The House of Atreus Redux

As a literary device, the family curse is as old as it gets. A method that illustrates how the seeds of tragedy arise from within a community, how blame for catastrophe can very often be laid at the feet of a beloved insider rather than the more convenient stranger. Arrogant and the complacent parents incite the wrath of the gods and suddenly the kids, if they are lucky enough to survive, find themselves without money or marriage prospects. Distant descendants of this literary tradition are The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, and Sartoris, by William Faulkner. Both tales were penned by New World authors with 20th century perspectives. But the difference between the goods needed to pull off a Pulitzer Prize (Diaz) and a Nobel Prize (Faulkner) is precisely that which separates those forgotten tragedians from the great Aeschylus himself.

Oscar Wao is an uber-nerd. A Dominican-American man with a penchant for high fat, low nutrition diets—both physically and mentally—he is , in the end, that most familiar of American clichés, an underdog fighting against universal meanness, this time in the ethnic strain. From the beginning, Diaz’s narrator explains how Wao’s family fled Dictator Trujillo Molina’s Dominican Republic for New Jersey to escape fuku, a family curse. A convoluted narrative explains how Wao’s grandfather, unwilling to give up the privileges of a wealthy, respected man during the early days of the cruel regime, brought the curse on himself and his descendents, leaving the work of undoing the curse to his Americanized, pop-culture saturated grandson.

Diaz peppers his prose with a bewildering array of sci-fi and gaming references and then underscores the whole thing with footnotes explaining Trujillo’s mid-20th Century Dominican Republic. Most disappointing, finally, is that the novel’s compelling subject matter—the problem of South American unrest and U.S. involvement in the atrocities there, as well as the problem of the immigrant—is undermined by the author’s insistence on establishing his narrator’s (and his own) street cred using language that is already so-five-minutes-ago. While Trekkies and Con participants throughout the country will hail this book as their coming-of-age tract, readers over the age of thirty-five and those younger readers innately convinced of their own coolness will probably find this book alienating if not irritating.

Compare this to Faulkner’s 1929 novel Sartoris, featuring shell-shocked Bayard Sartoris, a World War I veteran returning to his family’s sleepy Southern plantation after witnessing the death of his twin brother. The Sartoris curse, like that of Wao’s family, was invoked by forces within the family itself, a genetic predisposition exacerbated by environmental factors. Looming above the Sartoris men is Colonel Sartoris, a legendary Confederate hero who more than once outwitted Union forces. Famed for his acts of outrageous courage and cleverness, the Colonel is a family exemplar of insouciant bravery, of what it means to be a man. Yet, as the family generates itself and moves into the 20th century, the Sartoris men find themselves acting merely outrageous and insouciant—careening about the country-side in sleek automobiles, drinking themselves senseless, and inciting other drunkards to fight. Aunt Jenny, elderly spokesperson for the clan, vocalizes the community’s concern for young men of her family: They cannot destroy themselves fast enough.

Faulkner’s tale, like Diaz’s, is universal. Bayard Sartoris could be seen as a stand-in for the confused young men of the modern period. Unlike Colonel Sartoris, a mature man who fought for his piece of land and for the safety of his family, Bayard and his brother were asked to die extravagant deaths for an intangible cause. What’s more—and Faulkner makes much of this throughout—they were asked to take on this burden before they were old enough to exercise self-control, to understand that power should be tempered by responsibility.

Also like Diaz, Faulkner is not above authorial tricks of his own. References to people and events are made off-handedly, with no back-story, just as they would be for a listener casually following the gossip of a couple of friends. But the reader is wise to trust Faulkner who, unlike Diaz with his Spanish dialogue and phrasing, always follows through with an explanation later. Though Faulkner’s later works require nearly as much effort to read as Diaz’s Oscar Wao, the effort results in a revelation—what does it mean to witness a crime from this perspective rather than that one, for instance –that is more intellectually rewarding than feeling one has successfully solved a clever crossword puzzle.