In “Aguantando,” the children and mother are waiting for the father to return. There are many instances of sad and dysfunctional relationships in this collection. Diaz highlights the extreme poverty of the “unwashed children pointing sullenly at his new shoes, the familias slouching in hovels” in “Negocios,” but we’re still left to picture what the homes or shacks might look like and what the dirty children are wearing. We are also left to our own imaginations when it comes to location, except in a few cases. We can stereotypically assume that the characters have dark hair and eyes and tanned skin because they are from the Dominican, but beyond that, we know little of them in most cases.
There is little description used throughout the book, and unless someone has unique characteristics, such as the “thick veined slab of his tongue through a hole in his cheek,” used to describe a boy disfigured at a young age from the story “Ysrael,” characters are not described much, if at all. Instead, he casually slips in words to flavor the dialogue, like in “Aguantando,” where the “Abuelo” tells his grandson, “So cry all you want, malcriado.” Diaz writes in a way that allows the mind to hear the Dominican accent without much prodding from the writing itself. Diaz does not awkwardly represent the Dominican way of speaking, using missing letters or misspelled words, as some authors do in an attempt to recreate the sounds of the language. The language used to tell these stories is rich with authenticity, sprinkled with cultural slang and Spanish. The book of short stories, Drown, by Junot Diaz, loosely follows the theme of coming of age as a young man in the Dominican Republic or as a Dominican who has emigrated to the United States.
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