The third story is called “Alma” and it’s a short lyric burst of a couple of pages. Reading it reminded me of the most awesome sort of firecracker from my youth, the cherry bomb. That was when fireworks were not so illegal.

The form of address in this story is pretty amazing. It begins: “You, YUNIOR, HAVE A GIRLFRIEND named Alma”. It’s a kind of direct address that implies the lead character is being spoken to. Yet no one but the character, if they were in first person, or the authorial voice of the writer in third person, would know the details of Yunior’s love life with Alma.

Diaz language alternately balloons sentences or breaks them apart with waves of straight sex and eroticism. It’s a wicked river of a prose style that frequently leaps into poetry…like in nearly every sentence. Tempo tossed.

I’m not a Latino and don’t understand all the references to the culture in Diaz. But it doesn’t matter much. In literature we don’t understand everything. Lovers of literature cherish ambiguity, which is civilizing. We live in a world of growing fundamentalism. A world where anyone who doesn’t take a text literally is considered a traitor. But the world of language and books was never meant to be penned in a corral. Works of art and other kinds of free expression are all mustangs.

I loved the impression Diaz conveyed, that Yunior’s and Alma’s lovemaking was a performance that alternated in a current from awkward to intense. “Alma” portrays sex as a game that the lovers pretend they know how to play. Each role-playing as they observe their partner doing the same. Filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock developed a shot where he would pan in and focus out simultaneously to simulate vertigo. Diaz invents an erotic vertigo in his stories that I haven’t found anywhere else.

I didn’t grow up in any kind of working class or ethnic ghetto like the one depicted in the story, although I grew up working class. But I was always meant for college without thinking much about it. And thanks, City of New York, for letting me go to college tuition-free. If my parents had to pay for it, I wouldn’t have gone. They never could have afforded it.

I’m frustrated in this review that I can’t give you an account of Diaz eroticism that’s a closer reading of the text. It’s as hard to do that as trying to explain a poem or a great joke. You will have to repair to the pages of  This Is How You Lose Her yourself. But I will say that Diaz writing on Yunior making love to Alma made me half-wish I was straight.

At the conclusion of this story, Diaz provides a getting out of jail free card that any writer can try out if there’s written evidence that they’ve been unfaithful. Read “Alma” and see what you think of it.