This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

After enjoying his Pulitzer Prize Winning book a couple of years ago I looked forward to reading this collection of inter connected short stories. Centering primarily on his previous character Yunior, a small character in his Oscar book, we learn about the ways that Yunior's inability to be faithful has affected his relationships.

In it's totality the collection is a disappointment. I think that Diaz is a wonderful writer and I am not put off by the dialect that he writes in, as his characters primarily are Dominican and thus they speak in this dialects.

I think, that for the most part, people have a hard time connecting with a book or a character if they do not find something, anything, likable in the book or it's characters. Try as one might this is a struggle in Diaz's writing.

A couple of the stories were stronger than the others. A couple of the stories were previously published in The New Yorker. I forget that a quite small percentage of people read that magazine so is very common for author's to later reproduce their work in their own collections.

Something also off putting for me though certainly not related to the story directly is the fact that Diaz is a writing teacher at MIT. I am not a prude, I think writers have been challenging the acceptable standards for many decades and will continue to do so. For me Diaz is different. His writing is crude, in some ways vulgar, and as some of his writing seems autobiographical and a great percentage of his characters have misogynistic tendencies I do have questions about him teaching writing. I am sure that is just a middle aged white man's concerns but there you have it.

I think that my reading stack will have to be pretty short for me to pick up another Diaz book.