The art of machismo - Junot Diaz's fiction

Junot Diaz is a bit of a guilty pleasure - I've really admired his work since reading his first collection of short stories, and I think I've ready pretty much everything he's written since - including most recently his story Miss Lara (?) in the current New Yorker - which is in many ways prototypical of his work. Why guilty? - although his stories are moving and funny and vivid depictions, realistic if exaggerated, I would guess, of contemporary East Cost urban Dominican-American culture as experienced by a an American-born teen with aspirations both carnal and intellectual, mostly in that order, it's hard not be serious off put by his objectification of women, and I have to think that he gets a pass on this in ways that Anglo-American or Jewish-American writers would not and have not - his unrelenting machismo attitude of women is tolerated in his fiction because it's condescendingly seen as a form of urban realism whereas I can't imagine other writers getting away with this - two of the best, Updike and Roth, have been criticized often for the much tame versions of the same viewpoint, you'd expect Diaz to be vilified - and yet, and yet - his vision of women is really just a limitation of the vision of his characters, isn't it?, not necessarily the author's vision - and equally important, in his best stories, such as this one, hie characters grow from innocence to experience and the are really not bad guys overall, just limited (initially) by their youth and by the expectations of their culture. Also, they tend often (not so much in this story) to be nerdy outsiders themselves - the neighborhood scifi geek, the reader, the thinker - the author? This current story is quite remarkable in that it encompasses, seemingly effortlessly, a span of many years, as the main character's view of women in general and of his particular beloved, an older woman who initiates him into love and in a way into his manhood, and how his view of her grows and evolves until he is beyond her - similar in an odd way to Flaubert's great A Sentimental Education but in just a few pages, a few thousand words. Worth reading.