This Is How You Lose Her

From Barnes & Noble

As the New York Times reviewer noted, readers will be pleased to hear that Junot Diaz's new collection of stories brings back Yunior, the narrator of several stories in his debut Drown, a 1996 Discover selection.

The New York Times Book Review

…This Is How You Lose Her can stand on its own, but fans will be glad to hear that it brings back Yunior, who narrated several of the stories in Díaz's first collection, Drown…Yunior is a gorgeously full-blown character—half the time you want to comfort him, the other half you want to kick him in the pants…In the new book, as previously, Díaz is almost too good for his own good. His prose style is so irresistible, so sheerly entertaining, it risks blinding readers to its larger offerings. Yet he weds form so ideally to content that instead of blinding us, it becomes the very lens through which we can see the joy and suffering of the signature Díaz subject: what it means to belong to a diaspora, to live out the possibilities and ambiguities of perpetual insider/outsider status.
—Leah Hager Cohen

The New York Times

…a miniaturist performance—a modest, musically structured riff that works variations on one main subject: a young Dominican man's womanizing and its emotional fallout…This Is How You Lose Her doesn't aspire to be a grand anatomy of love like Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera…but it gives us a small, revealing window on the subject.
—Michiko Kakutani

Publishers Weekly

Decisively back in the form that permanently etched his name onto a list of unforgettable writers, Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) brings life to the short story with a voice that demands attention. Often caught between hopeless romanticism and flippant machismo, Díaz’s characters are as vulnerable and maddening as they are endearing and sexy. Among other familiar voices in this collection, Yunior reappears, older but not necessarily wiser, particularly as his once invincible brother Rafa struggles with cancer and everything else it means to be sick, poor, and uninsured. But as the title reveals, the beautiful, defiant, and impossible ladies that claw away at Yunior’s soul drive this book. As before, Díaz’s searing, sometimes hilarious, and always disarming language holds everything together with just enough of a sense that it all could fall to pieces in the process—if it hasn’t already. Drown inspired an entire generation of imitators and with this collection, readers will remember why everyone wants to write like Díaz, bring him home, or both. Raw and honest, these stories pulsate with raspy ghetto hip-hop and the subtler yet more vital echo of the human heart. Agent: Nicole Aragi. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Readers who adored The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award, have been waiting five long years for Díaz's next work. Here it is—a collection of short stories that focus on how love twists and turns us around.

Library Journal

Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) returns to short fiction in his latest book, the first since he won the Pulitzer in 2007, and his second collection of stories after 1996's Drown. The stories hinge on Yunior de las Casas, Díaz's Nick Adams: a Dominican-born, Jersey-raised writer and—as is especially on display here—chronic womanizer. Díaz tells of love won and lost with his signature verve; the book pulses with Spanish, sf, and the music and apocalyptic TV shows of the late 1980s. Through the lens of the women that Yunior, his older brother Rafa (who dies of cancer while Yunior is in high school), and their mostly absent father love, leave, and are left by, Díaz maps out a painful, aching geography of desire. The final story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love," which will be of particular interest to fans of Oscar Wao, further explores Yunior's (who was the novel's primary narrator) relationship with Lola, Oscar's sister. VERDICT Díaz's third book is as stunning as its predecessors. These stories are hard and sad, but in Díaz's hands they also crackle. [See Prepub Alert, 3/12/12.]—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

