Booking It: This Is How You Lose Her

This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz’s latest work of fiction since his widely-acclaimed, Pulizer-Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, consists of nine beautifully interrelated, confessional short stories. They do not disappoint.

Most of the stories occur at different points in the life of Yunior, a Dominican who immigrated to the United States at an early age. As one can gather from the title, these stories illustrate the capacity for men to act horribly and disrespectfully in relationships. The first story, “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” begins with this confession from the narrator: “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.”

This is an honest account of Yunior, who cheats on and sleeps with as many women as he can. And while the reader feels a certain disdain for this character, Yunior’s self-deprecations and deeply honest lamentations elicit well-deserved sympathy. Perhaps the crescendo of the collection comes as Yunior, astounded by the depths of his own “mendacity” finally calls himself a coward, and believes without doubt that his previous girlfriend did the right thing in dumping him.

Make no mistake, though, this collection, imbued with regret and loss, provides little redemption. As the title suggests, these stories involve losing women, not gaining them back. Diaz displays a great talent in this collection for pinning down that horrible, tension-filled moment when you realize your relationship is dead or dying: “your heart plunges though you,” he writes, “like a far bandit through a hangman’s trap.”

Constantly on the periphery, and sometimes in the center spotlight, Diaz explores problems of race, and coming to America from the Dominican Republic: Yunior often mentions the racism that immigrants encounter with a horrifying casualness. Living in Boston later in his life, he writes without commentary or reflection “on the walk home a Jeep roars past; the driver calls you a … towelhead.” The insouciance with which the narrator drops these details reveals the frequency of such moments.

While these are all sad stories, the reader can rely thoroughly on one thing to carry him through to the end: Diaz’s language. He writes with a beautiful, unaffected blend of Spanish slang and elevated English; describing Pura, a woman whom his brother is dating, Yunior writes: “guapísima as hell: tall and indiecita, with huge feet and an incredibly soulful face, but unlike your average hood hottie Pura seemed not to know what to do with her fineness, was sincerely lost in all the pulchritude.” Diaz’s sentences have an immense rhetorical authority, written neither for flare nor flash, but just because this is how the language speaks itself.

The other stylistic trait worth noting is Diaz’s habit of narrating in the second person singular, “you,” used in four of the nine stories, totaling about 84 pages. This technique both gives off the feeling of an older narrator chiding his younger self, (“You , Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma,” one story begins), and at the same time addresses the reader, assuming that he too has committed these acts of selfishness. While Diaz deploys this POV to near perfection, more naturally than one might imagine possible, he overuses it too, limiting its oddness and, in this reader’s opinion, testing his audience’s patience.

Another complaint concerning an element of style: Diaz relies heavily on a voice that tells and does not show the stories; rarely does he build up pieces of a scene. Similarly to the use of second person singular, this technique has its benefits, the natural conversational feel. But it also reduces some narratives to wispy, fleeting memories, as light and sheer as one girl’s tank top “that couldn’t have blocked a sneeze.”

But with overwhelmingly beautiful sentences and descriptions, like “shiny ice that scars the snow,” and with such deep and precise engagement with the difficulty of relationships and race in the U.S., these problems are hardly the defining characteristics of this strong and honest collection.

Recommendation: This collection isn’t a must read, but if you like Junot Diaz, or have any interest at all in race in the U.S., or if you feel particularly strongly about relationships, I fully suggest it.