Beauty and Terror

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of marymactavish.

I'm reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao right now (My desire to avoid The Best and the Brightest is doing marvelous things for getting me through the hardcovers I've been meaning to read for ages. I am tearing through these babies.) and loving it, of course. No surprise there. I feel all tangled up in One Hundred Years of Solitude and the memory of reading Heartbreak Soup largely over someone's shoulder, and Watchmen, and a whole bunch of other things that make me tremble with nostalgia. But I think the genius of it may actually be in the footnotes, and what he doesn't include in them.

Crazy, I realize. But while Junot Diaz is footnoting the hell out of Dominican history, he's refusing to do the same thing with geek culture. He is asserting that you ought to know this stuff, that you ought to understand the power of Watchmen, and the enmity between Galactus and the Fantastic Four, and the stark beauty of Minas Tirith. I think that's genius, enshrining that expectation, that new canon, in true literature. Adam Serwer, in a precise and effective slap at Anthony Lane's anti-fanboy bigotry delivered back in March, declared that "comic books are the closest thing Americans have to folktales, and their content is about as close as a reflection of American cultural identity, for good or for ill, as we have. You'd think that for that reason alone, the material and its consumers would be worth at least a minimum of respect." The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the best evidence of that argument I've seen, and a stinging rebuke to critics like Lane who reflexively and narrowly reject geek culture. I've long joked that Anthony Lane must not like to have fun because of what seems like his automatic distaste for most genre movies. Reading Diaz's stunner reinforces for me the power of what he's missing.