Drown

A catalogue of cruelties large and small, beautiful and painful studs this book. The cruelties children inflict upon one another are present here, as are the cruelties parents inflict upon their children, and husbands upon their wives. The cruelties of the State, of economics, and of xenophobia salt wounds gouged by misogyny, racism, and poverty, though even amidst this stinging there are glimpses of “ferns and branches and flower pods trembling…” (6), and the particular rapturous beauty of one’s mother dressed up for a party when one is a child. These stories are so carefully wrought as to read effortlessly, the language a smooth mix of slangy lyricism, English, and Spanish that seamlessly scaffolds the stories themselves.

These stories build on and relate to one another so that the book is somewhere between a novel and short story collection, mirroring—surely intentionally—the in-between spaces that haunt the stories’ plots. Set in both the Dominican Republic and the United States, the tales recount main character Yunior’s childhood in the D.R., his father’s departure for the U.S. and subsequent ambivalent relationship to their family, and Yunior’s teenage years in the U.S. There are parties and factories, cold Northern winters and crowded Dominican buses, greedy hands on girls’ bodies; there’s a boy with a terribly scarred face, there’s plenty of weed.

Read in the light of the #MeToo movement, it is impossible not to see the shade that misogyny and (sexual) violence cast upon these stories. Misogyny is not merely represented here, but worked: though Yunior’s mother is the parent who singlehandedly raises him and his brother after being effectively abandoned by her spouse (the book is in fact dedicated to Diaz’s own mother), it is this absent and disinterested father who attracts the book’s and narrator’s attention and adulation. Whenever women are mentioned, casually violent and sexualizing language usually follows (“She once tried to jam a pen in my thigh, but that was the night I punched her chest black-and-blue so I don’t think it counts” (53)). Similarly problematic are the representations of Ysrael, the aforementioned boy with a face disfigured in his youth by a wild pig. It is bad enough to read of Ysrael being cruelly and violently bullied by Yunior and his brother; still more unsettling is the stilted language Diaz employs in the story that Ysrael actually narrates. While nothing else in the book suggests that Ysrael suffered brain damage in his childhood injury, his narration is markedly not as clear or lucid as Yunior’s, leading to the uncomfortable conclusion that Diaz may have conflated physical and mental disability.

More sensitively rendered and painfully poignant are the nonconsensual sexual experiences that Yunior finds forced upon him, as both a child and teenager. Here is where the traumas of masculinity and sexual violence are processed (albeit briefly) instead of reenacted, and had Diaz committed to this harder road the stories in Drown would have been richer, stronger, and more valuable contributions to literature. The book is undoubtedly an attempt to reckon with gendered, sexual, and many other forms of violence, but fails itself by failing to look deeply enough inward.

Essential points: Somewhere between a collection of short stories and a novel, Junot Diaz’s Drown meaningfully investigates the challenges of immigration, masculinity, racism, poverty, and violence, but falls short in its attempts to process misogyny, too often taking a violent and sexualizing stance toward women not excused by the damage done to the author and narrator by a sexually violent culture. Subjects this novel includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others may be thrilled to find included in their literature!): Racism, sexual violence, sexual assault, abuse, violence, drug use, molestation.