The title of Junot Díaz's second story collection is This Is How You Lose Her, and for the most part, This is sleeping with someone who isn't Her. Or multiple someones. Or providing evidence of these multiple someones via unattended e-mail accounts or journal entries. Or, maybe worst of all, dismissing the evidence in those journal entries as mere speculative fiction, as the narrator of the title story attempts to do: "Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel."
The You in This Is How You Lose Her is Yunior, who was also the central figure of Drown (1999), Díaz's acclaimed debut collection, and is eventually revealed as the narrator of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which riffed in slangy Spanglish, geeked out on science-fiction allusions and escaped into magic realism to render its tale of spells and curses, mother-daughter throwdowns, teen-nerd rites of passage and, overshadowing everything else, the ghastly dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled Díaz's native Dominican Republic for 30 years. Formally audacious and completely addictive, Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer in 2008 and solidified Díaz's reputation as one of the unquestioned greats of his generation.
This Is How You Lose Her does not have the sweep and scope of its predecessor. But despite the reduced acreage, the biodiversity of Díaz's language is as rich as ever. The smaller scale makes for a more intimate book; it's not hard to believe that some of these stories appeared in embryonic form in a journal. (Baby, this is part of my story collection.) Díaz shares both his nickname and his Dominican-American identity with Yunior. Like his alter ego, he's a fiction writer and academic in the Boston area, his father left the family when he was young, his brother battled cancer, he suffered a bad breakup with his onetime fiance some years back, and he's endured excruciating back problems in middle age. These parallels between character and creator are especially bold given that Yunior is a full-time cad, exhibiting a severe ADD of the libido with a mild case of pervasive shame. (If this book had a theme song, it would be a melancholy merengue version of Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me," set on the Starship Enterprise.) A lack of critical distance between author and protagonist occasionally muddles the language: in the closing story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love"--a wayward boyfriend's Stations of the Cross--a mucho macho aphorism like "Old sluts are the hardest habits to ditch" awkwardly coexists with embroidered-pillow truisms like "Sometimes a start is all we ever get."
Yunior's repetition compulsion is mirrored in the stories, and it deepens the impression of a character whose brain is worthy of a Ph.D. but whose pelvic regions eagerly await social promotion to the seventh grade. It's a welcome switch-up when Díaz occasionally looks up from the latest notch on Yunior's bedpost to glimpse other places and times. In "Otravida, Otravez," he uses first person for a female laundry worker making hard daily compromises in her job, home and relationship; the stripped-down, matter-of-fact language is a confident departure.