Before I bought the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), my friend told me, “You should buy it. It’s good, just don’t read into all the hype surrounding it.” Though I was not hooked into literary circles enough to hear much hype about it, I had heard of the book (it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction after all) and heeded her advice. And I loved the book, which is a true triumph of an ethnic minority voice lodged firmly in the US.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a fictional saga of a family from the …