One Young Writer Delivers The Goods. By Piers Marchant Drown, by Junot Díaz (Riverhead). Hardcover, $21.95. THERE ARE GOOD ways and bad ways to get attention in the literary community: If you've produced an extraordinary work that, by some grace of God, gets to the right editor at the right time, you're golden. If the critics love you, but no one else has so much as leafed through one of your books, you're considered a soldier fighting the good fight on our country's cultural battlefield. But woe betide you if you make your splash with a financial killing or by getting a huge advance. The world is filled with half-assed writers putting out tepid first novels (The Secret History, anyone?) to volumes of cash from clueless publishers. In fact, cynics would go on to say, someone who makes a bundle for a first novel must be shallow and talentless. Occasionally, though, the big-deal publishing rigs get something right. Last year, Junot Díaz, a young writer from Santo Domingo who grew up in New Jersey, got a bunch of attention for receiving a huge advance on a novel he hadn't even written yet. The sniping began early and didn't stop until his first collection of stories, Drown, came out late last year. What you've heard since then is cynics and naysayers keeping their traps shut tight. This extraordinary collection proves Díaz to be the real deal, and a new literary voice to be reckoned with. The collection has 10 stories--all but one first person, many of them inter-related--yet their scope remains wide and dispersed. Subtle differences from narrator to narrator provide shadings and nuances of an entire community, even though many of the characters appear as similar as brothers. Díaz's gift, among others, is the ability to render similar subjects in different ways. The opening story "Ysrael," published in Best American Short Stores 1996, is about two brothers tracking down a boy outcast who, as an infant, had his face eaten off by a pig. Later in the collection, "No Face" (the only third person story in the collection) takes the point of view of the deformed boy himself. The effect is poignant and deep-reaching. Throughout the collection, a narrator named Yunior talks about his missing, violent, autocratic father, who left his family in the Dominican Republic for six years while he was living in New York. Over the course of these stories, we see the cruelty and malevolence of this man they all call Papi. Not until the last story of the collection, "Negocios," do we see the father's life in the States, as hard-scrabble and horrific as can be imagined, and get a sense of what drove him to his listless cruelty. The stories are all harsh. Bleak portraits of drug dealers, users, people who have been spent. Dirt poor Latino kids on the end of a skid-row trip that won't get any better. But amidst it all there's always something worth living for--something shimmering ahead in the distance, or deeply held from the past. In "Aurora," a young dope dealer obsesses over his ex-girlfriend, a junkie with AIDS who's recently been released from juvie. Hers is clearly a more acute and dismal spiral than his own. He loves her, knows it's the real thing, but their circumstances make ironic and pointless any dreams he has of growing old with her. The power of these stories comes from this same conceit: Díaz's characters are all able to see better lives for themselves. No matter how bad their circumstances, they remain aware of a finer possibility. These narrators know they will go on to leave no trace of their existence. Their stories, then, are the only things to be remembered, and they're desperate to cram the details of their lives into our consciousness--they want out, but this is as close as they'll come to getting there. The writing, too, is exceptional. Sharp and concise, Díaz is able to portray intricate and complicated emotional states with finely honed detail, a smattering of description. They have a minimalist approach, but with delicate, poetic language. The closing paragraph of "Fiesta, 1980," where Yunior recounts the bitter, violent time his parents were together when Papi finally moved them up to the States: "In the darkness, I saw that Papi had a hand on Mami's knee and that the two of them were quiet and still. They weren't slumped back or anything; they were both wide awake, bolted into their seats. Every now and then the van was filled with the bright rush of somebody else's headlights. Finally I said, Mami, and they both looked back, already knowing what was happening." In Díaz's work, the events in the characters' lives play themselves out, and they are helpless to change them. The silences between the characters, which are frequent and often, are ear-splitting with psychic pain. The collection as a whole is like a loosely structured novel. Not every story stands on its own as well as "Ysrael," "Aurora," or "Fiesta 1980," but there is a sense of continuity that binds them. Like early Hemingway, Díaz has found his voice and timbre; like Carver, he has the downtrodden, abused and hungry pantheon of characters that populate his world. Against all odds, this enthralling debut collection proves Díaz worthy of the praise and hype surrounding him.

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