Geek Chick

(originally published on MOLI 5/15/8)

Oscar Wao and Newell Ewing are comic-book fanatics. Both outsider youths have bodacious moms and superhero complexes. Wao is an obese Dominican in Paterson, New Jersey, who’s seemingly stuck in a perennial virginal pubescence. Ewing is an actually pubescent WASP denizen of suburban Las Vegas. Both nerds are ‘07 literary heroes: Wao is the titular protagonist of Junot Diaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, while Ewing is the missing child at the center of Charles Bock’s debut novel, Beautiful Children.

Both books were released, the former by Penguin, the latter by Random House, to an envious amount of hype (envied by this writer, at least). Wao, the successor to Diaz’s acclaimed 1997 collection of short stories Drown, was years in the making and wound up winning a Pulitzer. Bock’s book, also a long-term labor of love, earned him a front-page review in The New York Times Book Review – and a MOLI book of the month pick – though it doesn’t seem to have lived up to its initial hype with sales or prolonged fanfare.

Diaz and Bock are both products of literary schools: Diaz teaches at MIT (and compares a gruesome bit of torture to a MLA seminar in one stretching-it passage in Wao) while Bock has talked about the years he spent workshopping Beautiful Children under the tutelage of masters like David Foster Wallace. Both books can be self-consciously writerly. Wao breaks free of its footnotes and rotating narrative voices, while Children gets bogged down. Both represent a triumph, and moral denouement, for geek chic.

It used to be that male writers would at least feign a certain machismo – emulate Spanish civil war fighters or Neal Cassady or junkie outlaws or lords of the rings. The adolescent obsessions with fantasy and sci-fi that Diaz and Bock must themselves have once had – given their meticulous attention to genre detail – would be the kind of dirty past you’d want to keep hidden. Superman would deny his Clark Kent. These days, a familiarity with the arcana of the Fantastic Four can apparently earn one a hardcover, major-publisher, balls-out book deal.

Diaz and Bock put their antiheroes through ugly fates, yet clearly they love them. For all his weirdo unsexiness, Wao is one of the more finely drawn, empathetic, original characters to emerge from Paterson since William Carlos Williams’s wheelbarrow.

But I’m waiting for a female lit star who sees her altergo in Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Supergirl, and Tank Girl. She should be awkward, fat, shy, and doomed – and earn her creator a fat book contract and NYT slice of hype.

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