Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

So, this review is going to be a little different. My dad and I both read Oscar Wao this past year and we've started discussing it together. My dad doesn't have a lot of time to read, but he always sparks some really interesting discussions.
We sat down the other day to discuss the basic storyline (it's been a while since I read it) and some basic things that we liked and didn't like. One of the first thing that popped up were the footnotes. My dad and I both agreed that we really liked the style of the footnotes, but sometimes they were longer than the thing they were supposed to be commenting on.
Something else that was maybe a generational difference is that my dad didn't find the story new. To me, I'd had some background experience with Central America in the 50s but ultimately a lot of it was brand new information. My dad, on the other hand, said that he knew about the harsh Central American governments and that there wasn't anything new or exciting about this world that Diaz was presenting us. My question to him was, does a book need to present us with a world that we don't have experience with for the book to be good? What do you think?