The Boat

Author: Nam Le

ISBN: 030726808X

ISBN-13: 9780307268082

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Random House Inc

Pub. Date: May 2008


The first story in the debut collection by Australian writer Nam Le, 29, has the wonderfully bombastic title Love And Honor And Pity And Pride And Compassion And Sacrifice. A list of the "old verities" American writer William Faulkner urged writers to write about, it suggests that all stories should go back to some universal truth about the human condition. This search for the fundamental takes centre stage in a story that also serves a dual purpose as the introduction of this collection by Le, the fiction editor of the literary journal Harvard Review. A coyly semi-autobiographical story - the narrator is a Vietnamese-Australian writer named Nam who is at the Iowa Writer's Workshop - it opens with the narrator being, three days before his final story of the semester is due, devoid of inspiration.

In a dig at the expectations American readers have of stories written by non-white or "ethnic" writers, a friend helpfully comments: "How can you have writer's block? Just write a story about Vietnam." This stereotype of the immigrant writer being feted more for his or her exotic background than writing skills is one his fictional alter ego has no interest in perpetuating. As another friend hilariously puts it, "You can't tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn't have the vocab." However, when his father visits from Australia and stirs up memories the writer has of hearing about the infamous My Lai massacre, which his father survived, he decides out of desperation to start a story with the self-mocking working title, Ethnic Story. But while we do learn about his father's horrific experiences in snatches, ultimately this story explores how a father-and-son relationship is shaped by those very verities Faulkner spoke of, in its own uniquely complex and savage way.

Similarly, in the stories that follow, characters find themselves teetering on the edge of catastrophe, and in this limbo they are forced to confront their relationships with those around them. Meanwhile, the subjects of these stories are best described by the same friend from the first story: "You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing. But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins and Hiroshima orphans - and New York painters with hemorrhoids." Indeed, the collection contains all these elements (except, a little disappointingly, the lesbian vampires). All this traveling outside of the writer's own experience does smack of a precocious creative writing student showing off his virtuosity. For example, the weakest story, Hiroshima, reads like a fastidiously compiled list of Japanese references - tree spirits, paper doors and siblings being referred to as Big Brother and Big Sister - without ever really succeeding in bringing the reader into the mind of the narrator, a child who has been evacuated to the hills of the soon-to-be-destroyed city. But most of the time, the writer pulls it off.

He has a knack of bringing the reader under the skin of his characters, subtly exposing the urges which make them tick. At the same time, he does not ignore the influence a particular society of situation can have on the characters of its people. In the story Tehran Calling, an American woman visits her Western-educated Iranian friend who has returned to her homeland to help organize political dissent against the oppressive government. Half-skeptical of the atrocities her friend claims are happening there, she decides to visit as a kind of escape while recovering from the end of an unhealthy romantic relationship. The break-up is at once painful and a source of guilt, lying as it does in stark contrast with the life-and-death situations her friend faces. "I'm sorry that my problems - that they were never as impressive as yours," she says to her friend at one point, feeling that she is owed some small sympathy even as she acknowledges the pettiness of her own problems. It is testament to the writer's skill that her absorption with her own problems, which are admittedly petty in the larger scheme of things, still engages the reader's sympathy as she stumbles her way to a kind of catharsis. It does not matter where you are from, the writer seems to be saying, in our own ways, we are all adrift in uncertain seas.

Recommendation: The Interpreter Of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (1999). In this Pulitzer-winning deut collection, the writer uses her Bengali characters' attempts to settle in the United States as a starting point in exploring the unexpected relationships that form between people.