Photo illustration: Ed Johnson

Ever since the Swedes gave Obama the Nobel Prize before he’d actually done anything, I’ve wondered what goes on behind the closed doors of the secret chambers where they bestow such honors.

And never more than now, with the MacArthur Foundation’s baffling decision to deem 43-year-old fiction writer Junot Díaz a “Genius” worthy of the legendary award’s half-million-dollar paycheck.

It’s not that Mr. Díaz hasn’t written a great novel. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao didn’t captivate me, but that’s because I’m not inclined to care that much about tubby science fiction geeks with girl issues, even when limned in the admirably deft and much-praised brushstrokes of Mr. Díaz’s affecting, hip Spanglish prose. In the five years since then, Mr. Díaz has written just one other book, a short story collection called This Is How You Lose Her.

But, in his brief wondrous literary career so far, Mr. Díaz—now a tenured professor at MIT—has collected more medals than Michael Phelps. Starting with his Pulitzer for fiction in 2007, awards have stuck to him like burrs. He’s bagged a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lila Acheson Wallace Readers Digest Award, a PEN/Malamud Award, a US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize and a raft of lesser-known (to me anyway) awards including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, the 2008 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction, the 2008 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the Massachusetts Book Awards Fiction Award in 2007.

Oh, and he now sits on the 20-member Pulitzer Committee himself, perhaps in a newly created job counseling young writers about how to cope when the psychic and emotional weight of all their awards gets too heavy and they find that all their friends hate their guts.

There’s something about giant literary awards that attracts other awards, like protons and electrons. But is it possible that one young writer could be deserving of all these prizes? Was there truly not another worthy writer during the last five years to whom the judges at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, say, could have granted a prize, given that their chosen boy had already had bagged a Pulitzer and a Goog?

These are subjective calls, and I reveal my own biases when I admit I would have awarded the Genius grant to Gillian Flynn for Gone Girl and her weird, sickly meditation on mother-daughter resentment, Sharp Objects; or to Lauren Groff for Arcadia, her heartbreakingly beautiful end-of-an-era novel about the generation born of hippie parents. And I’m not being sexist. There are even men who deserve it: Jess Walter, for Beautiful Ruins, and Jonathan Dee, for The Privileges—two writers whose work is brilliant, engrossing and revealing about our times.

This brings to mind a perhaps apocryphal quote I’ve heard attributed to Hemingway (but cannot find in any Google search this morning): “Literary prizes are like life jackets tossed to men who know how to swim and have already reached the shore.”

So far in his brief wondrous life, Mr. Díaz has reached the shore with books exactly three times. He published a well-received collection of short stories first, called Drown, followed by galloping blockbuster Oscar Wao, and then, five years later, his new collection of short stories about love from the point of view of a helplessly philandering male narrator whose wayward urges prevent him from finding lasting love.

The colorful and insular world Mr. Díaz reveals in his writing is particular, but the universal theme is male concupiscence. Oscar Wao’s titular antihero moves to New Jersey from the Dominican Republic and comes of age in America. But the book’s chief narrator is Oscar’s roommate Yunior, a self-described “player” who can’t stay true to his girlfriends and is compelled to mess around with all their sisters too.

At one point Yunior shows a touch of self-awareness: “What I should have done was check myself into Bootie-rehab,” he writes. “But if you thought I was going to do that, then you don’t know Dominican men.”

Yunior reappears in This Is How You Lose Her as a professor and writer who cheats on his girlfriends. The key plot point is curiously the same in many of the tales: the girlfriend discovers his infidelities because she cracks open his notebook and reads his diary notes about the encounters. Or, she reads his emails.

Don’t you hate when that happens? The reviewers adore it. Calling Yunior “a Latino love rat in New Jersey,” The Guardian writes that “the chief pleasure of these stories is the unflinching honesty Díaz brings to the subject of betrayal.” Noting that Díaz “writes best about players,” The L.A. Times says “it’s the voice of male-driven sex and love obsessions that makes Díaz’s stories most memorable.”

Reading the short stories in the collection, I had a nagging sense of familiarity. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on it, then I realized who Yunior reminded me of: Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.

Yes, the booty-chasing white suburban alter ego of John Updike, one of the great phallocrats of 20th century American letters, a man also constitutionally unable to cross the street with getting a literary award stuck on his shoe. And not just Updike, but Philip Roth and Norman Mailer too.

The demise of such fiction was predicted not so long ago in the pages of this very publication. Sven Birkerts, writing 15 years ago, noted that the postwar male ego in fiction was going the way of the Marlboro Man.

