Roving Eyes, Wandering Hands In ‘How You Lose Her’

Ay-yi-yi, what is it with these Dominican men? Their hands — and eyes — never stop roving, even as they’re slipping engagement rings on their true loves’ fingers.

If that sounds like negative stereotyping, don’t complain to me: I’m just passing along the collective cultural verdict of the women and men, most of them themselves Dominican, who hustle through Junot Diaz’s latest short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her. A good man is hard to find in these stories, and when you do find him, he’s always in bed with someone else.

I picked up Diaz’s collection because I wanted to give him another try. I was one of those rare readers who did not think Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, was all that wondrous. I got weary of it early on. Sure, the Spanglish freestyle narration was dazzling, but the title character, Oscar, was one of those boy-men who obsessively dwell in the hermetically sealed world of sci-fi comic books, Dr. Who reruns and sword-and-sorcerer fantasy fiction.