Book Club Review: This is How You Lose Her
This week the book club discussed Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her, and gave it four and a half out of five stars. The book follows Yunior, a recurring character in many of Diaz’s novels, and his various romantic disappointments. The book’s characters struggle through the male-female dichotomy, cancer, racism, and the challenges immigration poses to family life.
As Yunior’s story reveals itself in snippets, the reader watches Yunior make the same mistakes, again and again. He lies, he cheats, he hurts people he loves and he hurts himself. He cannot seem to avoid the fate written for him by his father, by his brother, by society’s expectations of a Dominican man. Diaz juxtaposes this inescapable cycle, a beginning written for Yunior that has to finish, with Yunior’s inability to finish anything else, be it a relationship or a story. He says to himself before cheating again, “Maybe if you were someone else you would have the discipline to duck the whole thing but you are your father’s son and your brother’s brother.” As a result, no matter what Yunior does, the book forces the reader to want him to win; if he loses, then he confirms that we are born into being people we do not want to be.
Diaz does not care if his readers are confused or uncomfortable; he switches between English and Spanish slang and does not care if the reader cannot keep up, and he breezes through disturbing content as though it is nothing. He switches from first to second perspective, from male to female point of view, from one race to the next. Somehow, in the jumble of diverse characters and plot lines, Diaz weaves together a cohesive story about universal truths that defy our differences.
“This is what I know: people’s hopes go on forever.”