SHOULD cultural significance be allowed to take precedence over art? Which is more valuable, story, or the wider political truths expressed through an individual experience? It is impossible to respond to the stories in Junot Diaz's exciting debut, Drown (Faber, £7.99 in UK), as fiction only; too much of their impact is due to the fact that his voice comes from a culture within a culture within several cultures. New York literary circles have hailed Diaz as a second coming of sorts. What really makes him unique? Is it the quality of his work, or is it the fact that he is from the Dominican Republic?
On reading these sketchy, fleeting stories - which are reminiscent of Guyanan Roy Heath or Trinidadian Ralph de Boissiere and the fiction which African and Caribbean writers used to write before they discovered magic realism - one suspects Diaz owes his success to a combination of several factors: his deceptively balanced approach to narrative, his neat use of African and American speech rhythms, his ethnic origins and, above all, the cultural overlap he has mastered: "We weren't even theatrical or straight crazy - like other families. We fought the sixth graders, without real dignity." Elsewhere at times the content may appear risky - drug dealing, petty theft, violence towards women - and it is frequently macho in tone, but stylistically he plays safer than one might have expected.
About the most daring special effect Diaz uses is in the opening story, "Ysrael", which centres on the horrific account of a young boy who lost most of his face when a pig invaded the family but when he was a baby and caused extensive disfiguration - "skinned it like an orange". Now the boy has become a figure of fascination for the local children, particularly the narrator and his brother, who are intent on examining the destruction Ysrael's mask conceals.
Otherwise, there are no tricks, no gimmicks, no grotesque flourishes - just plenty of slang.
At their best the stories are boyhood memoirs dominated by a missing father. "I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life. He was in the States, working, and the only way I knew him was through the photographs - my moms kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed. Since our zinc roof leaked almost everything we owned was water stained ... was only because of that plastic bag that any pictures of my father survived."
In this collection of scenes from restless lives as narrated by a restless, obviously still young narrator, the one constant is the almost mythic figure of the father. Rafa, the narrator's slightly dangerous elder brother, "used to think that, he'd [Dad] come in the night, like Jesus, that one morning we'd find him at our breakfast table unshaven and smiling."
Diaz invokes two worlds, the island back home in which poverty and his missing father dominated family life, and the newer, brasher life of drugs and sex and hanging out in a New York divided into Afro Caribbeans, Latinos and nervous Whites. Most of these stories are good; a couple are almost as fine as Diaz's admirers claim they are, while the final one, "Negocios", is quite powerful. Again, it features the erring father: "My father, Ramon de las Casa, left Santo Domingo just before my fourth birthday. Papi had been planning to leave for months, hustling and borrowing from his friends, from anyone he could put the bite on." Meanwhile the mother, aware of the inevitable, "acted as if [Ramon] were a troublesome visitor who had to be endured".
At his more reflective and subdued, Diaz is a convincingly dispassionate witness capable of understatement, and, more importantly, confident enough to understate. The brasher narratives are frequently overly shrill and lack the exasperated humour common to many writers from former colonies - African and Indian, in particular. His strength may be that he knows when to end a story: none of these pieces outstays its welcome - although that is not to say that they all achieve a natural conclusion.
Drown, with its half hearted glossary, has a random feel to it; its range is limited, and rather than conferring a sense of cohesion, the repetition makes the reader suspect that these stories: were not meant to be published together. Far more than most short story writers, Diaz, an observer with a more instinctive feel for detail than for formal narrative, leaves one wondering if he actually is a fiction writer. Certainly many of these stories are impressive, but it may be that reportage is Diaz's true medium.
