To describe the book straightforwardly as being about an intergenerational immigrant would denude it of the charming manner in which Diaz unravels his plot, and the broader themes he strives for. The titular character, Oscar de Leon, aka Oscar Wao, is a corpulent Dominican-American teen whose existence balances precariously between the cultural poles of the two countries he calls home. Awkward, self-consciously verbose and obsessed by comic books, sci-fi and The Lord of the Rings, Oscar is so far from the stereotypical Dominican male, a predatory sexual species, that he is perceived by his countrymen to be a gringo. Worse, his predilection for falling madly in love with the wrong girls at the wrong time compounds his social difficulties. From the title down, we know that Oscar (the Wao borne from a Dominican-accented ‘Wilde’, whom he is said to resemble after turning up at a party dressed as Tom Baker-era Doctor Who) will have but a short existence on this earth: the question soon becomes – will he die an unhappy virgin before his time is up?

That would be the narrative thrust, so to speak, if the novel’s prime concern were its eponymous character. But really it is not. Before long we are tumbling backwards through his family’s brutal lineage on the isle of Hispaniola, the one first visited by Columbus, and a place cursed, it is said, by fukú americanus, or just plain fukú (say it out loud for maximum effect). Blighted by a quirk of history as the New World was, the family de Leon is similarly cursed to eke out a brutal struggle against the backdrop of one Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, aka El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief, or more simply, in the narrator’s pithy word, ‘Fuckface’. It is this backward-tumbling drama that drives the book forward.

Though the novel is named for him, it is not Oscar’s tale. Rather, Diaz performs a cunning conjurist’s trick with the identity of the main (though not sole) narrator. At first a seemingly omniscient figure, gradually the figure is fleshed out to reveal Yunior, occasional boyfriend of Oscar’s sister Lola, and a streetwise Dominican steeped in rap lore and the drama that lifestyle brings. And we gradually realise that all we are told is viewed through the prism of Yunior’s experience, which gives Diaz a plausible excuse for the pop and fizzle of the prose. A rich gumbo of Spanglish and pop-culture curveballs, one that switches from references to DC Comics to the Latin American literary canon often mid-sentence, Diaz’s narrator masters a fabulously authentic idiolect, combining phrases of Spanish (refreshingly unitalicised) whose onomatopoeic meanings are often clear but occasionally opaque to the non-speaker, whilst touching on – but never quite becoming – the stereotypical streetwise Noo Yawk-based Latino. His eye for the women in his homeland casts a pheromone-ridden patina of lust across the pages, and you can almost feel the sweat rolling across naked skin as the descriptions of the ‘culocracy’ of Santo Domingo drip hot and musky. It’s a febrile language, one you can wrap around your body like a sarong and skimp along the beach to the fading sunset with.

The only time we really depart from the narrative voice (though even here it is not entirely suppressed) is in the copious footnotes which litter the novel, particularly in the first part, which tend to be didactic missives on Dominican history and in particular the venality and kleptocracy of the Trujillo regime, a man who treats the nation like ‘his own private Mordor’. These subsections are easily skipped yet build up the canvas against which the de Leon family – and, as Diaz is clearly gunning for, the immigrant experience in general and America’s relationship with it’s near neighbours – must struggle. A dictator who gripped the Adam’s apple of his country for some three decades and never let up for a second, Trujillo and his thuggish legacy impacts upon the family generation after generation, in moments of historical repetition that further compound the cyclical nature of the fukú curse. Yunior’s ire is clearly Diaz’s own, and there’s a great moment where he takes a swipe at Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, whose novel The Feast Of The Goat is considered insufficiently critical of the Trujillo regime.

Perhaps the only moment where the novel fails is in the final chapters, as Oscar’s tale returns to the fore. Yet it remains a fine example of the immigrant experience and the way it fuses with American cultural norms, a genre that has seen some fine examples recently (Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan being one such) and delineating a third way between ‘Macondo and McOndo’ for the Latin American tradition to mine.