From the author of Drown (1996), more tales of Dominican life in the cold, unwelcoming United States. Eight of the collection's nine stories center on Yunior, who shares some of his creator's back story. Brought from the Dominican Republic as a kid by his father, he grows up uneasily in New Jersey, escaping the neighborhood career options of manual labor and drug dealing to become an academic and fiction writer. What Yunior can't escape is what his mother and various girlfriends see as the Dominican man's insatiable need to cheat. The narrative moves backward and forward in time, resisting the temptation to turn interconnected tales into a novel by default, but it has a depressingly unified theme: Over and over, a fiery woman walks when she learns Yunior can't be true, and he pines fruitlessly over his loss. He's got a lot of other baggage to deal with as well: His older brother Rafa dies of cancer; a flashback to the family's arrival in the U.S. shows his father--who later runs off with another woman--to be a rigid, controlling, frequently brutal disciplinarian; and Yunior graduates from youthful drug use to severe health issues. These grim particulars are leavened by Díaz's magnificent prose, an exuberant rendering of the driving rhythms and juicy Spanglish vocabulary of immigrant speech. Still, all that penitent machismo gets irksome, perhaps for the author as well, since the collection's most moving story leaves Yunior behind for a female narrator. Yasmin works in the laundry of St. Peter's Hospital in New Brunswick; her married lover has left his wife behind in Santo Domingo and plans to buy a house for him and Yasmin. Told in quiet, weary prose, "Otravida, Otra Vez" offers a counterpoint to Yunior's turbulent wanderings with its gentle portrait of a woman quietly enduring as best she can. Not as ambitious as Díaz's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), but sharply observed and morally challenging.

The Washington Post

Drown, [Diaz's] 1996 collection of stories, was widely praised for its verve and searing honesty. Readers of that and [The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] will find much to love in This Is How You Lose Her. Written in a singular idiom of Spanglish, hip-hop poetry and professorial erudition, it is comic in its mopiness, charming in its madness and irresistible in its heartfelt yearning.
—Ron Hansen

The Barnes & Noble Review

As a critic, I've come to appreciate less-prolific writers whose books gestate over years and aren't released until they're fully cooked. In Mae West's words, Junot Díaz is "a guy what takes his time." After the 1996 publication of his highly acclaimed debut collection of stories, Drown, he took eleven years to complete The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won both the NBCC and Pulitzer prizes. Now, five years later, he's produced a second book of stories, This Is How You Lose Her, which will have to tide us over until his next novel.

I am not going to make the case that Díaz's stories are as wondrous as his novel, but few books are. If you haven't read Oscar Wao, Díaz's vibrant, Spanglish-spangled epic about a cursed, overweight Dominican-American nerd growing up in the industrial wastelands of New Jersey who's obsessed with unattainable women and apocalyptic science fiction, go for it. It's not necessary to tackle the novel before his stories — but it is essential reading. What elevates Oscar Wao from really good to truly great is that it works on both the intimate, personal level and the broader, historical, political level: In much the way that the burning of Smyrna and the Detroit riots underpin Jeffrey Eugenides' tale of mixed sexual identity in Middlesex, and the Soviet revolution forms a backdrop to Boris Pasternak's tragic story of thwarted love in Dr. Zhivago, the Dominican Republic's devastating twentieth-century history under Trujillo's dictatorship reverberates through Oscar Wao's multigenerational saga.

The stories in This Is How You Lose Her, however appealing, can't compete with that sweeping historical resonance, but they do offer a fresh hit of Diáz's loose- limbed, inventive, profane, hip-hopping prose — plus his wise and witty slant on what he has referred to as a generation of hypereducated poor kids of color. You can hardly ask for a better story collection for those who complain that short fiction thwarts their yearning for immersive reading experiences. This Is How You Lose Her pivots around a single character, Yunior, Díaz's charming, roguish, literary, lovesick, cheating alter ego, who will already be familiar to readers of his earlier books — lending a quasi-novelistic continuity to this collection. Even more alluring, Díaz's subject is well-nigh irresistible: the devastating power of love in its many incarnations, whether romantic, reciprocated, rebuffed, maternal, passionate, deceitful, obdurate, illicit, or inappropriate.

As for those who disdain short stories as little more than training wheels for novelists, the truth is that at their best — Chekhov, Cheever, Munro, Díaz — short stories pack more bang per word than just about anything but a sonnet or a telegram. Their more manageable size also makes them ideal for book club discussion. Focusing on just one or two stories in greater detail could be a real boon to members chronically unable to make it through the month's selection in time for the next meeting — as so often happens in my group.

