When Do You Tell A Specific Story Right? (I wasn't clever enough for a witty title today...)

It's been a while since I've blogged, much less blogged about literature, but I got to thinking today. A while ago, I leant my friend Junot Diaz's latest book This Is How You Lose Her and she called me up to rant about it. This surprised me because she and I love Diaz's work; while Drown is expertly economic and sparse in its writing yet full of raw emotion and intensity, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a beautiful masterpiece, a saga of colonialism, family, intergenerational trauma, nerdism, sexuality, identity and fantasy. Admittedly, when I had read his latest book in the fall, it hadn't spoken to me as strongly as his other two had but I found it superbly written and honest, an exploration of an older Yunior's psyche and views on relationships as a man. My friend didn't disagree but she said while in Drown and The Brief Wondrous his honesty was entwined with a commentary on these views, in This Is How You Lose Her that ironic/meta/critical element was gone. Yes, it is an unspoken (sometimes spoken) trend in Caribbean/Caribbean-American-Canadian/African-American-Canadian communities for black men to go after light-skinned women and see darker women on the side, yes power dynamics and sex can be entwined, but her issue was that the novel seemed to celebrate these issues and themes; This Is How You Lose Her seemed to take what made Drown and The Brief Wondrous stimulating, buzz-worthy, and sexy and run with it, revel in it, instead of stop and dissect it. I don't necessarily agree with this assessment but I found enough merit in it to think about it for a while since the same accusations were made about The Brief Wondrous. 

Many women I know found Diaz's female characters stock in comparison to the lively energetic voice of Yunior and the colourful characterization of Oscar; a lot of [white] women found the female characters unnecessarily harsh and unaffectionate; and other women (of many nationalities/races/ethnicities) felt as if he adheres to the whore/Madonna trope in all of his work. Certainly, the women are more subtly portrayed compared to the male characters in The Brief Wondrous but I never equated flashiness with depth; further, I understood the women in his novel because I grew up with and around these women. Their grit-teeth sternness, their suck-it-up attitude... they're survivors of horrific life experiences and are hardened as such; moreover, support for many Caribbean families isn't about emotion, it's about "getting shit done", about moving your offspring up in the world, providing for them, making sure they won't want for anything when they're older: financial stability, education, work ethic, an instillation of a "no-nonsense-nobody-will-walk-over-me-in-life" attitude and I think Diaz portrayed that unapologetically and wonderfully and my friend agrees with this. My point in bringing this up and explicating my defence of The Brief Wondrous is that it led me to another question (and this is where my post really begins): what does it take for commentary to work? If you're not writing an essay, if your fiction isn't explicitly polemical, if you're just trying to tell a story while at the same time making a comment on the world you grew up in ... how do you it? When and how is it successful? As a writer, I'm very interested in this question. It's almost related to the question about satire: when is irony not ironic anymore? As someone who witnesses "hipster racism" (http://jezebel.com/5905291/a-complete-guide-to-hipster-racism) daily, the irony/not-irony question is another one that really interests me.

I find myself constantly debating with people about when commentary in a story/movie/TV series works and when it doesn't or when it's nonexistent. For instance, I got in a heated argument with someone over Robert Downey Jr.'s use of blackface in Tropic Thunder. I felt like I understood what Ben Stiller was trying to do with RDJ's character: not only showing that Hollywood would rather "blacken" a white man rather than hire an actual African-American actor but that black characters in Hollywood films are presented as how white people see them and not as they are (the "collard green" scene did that for me). He, however, found that Stiller was using the defence I made as an excuse to get some cheap laughs at the expense of African Americans. On the other hand, I absolutely loathe New Girl. It's one of those shows I watch purely to hate (kind of like Sex and the City) and while a few of my friends have defended the never-ending racial jokes as a commentary on multiracial friendships in contemporary society, I feel like the show is just using racist jokes to make racist jokes under the guise of irony. I especially think this since the jokes or statements have nothing to do with the plots and they don't influence the dynamics in any way; plus New Girl still employs tokenism with Winston and CeCe rejects her cultural ways and for the few episodes that she embraces them, it's clear (to me) that the show is poking fun at the traditions.

There is no real conclusion or solution or realization in this post/to this post, it's really me just spewing out my thoughts and wanting to share them with whoever comes across this blog. I may have mislead you, the reader, into thinking this is about literature but I suppose I'm wondering more about storytelling and the politics/mechanics/influences of it. Spike Lee's Bamboozled does a great job in exploring the questions I've raised, making a commentary on when/how/why satire becomes real and therefore almost, ALMOST slipping into the caricature he condemns in his own film (which is interesting). So this more of a discussion than a definitive post and hopefully I get some [respectful] responses. And with that, I'll end.