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Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, evidently has good juju.

A Reading by Novelist Junot Díaz

6 p.m. Oct. 23, Hartford Public Library, 500 Main St., Hartford. 860-695-6300, hplct.org. Free; 8 p.m. Oct. 26, Quick Center for the Arts, Fairfield University, Fairfield, 203-254-4010, fairfield.edu/arts. $45.

Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in working-class New Jersey, Junot Díaz moved through the state-school system to Cornell and is now a creative writing professor at MIT. He has The New Yorker's number, as attested by several stories and essays he has placed there, one of them even before Drown, his acclaimed short-story collection, was published in 1996. And then there's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, his 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning debut novel.

Díaz deserves every bit of his success, for he is a monstrously talented writer. But if the narrators in Oscar Wao are any indication of the mindset of their author, it's reasonable to speculate that Díaz might also wonder if he hasn't been the beneficiary of some exceedingly good juju. Juju must be involved, after all, to win the Pulitzer Prize for writing what, in some ways, is one of the best science fiction/fantasy novels to come out in years.

The Pulitzer Prize isn't allergic to genre material. Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay draws heavily from comic-book lore. Toni Morrison's Beloved had significant elements of fantasy in it. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel by any definition of the term. But of these authors, even Chabon, only Díaz truly lets loose with all his nerd fury.

Oscar Wao is the first mainstream novel I've read that rewards the reader for being familiar with Michael Moorcock, Mervyn Peake, John Christopher, Alan Moore, Katsuhiro Otomo and Los Bros Hernandez at the same time as it invokes Wilde, Hemingway, Joyce and other literary-fiction titans. But the furious name-checking isn't just a string of shout-outs to the stuff Díaz clearly loves; it's a signal that this book is as much science fiction and fantasy as it is literary fiction.

And Díaz's main touchstone here is none other than J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

It may not seem so at first. Oscar Wao is essentially the story of a Dominican family that suffers horrifically under Trujillo, escapes to the United States, and then struggles to come to terms with its Dominican roots as it finds its way in both Dominican-American and the broader U.S. culture. In its plot and characters, it never strays from a gritty social realism, never turns its eye away, except sometimes to spare us from violence too heartbreaking to devote words to. Meanwhile, the book is written in a gorgeous, urgent Dominican Spanglish that borrows from several traditions at once and is a sheer pleasure to read.

But the book's form, its structure — the way the story is put together and the way it unfolds — is straight-up epic fantasy and science fiction. The main motivator of the plot isn't a character, but an idea: the Dominican concept of fukú, Díaz writes in the novel's opening pages, before a character is even introduced, "generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World;" and its counterspell, zafa, that could stave off the fukú and "keep your family safe."

All the characters can be seen as caught in the throes of these opposing forces; they are birds in a hurricane. Then, in his depiction of the regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961, Díaz alludes to Tolkien's land of evil, Mordor, right from the start. Trujillo was "our Sauron," he writes in the same opening section — and doesn't let up until the Dominican Republic has effectively become Mordor.

And the way the curse, counterspell and Tolkien allusions converge in Oscar Wao's final sections, in which the book's titular character returns to the Dominican Republic to meet his salvation and his doom (don't worry, I'm not giving anything away that you don't know from the book's title), are what give the book its true power.

If you're not hip to science fiction and fantasy, Oscar Wao is still a delight to read, sentence for sentence, and the story is moving and tragic. But if you know about the genre thing, Oscar Wao is transcendent.

It's easy to marvel at Díaz's technical mastery of several genres, but there's a question embedded in the wonder: Why should he go through all the trouble to portray Dominican history as a science fiction-fantasy epic?

BOMB Magazine asked him that question in 2007 and he gave a long answer. "These were the narratives that spoke directly to what I had experienced," Díaz said, "both personally and historically. The X-Men made a lot of sense to me, because that's what it really felt like to grow up bookish and smart in a poor urban community in central New Jersey. Time travel made sense to me, because how else do I explain how I got from Villa Juana, from latrines and no lights, to Parlin, N.J., to MTV and a car in every parking space? Not just describe it but explain the missing emotional cognitive disjunction? ... If you're looking for language that will help you approach our nigh-unbearable historical experiences, you can reach for narratives of the impossible: sci-fi, horror, fantasy."

Or as he puts it in Oscar Wao: "Who more sci-fi than us?"

It's a question that fuels Oscar Wao and seems to fuel Díaz as well, and if we have to wait 10 years for the next book he writes — there were 11 years in between his first two — we're lucky we only have to wait a few days to hear him speak.

Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of The New Haven Review (newhavenreview.com).