Feeling Copacetic

I just finished reading The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. Junot Diaz depicts a Dominican family across multiple generations. He does it by piecing the information together. The narrator is constantly changing; he switches from first, to second, to third person. The story is not chronological. Although he writes in English there is enough Spanish that if you don't know the language at all it could be frustrating.

Switching narrators without preface, writing in Spanish and English, jumping around to different parts of the story, to tell you it in the order he wants to--not necessarily the order you want or expect, until the entire picture is painted and you can put the pieces together to understand the past, and doing all this, with excellent writing, phenomenal story-telling, superb grasp of the English language, and the occasional sentence that goes on way too long. For those of you that know me you can guess why I appreciated the book.

Oscar goes through a lifetime of tumultuous events ranging from depressing to horrific. Toward the end, just weeks after the most terrifying event of his life, he stops by a friend's house to ask a favor.

"Jesus, Oscar, I said. Come up, come up. I waited for him in the hall and when he stepped out of the elevator I put the mitts on him. How are you, bro? I'm copacetic, he said. We sat down and I broke up a dutch while he filled me in."

"I'm copacetic." Yeah, me too.