And no less a literary light than the sainted David Foster Wallace, also writing in these pages a decade and a half ago, called Updike “just a penis with a thesaurus” and predicted the end of the primacy of “Great Male Narcissists in American fiction. “Most of the literary readers I know personally are under 40,” Wallace wrote, “and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar G.M.N.’s.”

Fifteen years after those declarations, literary awards jurors are irresistibly drawn to this Latino Updike, if you will, younger, hipper, bilingual, less prolific certainly, but still plowing the same field as his predecessors, along with the same sorts of all-too-accommodating women. The heart wants what it wants, right? Like the GMNs of yore, Díaz’s alter ego is utterly beholden to his wandering penis, yet never examines his compulsion to bone everyone in sight.

In showering Mr Díaz with prize after prize, literary jurors seem to be saying the post-war GMN isn’t dead yet. Is it the wars, the terrorism, the recession, driving the longing for a regenerated machismo that Mr. Díaz’s multi-culti cred makes acceptable again? Is it a feminist backlash?

Mr. Díaz’s wondrous bewitching of prize committees comes at a time when women writers remain wildly underrepresented in publishing, on both the reviewing and the reviewed side. According to VIDA, which tracks women in the arts, the count in 2011 was dismal as ever. The London Review published work by 117 women and 504 men, The Paris Review published work by 20 women and 46 men, The New York Review published work by 163 women and 627 men. It goes on and on. Interestingly, there is more parity over at Pulitzer, where, since 1982, 18 men and 12 women have won for fiction.

I suspect that there’s more to Mr. Díaz’s multiple awards than either sheer talent (which he does possess), latent machismo among male awards-granters or even wish fulfillment for a bunch of pointy-headed dweebs. Mr. Díaz has acknowledged being guided in his writing career at Rutgers by two female titans of the post-male, multicultural literary establishment: Sandra Cisneros and Toni Morrison. In the end, Mr. Díaz’s crowded awards shelf might have as much to do with wise investments of “Who You Know” currency as anything else.

Last week, Mr. Díaz was on CBS This Morning talking to Charlie Rose about how the windfall will change his life. “It gives you an enormous amount of time and room,” he reflected. “I told a friend of mine, it’s like finding an extra bedroom to your apartment.” Yunior would certainly put that chamber to good use.

Nina Burleigh is the author of The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox among other books. Follow her at @ninaburleigh.

"It's like finding the fucking golden ticket," Mr. Diaz said. "It's like finding an extra bedroom in your New York studio apartment."

The award gives recipients $100,000 a year for five years, with no preconditions.

"The MacArthur Fellowship is designed to provide seed money for intellectual, social, and artistic endeavors. We believe that highly motivated, self-directed, and talented people are in the best position to decide how to allocate their time and resources," the MacArthur Foundation explains on its site.

Mr. Diaz will use the money to finish his "crazy monster book," he said.

The novelist was notified that he won the award on September 12--one day after he began his book tour for This is How You Lose Her. Was it hard keeping it a secret?

"I was so fucking stunned," said Mr. Diaz. "I am a chatty person, but colossally discreet."

There are twenty-three winners who "show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future." In addition to Mr. Diaz, this year's winners include Washington Post journalist David Finkel and writer Dinaw Mengestu.

The news was supposed to be released at 12:01 am on Tuesday morning, but broke late this afternoon.

"Some motherfucker leaked it," said Mr. Diaz. "Not me. I'm still convinced they'll take it away from me."

Mr. Diaz. (Photo by Nina Subin)

At first, you weren’t sure how to feel about Junot Díaz’s latest book of short stories, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead, 224 pp., $26.95). You think this might have had something to do with his use of the second person.

When you set the book down, your first instinct was to say it’s very different from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but the more you thought about it, the more you realized that there are quite a few similarities. There are the multiple vignettes feeding into the same essential story line, the nerd patois that peppers the text with references to geek pop culture, the second person and, obviously, the heartbreak. So why doesn’t it feel similar?

You think it might be the scope. This book is about Yunior, Mr. Díaz’s fictional alter ego, who in Lose Her watches his brother Rafa die from cancer, sleeps around, remembers the first time he ever saw snow. He works on a science fiction book set in the 1980s. You have to be honest: you were never that enthusiastic about Yunior. You always found him to be a bit of a cipher—assuming he’s the same Yunior from Oscar Wao and Mr. Díaz’s first book of stories, Drown (and you have no reason to think otherwise, since they’d all still be ciphers, even if they were separate characters). Only one story isn’t about him, the one about a hardworking laundrywoman who does her best not to think about her lover’s family back in Santo Domingo as she and the lover look at houses together in New Jersey. When you got to that one, you couldn’t help but remember how big Wao was. Wao was about the Dominican Republic, the whole country and everyone in it. Like Lose Her, it jumped around in time, but the arc and the large and varied cast of narrators led to a feeling of epic scale. When he compared Rafael Trujillo to Sauron, or Galactus from the Fantastic Four, you believed it.

