This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

Previously published in The Herald magazine. 

Junot Diaz just doesn’t seem to be able to shake off Yunior, the major star of his first collection of stories Drown, his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and now his newest collection This is How You Lose Her. Perhaps Diaz doesn’t want to shake him off - he does, of course, have so much in common with Yunior that is it often hard to differentiate between the writer and his protagonist, between what is autobiographical and what is fiction. One thing is certain - Diaz’ narrative has retained the powerful staccato rhythms of language and insights that earned him the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and more recently, a MacArthur Fellowship ‘Genius Grant’. 

This is How You Lose her is a collection of short stories tethered to each other by more than just Yunior’s presence. This collection is about the Dominican diaspora and the immigrant experience; it is also about infidelity, love and relationships. There are stories set in Yunior’s childhood at the very start of his life in New Jersey, stories set when Yunior is a bookish teenager in watching his brother seduce all the neighbourhood’s girls, dealing with illness and death as his brother is diagnosed with leukemia but refuses to change his ways: ‘he prided himself on being the neighborhood lunatic, and he wasn’t going to let a little thing like cancer get in the way.’ Each story is perfectly balanced, taut and effective, each complete in itself even though they are all set in the same world and share many characters. 

Yunior seems incapable of a stable, monogamous relationship but is insistent right at the very start that he’s ‘not a bad guy. I know how that sounds - defensive, unscrupulous - but it’s true. I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good.’ What says a great deal about Diaz’ writing prowess is that even though it would be very easy to dislike Yunior for his incredibly sexist language and his constant reduction of women into mere fetish objects, he remains an appealing and interesting narrator. There are many sexist descriptions of women present, like ‘dude had thrown away better bitches’ or ‘a chest you wouldn’t believe’, or ‘no breasts…no ass, even her hair failed to make the grade’ that make it seem that Diaz’ treatment of his female characters in This is How…is problematic. Is Yunior’s constant objectification of women uncomfortably misogynistic? Yes it is. Does this make the stories less appealing? Strangely, no, it does not. What it does is give a clever, even humorous insight into the gender dynamics of Dominican immigrants. 

There are two elements in Diaz’ writing that add to the firm confidence of the language of This is How… One is the use of the second person in a number of stories, including the very last which is entirely written in the second person. The second is the use of frequent asides to provide the reader with details of the past, secrets hidden from other characters. It is only a writer of extreme skill and surety who is able to pull that off without the language immediately taking on the tone of a 1980s Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Of course, it helps that Diaz’ language moves with the control of a perfectly timed piece of music: filled with street slang, the narrative is entirely confident with a great command over English, accented with a solid, thumping Latin beat.