Foreword
by Junot Díaz
In those days I was starving—for models, for guides, for soul company. I was a young Dominican diasporic writer, a Caribbean diasporic writer, from a particular type of dysfunctional Caribbean family, and I was adrift in the literary world. Adrift without moorings or a map or even much of an anchor. I wrote what I could and read what I could, but no matter what I put into my heart and head there was always something missing—some vital element that I could not name and yet I craved wildly.
Like all hardcore readers and like nearly all writers, I had assembled a pantheon of novels, of writers I adored, that stirred my deepest selves, that transformed my sensibility: Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones; Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street; Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets; Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; Toni Morrison’s Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. I doubt I would have become a writer without these brilliances—yet for all these books gave me, there was still something missing, a vital part of me that remained unseen, unaddressed, unacknowledged.
I had read articles and interviews and knew many readers personally who testified to what it means when a book reaches into the core of you, when a book recalls you to yourself. I had no idea what that would mean exactly, because I didn’t truly understand myself exactly, but I had no doubt that such a book existed. And if this book didn’t yet exist, it was surely imminent, and all I had to do was keep my eyes open.
Such was my faith in those days. And that was what I sought in libraries, on my friends’ bookshelves, in the bookstores (in those days there really were a lot of them)—a book that would complete some circuit in me.
And it was during that restless search for complétude that I found Oscar Hijuelos’s Our House in the Last World.
Our House in the Last World tracks the long melancholic fall (there really is no rise) of the Santinio clan from their roots in Holguín, Cuba, where “[p]eople believed in God, and children died at early ages of fever and tuberculosism” to the all-the-way messed-up tenements of New York City. A family saga whose fractured four-chambered heart is comprised of nervous ghost-seeing Mercedes; her feckless, hard-drinking husband, Alejo; and their two American sons: the older, worldly Horacio; and Hijuelos’s alter ego, Héctor, so white that no one believes he’s Cuban, so “sick at heart being so Americanized, which he equate[s] with being fearful and lonely,” and so awkward he feels like he’s a “freak,” living in “the twilight zone.”
Our House in the Last World is the quintessential immigrant novel—may in fact be the purest expression of the genre I know—and it is certainly one of the finest.
This is the first novel all young writers dream about. The novel tips in at a brisk 235 pages, and yet it is as profound and moving as any thousand-page tome, and in spite of its relative brevity seems to capture everything about the immigrant experience that I and so many of my friends endured.
The shattering disorientation of that shift. The shock of language, of culture, of weather, of place, of America. The suffocating living together. The perilous primacy of work. The financial fecklessness of our elders. The loss of language and cultural bearings. The crushing loneliness. The addictions. The ailments of flesh and spirit and mind. The ghosts we immigrants become and the ghost worlds that haunt us. The impossible, unbridgeable gap between the parents born allá and the kids they raise aquí, and who dies in that gap and what, also, is born there.
And death, always death. The horrid unraveling of bonds, of love, of hope, under all the stressors of immigration.
Read Our House in the Last World closely enough—as I have these last three decades—and you’ll find Roth and Dickens and Cahan and Sontag and a big bolt of Puzo, whose omertà-ness obscures the fact that he’s one of the great chroniclers of American immigration, fictional or fantastic (Puzo, after all, wrote the script for Superman, the Ur-Good-Immigrant of our melting pot dreams). Hijuelos’s voice is both understanding and extraordinary, a master class in control. He describes the Santinio family’s many dysfunctional clashes through a matter-of-fact counterpoint that resists the sensational or the maudlin; and yet there is intimacy, tenderness in every aspect of the narrative, even in that cool control, that collapses the distance between the reader and the characters.
Hijuelos made his name and career with The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, for which he won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize (the first Latine to do so), but for my penny Our House is not only the equal of The Mambo Kings, it is in certain respects the superior work. What Hijuelos accomplishes in this taut novel (and what few other works of literature have come close to matching) is one of the truest portraits of the psychogeography of immigration ever put to the page.1 The United States is a country that talks about immigration nonstop, for or against, as a social-racial problem or an economic-democratic good, but as a nation we have frightfully little awareness of how the slow cold violence of immigration lives within the hearts and minds of those who survive that apocalyptic translocation. As William Carlos Williams writes, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” Change “poems” for “immigrants” and “men” for “nations” and one begins to perceive the importance of what Hijuelos has wrought.
Our House in the Last World is not only a Great Novel, it was the novel I’d been looking for all my life—the novel that saw me, in my entirety, that gave me the impetus I needed to write my own first book, the novel that counted out all the shattered pieces of me and declared them whole.
Though productive and well published, Hijuelos never got the love he deserved from the “literary world” or wholesale acclaim from the communities closest to his art. Hijuelos arrived too early to avail himself of the diversity wave that has altered the face of publishing, hopefully forever. But Hijuelos arrives just in time for many readers and writers, today and tomorrow.
I hope you are one of them.