick, we know that you put up a front and we know that you’re a bigheaded dude that needs his bubble burst. You’ve played the pity game to the letter, you’ve slanged it up and kowtowed, and you’ve garnered enough accolades and benefits with your bend and shuffle.
Enjoy the fruits of your soul-selling, hombre, but tremble at what’s coming in the horizon.