Member-only story
31 DAYS, 31 STORIES
2/31: “Everything above is loud and bright, everything below is whispers.”
Looking at “Drown”, by Junot Diaz
Found this collection in my early Kindle downloads. A few pages into the title tale, I thought “I think I’ve seen this film before” and I so enjoyed the road to an ending I didn’t remember.
Yunior is in self-imposed exile, drowning in conflicted memories of his high school bestie. Drowning in small town poverty. Drowning in his own negativity. Drowning in unresolved sexual tension.
Mom doesn’t understand why her boy doesn’t want to see his old friend who went to college and became a pato (no girl, that’s not a duck like you learned in Spanish class).
Mama doesn’t know a lot of things about her son: the way they “stole, broke windows pissed on people’s steps.” The way, a couple years out of high school, Yunior is selling drugs to kids. The way he goes out looking for Beto only once Mama is asleep.
Dias writes matter-of-factly, as if Raymond Carver were a Dominican immigrant. The story swims laps, back and forth, Yunior telling us about his current life with his mom, and the memories of his time with Beto.
The prose is a pleasure to return to, especially to revisit Diaz’s earlier, pre-Pulitzer work.