Staying with Yunior’s voice, and only Yunior’s voice, can feel a bit claustrophobic, but at least that nerd-speak is back. A dry spell in his sex life isn’t just a dry spell, it’s “fucking Arrakeen.” You’ve always liked this, not only because it engages you—the you who read Grant Morrison’s writing stint on JLA in the individual issues—but also because it signals that he is reporting from a very personal place. Look, he was saying about Trujillo, that guy was so bad that nobody will ever be able to understand his reign objectively, so why bother? Have some extreme subjectivity, and humor. You think that’s part of the joke in using the second person, too, because it’s obviously not “you” you. One story in this new book even begins “you, Yunior.” But the rambling personal style is a lens best focused on something big. His short story in The New Yorker’s recent sci-fi issue, which is apparently part of a science fiction novel he’s been trying to finish, could have been subtitled, “Stuck in the ‘Friend Zone’ at the End of the World.” You thought it was hectic, funny, tragic and brilliant.

Here’s how Mr. Díaz’s style has changed for this book, and your opinion of how effectively it was used: it’s too sparse, and he chose the wrong topic. Drown was written in a style that was a little too straightforward, pretty much just “this happened” then “this happened,” albeit in tight stories, but he developed that tone further in the laid-back Wao. It rambled, in a good way. Here, it’s much the same, but pared-down in the Raymond Carver/Ernest Hemingway mode of stoic tragedy. One story ends: “We never spoke again. A couple of years later I went away to college and I don’t know where the fuck she went.” In the final story, Yunior admits he cheated on his fiancée with 50 women, and that’s just the starting point. The rest of the story ticks off the years after their breakup like the days after the apocalypse.

The stiff upper lip means a shortage of sex scenes. Mr. Díaz has described his style as a mix of “English, Spanish and nerdish,” and if he ever wanted to add a fourth inflection, you’d nominate “pornish.” What’s there, sex-wise, is perfunctory—it was good, it was bad, we held each other. Here’s about as dirty as it gets, in a scene with Ms. Lora, a high school teacher with whom Yunior had a liaison when he was 16 (line breaks included): “Do you have a condom?/ You are a worrier like that./ Nope, she says and you try to keep control but you come in her anyway./ I’m really sorry, you say.” See how it’s about him, but not at all about sex? This fits with the general sparseness, and yet you wonder if he might not have benefited from a few more dirty details. You mean, 50 women! There had to be some stories there. He has a big topic for his prose lens—this weird, hulking infidelity—but you never really understand it, because he doesn’t try to explain it.

Maybe this sexlessness is why Yunior still feels like a cipher, despite being the main character.  If you think about a potential relationship longingly—and there’s a lot of longing here—it’s because there’s this shadow of what might be stretching long before it, all those positions to explore, or left to explore, if you’re longing for someone you’ve lost. That the sex is shallow, when it does happen, means the emotions lack a punch. It’s like a horror movie in which the murders aren’t very gory: it’s harder to be scared for the dopes onscreen.

This is also your way of saying that the women are forgettable. You never even get a chance to like them, because most of the stories, true to the title, are about the end. You’re not sure that Yunior deserves to be happy, even though the book sets you up to root for him.

You wonder if Junot Díaz, whose friends call him Yunior, might have been too close to the subject. You keep returning to this interview he did with New York magazine to promote the book, in which you found out that he a) recently suffered a bad breakup and b) has been under contract to do a book about “the rise and fall of a young cheater” since the success of Drown 16 years ago, when he was 27. To you, this sounded like someone narcing on himself, like he’s on that Substance D stuff from A Scanner Darkly. “Writing short stories in a culture like ours is like giving birth to girls in a Dominican conservative family in the fifties,” he told New York, hastening to add that he loves girl babies. Did he want you to read this book at all?

You liked some of the stories. The one with the female narrator embraces the anxious idea that citizenship is a zero-sum game, and the one in which Yunior goes on vacation with a girlfriend as he tries to ignore their collapsing relationship will ring true to anyone who’s been in that situation. But from reading Oscar Wao, you know that Mr. Díaz is capable of much more, and if this book was required writing, it definitely isn’t required reading. It’s just ... fine, and you say that as someone who is pretty close to Mr. Díaz’s ideal reader.

