bleeding like a hog

"He and Ana in SAT class, he and Ana in the parking lot afterward, he and Ana at the McDonald's, he and Ana become friends. Each day Oscar expected her to be adios, each day she was still there. They got into the habit of talking on the phone a couple times a week, about nothing really, spinning words out of their everyday; the first time she called him, offering him a ride to SAT class; a week later he called her, just to try it. His heart beating so hard he thought he would die but all she did when she picked him up was say, Oscar, listen to the bullshit my sister pulled, and off they'd gone, building one another one of their word-scrapers. By the fifth time he called he no longer expected Big Blow-off. She was the only girl outside his family who admitted to having a period, who actually said to him, I'm bleeding like a hog, an astounding confidence he turned over and over in his head, sure it meant something , and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thumped inside his chest, a lonely rada. Ana Obregon, unlike every other girl in his secret cosmology, he actually fell for as they were getting to know each other. Because her appearance in his life was sudden, because she'd come under his radar, he didn't have time to raise his usual wall of nonsense or level some wild-ass expectations her way."

I opened The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao at around 2:30 this afternoon and I'm already about a third of the way through it. The pages just fly by, like it ain't no thang, and so far it's alright. I'm not extensively familiar with Diaz's work, just some stories here and there, but uh, he seems to have his moments and, actually, is the only writer I've seen who manages to emulate the kind of honest, contemporary narrative for which the standard has been set only, for me personally, by a (at his best) nearly flawless Roth.