This Is How You Lose Her

A few years ago, I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and was thoroughly smitten by it.  It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008, so I can't say I was alone in this opinion.   The author, Junot Diaz, has recently had his second collection of short stories ( I didn't read the first collection: Drown) published as This Is How You Lose Her.

The narrator for most of the stories is Yunior, who, like Diaz, was born in the Dominican Republic, moved to New Jersey as a child and is a college professor in the Boston area.  On the way to his present life, Yunior has left behind a trail of women that he cheated, betrayed and lied to, almost obsessively.  Yunior also appeared in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and many critics consider him to be Diaz' alter-ego.

The short, interconnected stories in This Is How You Lose Her are not all about his disastrous relationships with women; several are about his family.  The stories about family I found to be particularly affecting; two of them are about his very troubled relationship with his older brother Rafa, who is dying of cancer.  While as a young boy he adores his older brother,  the relationship becomes a mix of love and hatred as Rafa becomes increasingly shut down and emotionally unavailable to his brother and mother. The stories also give us great characters in Yunior's Mami and Papi.

All the stories give us a slice of life in the neighborhoods of the transplanted Dominicans.  Diaz writes in the language of the streets he grew up on; frequently interjecting Dominican phrases and words into his story that most readers will simply guess at the meaning of. His copious use of the F-word and N-word might be offensive to some readers, although I felt it added validity to the frequent and profanity-laced conversations Yunior has with his "boys".  Later, when Yunior is living in Boston and teaching at a university, he completely nails that city's deeply ingrained racism with funny/sad anecdotes about run-ins with police and campus security as he goes about his job teaching at the university.

The stories that Yunior tells us about women he has failed with are, although ultimately heartbreaking, also witty, self-deprecating looks at Yunior as a man...a man most readers would most likely feel needs a good slap upside the head.  And he receives those slaps (at least figuratively) from woman after woman after woman as he is repeatedly caught cheating and lying and still, somehow never learning the ultimate lessons in life about faithfulness and commitment.

After each of these relationships ends, Yunior berates and criticizes himself, seldom laying blame on any of the women. He admires them and understands their decisions to leave him behind as he avows to be a better man...and fails.

The last story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love",  is, I think, one of the the most affecting of the entire collection.  In it, Yunior records the ruination of his most recent relationship that has ended after six years.  Why? Because the woman he loves and is actually engaged to, has discovered that over the last six years he has cheated with over fifty (50!!) women.  These facts are all revealed to the reader in the first few sentences of this last story.  After the break-up, Yunior slips into a truly depressed state of mind and suddenly all the sorrow and heartbreak he has caused comes homes to roost, and it hurts.  The remainder of the story is broken into the next five years as Yunior attempts to slowly recover and rebuild his life, alone. He is a writer who hasn't written anything in a very long time until finally one day he writes the name of his ex followed by "the half-life of love never ends." And that's the beginning.

A Killing in the Hills

A Killing in the Hills isn't generally the type of novel that appeals to me: crime story, stereotypical characters (damaged hero cop, overworked waitress with a heart of gold, gutsy broad, sulky teenager, you get the drift) so I would probably have not read it EXCEPT it was written by Julia Keller.  That is the only reason why I picked it up.  And kept my fingers crossed that I would like it.

First: Julia Keller.  You may or may not recognize the name: beginning in 1998 and up until just this past June, she wrote as the cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune.  If you were a fan of hers, you know that she wrote beautifully and insightfully about cultural phenomena, often focusing on literature.  She was a true fan of great writing and I knew that I could usually count on her literary recommendations to guide me in my reading choices.  Aside from her cultural criticism column,  Ms. Keller earned the Tribune a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing (the Trib's one and only in that category)  in 2005 for her series on tornado-ravaged Utica, Illinois (which I actually remember reading and being completely struck by the clarity and incredible detail).  

Anyway, having been a longtime Julia Keller fan, when I read that she had written her first work of fiction for adults (she authored two previous works: a work of fiction for young adults and a non-fiction work: Mr. Gatling's Terrible Marvel),  I was very curious about what type of story it would be.  To be honest, as I said at the top of this essay, I was worried when I discovered it to be a mystery.  Oh boy, another mystery.  In continuing my slide down the hill of expectations, I read in an interview with Ms. Keller that this novel was the first in a planned series centering on a (you guessed it, gutsy) heroine.  AND her ongoing battles (against the forces of evil).  AND in a small town.  Oh, did I mention the heroine is a single mom of a sulky teenage daughter?  

Oh no; this was all very bad news.  

Nevertheless, old fans die hard (think people who still care about Ozzie Ozbourne as another inexplicable example) so I bought the book, read it over the course of a couple days (it's a mystery, not  rocket science) and....

I liked it, with some reservations.   

Yes, all the stereotypes are there: Bell Elkins, hot shot DC attorney, goes back to her roots in West Virginia, divorcing her husband and dragging her unwilling and unhappy teenage daughter Carla along with her.  Bell runs for and is elected to the position of prosecuting attorney for Raythune County, West Virginia and joins forces with the embattled sheriff to take down the drug dealers and suppliers who are slowly but surely ravaging the youth population of isolated towns buried in the hills. 

Keller's fine writing and fleshing out of the major players in the story (Bell, Sheriff Fogelsburg, Carla) lifted the quality of the storytelling a bit from the usual genre.  But the bad guys remained uninteresting and frankly bordered on caricature (snivelly teen drug dealers, etc.) 

Bell is a complicated woman and the story of her childhood in that small town, as revealed in bits and pieces throughout the story, is written quite grippingly.  Bell's relationship with her daughter is more than strained, and since Carla is intimately involved with the story's major crime, their issues are front and center. 

Very off-putting (and oddly introduced about twenty pages before the book ends) was an extremely brief encounter that Bell has with a repairman kindly making a late-night visit to her house to check on some electrical problem.  Keller goes to some length to describe the immediate attraction between them that Bell does not have time to explore because she is FIGHTING CRIME AND HER DAUGHTER IS IN DANGER,  for heaven's sake.  However, thoughts of him linger in Bell's mind as she's racing to save Carla's life.  I was really disappointed that Keller felt the need to bring the idea of a possible romance into the picture.  She has taken great pains to make Bell a strong, independent, fierce woman with a mission.  Her plate is full; do we really need this element awkwardly introduced so we will buy the next book?  There are other enticing threads left dangling that Keller hopes readers will follow as well into the next book, I'm sure.

While being glad that I read it, to both satisfy my curiosity and support Keller's foray as an adult fiction writer, I will not read the next book with Bell Elkins as the heroine.  

I do however, wish Julia Keller a happy and satisfying life with her writing and in her new teaching position at Ohio University.  I will continue to secretly hope that she may decide to venture out from the mystery genre and I will be at the front of the line once again.  

Best Wishes, Julia!