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Islandborn

My hero, Junot Diaz, is in the news.

Two things. After a long silence, he's back with a picture book-- "Islandborn." More on that later. (It's a thing for writers of serious contemporary fiction to dabble in children's stories. Amy Bloom wrote "Little Sweet Potato." Lorrie Moore wrote "The Forgotten Helper.")

And: Diaz has written a piece in "The New Yorker" about having been raped when he was eight years old. A fan noticed the recurring role of sexual abuse in his stories, and asked about it. Thus: the piece. (On at least one other occasion, Diaz used a note from a fan to prompt a new piece of work. That was when someone asked, "What do we do now that Trump is elected?")

Here are some things to notice in a Diaz piece. The language seems simple, but it's relentlessly poetic. Bits of figurative inventiveness all over the place. "She treats me like I ate somebody's favorite kid." "She's smiling so much you'd think her wide-ass mouth was going to unhinge." "Then the Letter hits like a Star Trek grenade and detonates everything, past, present, future." Also: Notice that the narrator is inevitably a fool. The narrator is inevitably Billy Bigelow, from "Carousel." You love him, because he's a mess. He's not a superhero. You want to take care of him. You want to say, Yes, I know; we do stupid things; life is hard.

Diaz has more fun with profanity than just about anyone else I know. "Magda only found out about my cheating because homegirl wrote her a fucking letter. And the letter had details. Shit you wouldn't even tell your boys drunk." "Her father, who used to treat me like his hijo, calls me an asshole on the phone, sounds like he's strangling himself with the cord." "She considers me a typical Dominican man: a sucio, an asshole." "This is when my boys claim they would have a pulled a Total Fucking Denial."

Diaz is interested in the experience of "being an outsider," and he tells this particular story through (seemingly) incidental details. "We were eating breakfast together at diners hours before anybody else was up, rummaging through the New Brunswick library together, the one Carnegie built with his guilt money." (You can bet, if the writer were John Updike, you would not see that line about the guilt money.) "How to date a brown girl (black girl, white girl, or halfie): Clear the government cheese from the refrigerator." Sometimes, it seems, Diaz is playing a game with himself: "How many *New Yorker* readers can I startle in the space of just one sentence?"

And, lastly, Diaz has fun with two different languages together on the page. "Her father is angry. You no deserve I speak to you in Spanish, he says. I see one of Magda's girlfriends at the Woodbridge mall--Claribel, the ecuatoriana with the biology degree and the chinita eyes--and she treats me like [shit]." The story under the story: You no deserve I speak to you in Spanish is a fresh, *sui generis* way of saying, I despise you. "The ecuatoriana with the biology degree and the chinita eyes": A brand new "verbal tag," a memorable variation on Homer's "wine-dark sea."

Diaz regularly makes me feel less alone. "I'm 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." Perhaps we should all have that tattooed across our foreheads. And: Who would choose not to keep reading after these frank, confident, compassionate first sentences?

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