Even so, your opinion of Mr. Díaz hasn’t changed one iota. These stories feel like the B-sides off a really great record, which makes you all the more hungry for that sci-fi apocalypse book. You’d preorder that one FTL.

dduray@observer.com

Triffids are deadly, semi-intelligent, make-believe plants that have thick tentacles and spray poisonous gas featured in science fiction novels, including The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham and Simon Clark's The Night of the Triffids. Mr. Colbert scoffed: "We might have to check the building for structural damage, you geeked out on me so hard right now." But he only revealed his own nerdiness by actually knowing what triffids are! Clip above.

June 14: Vampire Weekend with Kid Sister
June 20: Comedy Central Park with Stephen Lynch, Mike Birbiglia and Julian McCullough

June 22: French-Israeli singer Yael Naim
June 28: Vieux Farka Touré and Fallou Dieng
July 5: Rachid Taha and Dengue Fever
July 11: Dancing with Rennie Harris/Puremovement
July 17: Junot Díaz
July 20: Santogold with Diplo
July 23: Mark Knopfler
July 27: Skatalites with Taj Mahal
July 29: Crosby, Stills and Nash
July 31: Richard Price
Aug. 2: Roy Hargrove
Aug. 6: Sonny Rollins
Aug. 14: Los Lonely Boys with Los Lobos
Aug 16: Battles and Black Dice
Aug 17: Sharon Jones

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I Love the 80s Newsweek's Jonathan Alter talks to Mediabistro's Kathryn Carlson and shares this career high: "When I started covering the media in 1984, there were very few media critics in the United States. At one point, I was named one of the top ten media critics in America and my parents were very pleased—but I had to tell them that there were only ten media critics in America."

Sensitive Siegel Don't ask Against The Machine author Lee Siegel for an interview if you've ever written anything critical about him. Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici learned that when a publicist from Siegel's publisher cancelled an interview on account of having "written negatively about Lee on your Portfolio blog."

We’ve waited a long time for a novel from Junot Díaz. The Dominican-American author blasted the publishing world in 1996 with Drown, a book of short stories mainly about the macho scrambling of Dominican immigrants in industrial New Jersey. Fresh and gritty, it heralded a confident, new urban voice in literature, and scooped up plenty of awards and attention. So, how does The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao fare beneath the crushing weight of expectation? “Negro please,” as Mr. Diaz would write, it was worth the wait.

We’re retreading some of the same Dominican-diaspora territory here—Santo Domingo; Paterson; Nuevo York—but with fleshier, richer characters. The story spans three generations of a family with grand origins and a tragic fate. The grandparents are Dominican aristocrats with lovely daughters and a rambling villa in La Vega. But decades, bad politics and misfortune generate Oscar, a rotund, Elvish-speaking, comic-book-loving ghetto nerd in Jersey. Oscar, with his “enormous Section 8 glasses,” is the kind of boy who says, “I have a plethora of new Japanimation for your viewing pleasure.” In college he asks his roommate if it’s true “that no Dominican male has ever died a virgin.” The family, once so proud, has suffered a great fall.

So what happened? Well, a series of murders, suicides, beatings, humiliations and broken hearts, among other things. The family may have been cursed with a “fukú,” which struck anyone stupid enough to mess with Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s brutal dictator from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. Trujillo’s almost supernatural brand of sadism, which saw him feeding enemies to sharks or drowning them in boiling oil, is worthy of paranoid lore. But, as Yunior, our smack-talking, yarn-spinning narrator for most of the book, says, “Shit, what Latino family doesn’t think it’s cursed?”

This is a hard-luck tale, to be sure. Darkness seems to be an essential ingredient in any Latin American novel, given the continent’s politics of tyranny and sputtering revolution. But the breezy, ballsy informality of the narration keeps the action light and kinetic, as if Yunior, our slightly mysterious guide, is entertaining friends over beers. He delivers the story in a Spanglish vernacular, but it helps to be fluent in comic book and Tolkien, too, so that you have your bearings when he tosses off lines such as “our boy wasn’t no ringwraith, but he wasn’t no orc either.” Well, I suppose we know what Mr. Díaz was reading when he was in middle school in Jersey.

Despite the street talk, Mr. Díaz still paints some beautiful sentences, particularly when he’s describing people. There’s Ana, one of Oscar’s many crushes, who laughs “as though she owned the air around her.” Or Oscar’s sister Lola, once “a long slender-necked ibis of a girl” with “big innocent teeth.” Oscar’s mother, Beli, a woman of tragic beauty, becomes a “hardnosed no-nonsense femme-matador” with skin “the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s last light.”

Not many writers can litter and lift a story of a family’s dissolution with humor and beauty. Junot Díaz has written the novel we’ve been hoping to get from him. If we’re lucky, we won’t have to wait so long for the next one.

Emily Bobrow is an editor at economist.com.