You Are Stopped at a Railroad Crossing . . .

You're stopped there and you're thinking about the blog post you want to do on using second person point of view in a piece of fiction.  Second person -- you rather than I or he/she -- is only rarely used in fiction.

Cookbooks do it all the time -- Now you mince the garlic -- as do self help books -- You concentrate on the candle flame, seeking to clear your mind of all cluttering thoughts. 

It makes perfect sense in these cases -- but in a novel? You wonder why would someone do that.

One of your students is writing a novel in which some of the chapters are in the second person. The others in the class are struggling with it but you find it oddly compelling and so you do some research on the use of the second person point of view in fiction. 

You find mention of Bright Lights, Big City -- Jay McInerney's very successful novel depicting wild youth in the midst of cocaine culture -- using the second person point of view, You remember reading this and remember the feeling of being hurtled along on a very wild ride indeed. 

Then you pick up a copy of The Best American Short Stories of 2013 and read a story (originally published in The New Yorker) by Pulitzer Prize winner and best seller Junot Diaz. The story, "Miss Lora,," is written in the second person point of view.  And it's fun to read. You think that it seems to put you, the reader, right into the head of Yunior, the main character.

Then you read an interview with Junot Diaz in which he says he uses the second person to create some distance -- to "challenge the reader and to signal the writerliness of the book." 

And so you say, Okay, whatever. But you've learned something to share with your class next Wednesday. And you appear to have written a blog post too.

  

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

WOW!!

I mean, really, WOW!

This is Some Book. Don't take my word for it -- check out all the reviews. And then there's that Pulitzer Prize thing -- not bad for a first novel.

(Of course, Diaz had been polishing his prose, publishing stories in The New Yorker for some time.)

I was going to save this post for a while, since I just carried on about a book the other day. But I wanted to acknowledge Banned Books Week and this book would undoubtedly make some folks' banned list -- language, sexual situations, violence -- and in the Dominican Republic, I have no doubt it would Not be popular among many.

The book is, on the surface, the story of Oscar, whose Dominican heritage haunts his nerdy, role-playing gamer, fat boy, loser life. But what it really is is an exploration of that heritage, that curse, that land called the Dominican Republic.

A bit of history -- Trujillo, who ruled the DR with an iron hand (and US support for many years till the CIA allegedly arranged his assassination) was as cruel and lunatic a dictator as Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Stalin, Idi Amin, ____(insert name here).

Trujillo ordered the death of any Haitians living in the DR or of any Dominicans with Haitian blood -- sending his minions to do the execution with machetes. All of this to make the DR a 'whiter' nation. (Trujillo himself was a quarter Haitian.)

He was infamous in lechery -- an eye for the ladies and girls -- who, single or married, were all available to him -- or else.

And our government supported this man, fearing that with him gone, the Socialists would take over. When his excesses become too excessive to overlook, he was removed and another dictator, almost as bad if not so psychotic, was installed.

Oh, it makes me want to weep.

But this wonderful, sprawling, quirky, somehow good-humored, in spite of all that is evil, book is a testament to the light that still shines in the heart of one Dominican.