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The texture of the ten pieces that make up Drown, the collection of short fiction by 27 year-old Junot Diaz, reminds me of the fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, whose encyclopedia work The Muquddimah says that "poetry and prose work with words, and not with ideas. The ideas are secondary in the words." While showing no dearth of ideas, this compelling book by the young Diaz does the trick primarily at the level of words.

Diaz delves piercingly into the Dominican chapter of the human experience revealing a field virtually unexplored by American fiction. Set in a discrete history and geography--following the characters' whereabouts from the homeland in the Dominican Republic through their immigrant odyssey in the United States--the book unveils a contemporary yarn of misery, uprooting, and endurance.

Diaz populates his stories with problematic, deep, complex characters who wrestle with recognizable traumas. Yunior and Rafa in "Ysrael" and "Fiesta 1990" confront the pain of growing up, the loss of innocence, and the uncannily random distribution of misfortune. Imagine a boy who has had his face eaten up by a pig. Who would dare to tackle the question: why he? "Drown", "Edison, New Jersey", "Aurora," and others, offer us glimpses of the anger stemming from unearned suffering, the embarrassment of poverty, the pathology of loving a crackhead, and the unfailing shock of the real. Drown brings to the fore the conflicts, yearnings, and frustrations that have fueled literary texts through the centuries.

In each of his stories Diaz uses a first-person narrator who in observing others (evident in "Boyfriend", "Aurora," and "No Face") lets us peek into the arena of his own soul. The last and longest of the stories, "Negocios," reconstructs the adventures of Ramon, the father who left wife and children behind to try to make it in the States, from the vantage point of Yunior, the youngest son.

Conceptual maturity and masterful execution come joyously together in Drown. I would contend that nothing explains the welcome magic of this book by Diaz more than his adroit engagement with words, to go back to the comment by Ibn Khalhun. It is his knack for language that ultimately enables him to achieve the visual richness of his work conferring tangibility to the experiences he captures in it, "He turned away from me. His feet were crackling through the weeds, breaking stems," says the narrator speaking of his older brother Rafa, as he walked away upset ("Ysrael"). Subsequently, the brothers ride the bus back home: "Rafa crossed his arms and watched the fields and roadside shacks scroll past, the dust and smoke and people almost frozen by our speed" ("Ysrael").

In the title story, the son is vexed over his gullible mother's torment by the sly absentee father who sweet-talks her on the telephone from Florida to strip her of some money: "His words coil inside her, wrecking her sleep for days."

Diaz causes words--and most notably the verbs--to show meaning plastically. Here is a fiction writer who draws on the robust lexical fund at his disposal to sculpt, to paint, to physically imprint the reality of his characters so as to make them seen.

Junot Diaz is a vigorous new voice in American literature. In this first known book of his, he has aptly rehearsed a well-crafted elliptical style and has had the characters speak Spanish - Dominican or Latino as the case may require - without translation, italics or any other editorial assistance for the reader. He has handled those features with such naturalness that one wonders whether they will recur in the young author's future undertakings. But it really makes no difference for now. A writer is to be judged for work completed, not for potentiality. What matters is that Drown, the work he has produced, is a fine literary achievement.