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There's this white boy in the class that assigned this collection taking pot shots at it for misogyny, which is real easy when you're white and male and your eyes glaze over how deeply white girls and their white skin and their white features inspire both veneration and self-hatred. Objectification, to an extent, but when white's the standard of beauty and safety and the Dominican Republic's the name of the game, either you talk imperialism and intercommunity issues or you're just another colonial savior brat looking to save the brown women from the brown men in the name of divide and conquer. Besides, the gynephobic violence might be there, but I've read enough works that glorify that sort of shit to know Díaz isn't doing the same. The main short story cycle character Yunior doesn't go around blubbering at all the bad things he sees, but he does take it in without self-reflexive excuses or the defensive bravado so commonly known as masculinity. It's harder for me to poke at, as neither gender nor race are a common factor between me and him, but the normalization of hatred of women in literature leaves a bad taste that this particular collection did not spawn, so of course I have to peer at this result and wonder why.

I'm glad I didn't follow the class itinerary of reading only six or so of the ten, cause the nice and neat line of the beginning story and the titular story and the ending "this is what it's sorta all about" story is perfect for an MFA program and horrible for actually getting a sense of what is going on. Proust in the time of race and heroin. Sentiment in the time of the death of English dominance and the rise of destabilization of the canon. The homeland's death, the way out's denigration, the destination might be life but there's way too many white supremacist slags running things for it to be anything other than a capitalistic jumpstart and/or deathtrap. Emotional bonds are a pain. Sexuality's a pain. The acrid freedom of individuals in the US is on one hand the collective familial unit of man of the household Dominican Republic is on the other, and both will never be an option so long as gringa serves a conceptual purpose of sociopolitical self-defense.

If you're like me, a member of a white family stronghold living in the US, at one point in your life you hated these people. You loathed them. Never mind the billionaires buying up the legislation for fucking up those countries south of the border and the Gulf of Mexico even more, there's an immigrant who only speaks Spanish fifty feet away. Yeah it's a pain when people all over the world are headed towards your door, but that's what you get for always winning, always killing, always conquering, all over the world. All the time.

It's a mess, and I'm not going to say I adored the abusive relationship of this collection's "Aurora", but you don't boil anything down to a single issue and flip it off accordingly. You can if that one thing inspires enough virulent disgust, but not before running through all the context first. In my case, there's a Dominican-American kid with a heart rocketing around these gritty and lovelocked pages, so this is not the kind of player on which I can lay the blame of the game.