Of the nine stories, most of which first appeared in The New Yorker, several return to themes from Yunior's childhood, including the difficult death of his sexually smoldering older brother after landing "on cancer planet." (In fact, Díaz's own brother beat the odds to survive a similar cancer.) "Invierno" is a sobering tale about arriving in New Jersey from the Dominican Republic at nine (Díaz arrived in late 1974, at age six), to a wintry world that's frozen solid and harshly ruled by a dictatorial, cheating father whose punishments include making Yunior and his brother Rafa kneel on the cutting side of a coconut grater until they bleed and whimper. "Otravida, Otravez," an exercise in literary empathy written from the perspective of his father's other woman, provides a refreshing break from Yunior's point of view.

But the dominant theme of this collection is the aftermath of infidelity — usually from the cheater's perspective — and how love and longing so often outlive the relationships on which they were founded. "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" channels Yunior's winsome voice: "I'm not a bad guy. I know how that sounds — defensive, unscrupulous — but it's true. I'm like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good. Magdalena disagrees though. She considers me a typical Dominican man: a sucio, an asshole." Magda discovers Yunior's perfidy in a letter from his "homegirl." Yunior continues: "Anyway, I won't bore you with what happens after she finds out. The begging, the crawling over glass, the crying. Let's just say that after two weeks of this, of my driving out to her house, sending her letters, and calling her at all hours of the night, we put it back together." Alas, broken trust is like Humpty Dumpty. Even a vacation in Yunior's beloved Santo Domingo can't repair the damage. But what this rueful tale is really about is Yunior's blockheaded inability to recognize this, blinded not so much by desire as by his implacable yearning for unconditional love.

Alma is another girlfriend who tires of Yunior's cheating ways, leaving him heartsick and baffled. Her tale is narrated in the tricky second person, which can be a gimmicky way to involve a reader but which Díaz handles with aplomb. The story opens, "You, Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you." So, Yunior objectifies women outrageously — as unapologetic in his lusty machismo as Jim Harrison's roguish, horny half-Chippewa free spirit in his Brown Dog stories. Everything is hunky-dory until, eight months into the relationship, Alma reads about "this beautiful freshman girl named Laxmi" in Yunior's journal. And "Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man," Yunior dissembles: "Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel." Díaz breaks to a new paragraph for the clincher, which also gives his collection its title: "This is how you lose her."

The question, you may well ask, is why is Yunior so beguiling? How does he attract all these smart women, and why doesn't he lose us in his rake's progress? In the first story, Yunior owns up to his infidelity, and he loses Magda. Perhaps older but no wiser, he lies to Alma about Laxmi, and then loses her, too. What's a fellow to do? Fidelity appears not to be a serious option. Both stories recall Yunior's incorrigible, ultimately relationship-ending infidelities to Oscar's beloved sister Lola in Díaz's novel. Is Yunior a sympathetic cad because he never gets away with it, or because he acknowledges his caddish behavior and is as hurt by his shenanigans as his girlfriends? And how does Díaz manage to keep returning to the same narrative track without trying our patience? The answer, in brief, lies in his energetic, tender, funny, ever-insightful prose.

Yunior is just as baffled and miserable years later in the wonderful final story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love" — a twisted sort of how-to and a fitting sequel to the conniving, "How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie" from Drown, also written in the second person. ("She'll say, I like Spanish guys, and even though you've never been to Spain say, I like you. You'll sound smooth.")

"The Cheater's Guide to Love" could well have provided another apt title for this book. It opens with yet another cover blown: "Your girl catches you cheating. (Well, actually, she's your fiancée, but hey, in a bit it so won't matter.)" This time, Yunior's email has given him away — fifty different girls over the course of six years. "Maybe if you'd been engaged to a super open-minded blanquita you could have survived," the barely repentant rough comments. But no such luck. "She'll stick around for a few months because you dated for a long long time. Because you went through much together — her father's death, your tenure madness, her bar exam (passed on the third attempt)." Right. But here's the real reason, which explains why Yunior monitors the vicissitudes of his heartbreak over five years: "because love, real love, is not so easily shed." Put differently: "The half-life of love is forever."

It takes Yunior years, but it's a major epiphany, enough to fuel his writing — including the very stories we're reading: "In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace — and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get." The half-life of prose like this, prose that explores and transcends human weakness, should be forever, too.

Heller McAlpin is a New York–based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

Reviewer: Heller McAlpin