The Age
James Ley, Reviewer
June 16, 2008
Nam Le's The Boat is a most accomplished fiction debut, writes James Ley.
Nam Le was born in Vietnam, raised in Melbourne, and lives in the United States where he has attended the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has these biographical details in common with "Nam", the narrator of the first story in his debut collection, The Boat. Titled rather grandiosely Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, the story is a nimble and cleverly self-aware piece of fiction that sets out to subvert any expectation that Le might allow himself to be pigeonholed as an "ethnic" writer.
We meet the fictional Nam at a low ebb. He is drinking too much and lacks inspiration. When his father arrives on his doorstep in Iowa, he begins to wrestle with the ethical and imaginative problems of transforming what he knows of his father's horrific wartime experiences into literature. The material compels him, and the story gestures towards some of the deeper psychological undercurrents defining Nam's relationship with his father, but at the same time he is resistant to the idea that he should simply plunder his family's experiences for his own purposes; he is resistant to the idea that his imagination should be circumscribed by his past.
"You could totally exploit the whole Vietnamese thing," a friend tells him. "But instead, you choose to write about lesbian vampires and Colombian assassins, and Hiroshima orphans - and New York painters with haemorrhoids."
The Boat is sadly lacking in lesbian vampires, but the rest turns out to be accurate. Its stories roam widely, and do so with aplomb.
This is a remarkably accomplished collection, not merely on account of its uncommon breadth, but for its consistently high level of craftsmanship. Each of its seven stories is, in its own way, a substantial and well-developed piece of writing.
Indeed, if there is a criticism to be made of this collection it is the relatively mild one that among the various modes and settings it attempts, there are some that are more successfully realised than others.
The central story, and the book's longest, Halflead Bay, is set in a small Australian coastal town and cleaves so closely to the style and mood of a Tim Winton novel that for a while I was hoping it was a parody and was slightly disappointed when it wasn't. Never more than a conventional rites-of-passage tale, it reads like an unusually well-crafted piece of teen fiction, the work of a gifted imitator rather than a unique talent.
It is, like the rest of the collection, beautifully written and closely observed, but polished to a point where any barb of originality has been sanded away.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/book-reviews/the-boat/2008/06/16/1213468314014.html
Australian Literary Review, Barry Oakley, 2 July 2008:
"Nam Le is ... a disturber of the peace, a writer whose energies put so much strain on the short story form that it can't contain them. Novella doesn't sound right, either; that, too, suggests a modesty of ambition Le simply doesn't have. Spring-loaded compressed novels, perhaps.
Consider the subjects of his stories: a child assassin in Colombia ("Cartagena"), an ageing New York artist desperate for a reconciliation with his daughter ("Meeting Elise"), a boy's coming of age in a rough Victorian fishing town ("Halflead Bay), before the first atomic bomb falls in Japan ("Hiroshima"), the suffocations of theocracy in Iran ("Tehran Calling"). This astonishing range is topped and tailed by accounts of the uneasy reunion of a young Vietnamese writer in America with his ex-soldier father, and by the title story — the escape of a group of exhausted refugees from the Vietcong in a wallowing boat.
Since Le was born in Vietnam, educated in Melbourne and now lives in the U.S., at least three of these stories have autobiographical elements, but this is irrelevant. His recreations of a woman's life under the Tehran fanatics, the patriotic innocence of a young Japanese girl before the conflagration and the chilling knowingness of an equally young Colombian boy who has just become a gun for hire for the drug lords, all carry total conviction.
Surely, one might be permitted to think, after all this high seriousness and intensity, Nam Le can't do funny. But this criminally talented 29-year-old can do that as well. His portrait of the disintegrating Henry Luff and his ordeals with his gastroenterologist ('He's wheeling something towards me — a laptop — attached to about ten feet of evil-looking black rubber hosing') reads like Saul Bellow with a dash of Rabelais. Then, smoothly as a racing driver, Le changes gear: down from high comedy to pitifulness as, despite his drunken efforts, Luff doesn't manage to meet his daughter at all."
http://www.namleonline.com/reviews_oz.html
The Courier Mail, by: Heidi Maier, June 14, 200812:00AM
IN THIS, his ambitious and compelling debut collection of short stories, Australian expatriate writer Nam Le blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction with an ease that might be disturbing were it not so beautifully executed.
In the book's austere and haunting opening story, Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, Le gives us a character named Nam who is in his last year at the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop. Beset by a protracted case of writer's block, he is struggling to complete his final piece of assessment when his father unexpectedly lands on his doorstep.
His father's presence dredges up unwelcome memories of the past and Nam panics about his future as a writer as his friends urge him to "take the easy route" and exploit his Vietnamese heritage in order to write a blatantly autobiographical story.
"I know I'm a bad person for saying this," one classmate admits, "but that's why I don't mind your work, Nam. Because you could just write about Vietnamese people, like, all the time." It is a suggestion that is seemingly supported by both his creative writing lecturer and a visiting literary agent who tell him that "ethnic literature's hot. And important too."
As the story unfolds, we learn that Nam's father was barely 14 years old when he was conscripted into the South Vietnamese army and, after the fall of Saigon, imprisoned, starved, and tortured. In 1979, he escaped to Australia where, desperate for his son's success, he was a tyrannical presence in his life, forcing him to spend his summer school holidays studying for 10 hours at a time and caning him when he dared to deviate from the strict timetable.
These facts are gruesome enough, but particularly hideous is the revelation that he would rub Tiger Balm into his son's open wounds.
Not surprisingly, Nam left home at 16, running off with his girlfriend and falling into drug addiction. He eventually returned home, finished high school and, in order to please his father, studied law at university.
The tale itself is a deceptively simple one and it would be easy, despite his delicate prose and the prestige of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, to dismiss Le's work as typical of a lot of what has emerged from the postgraduate creative writing programs that are now so popular at universities in Australia and the US.
But Le is no aspiring writer. His stories are, for the most part, the real thing. The sad and tender Halflead Bay is told from the perspective of a young boy whose mother is dying as he is falling in love for the first time. Tehran Calling explores an American woman's travels in the Middle East and Meeting Elise reunites a dying father with his estranged daughter. She, like the Nam of the first story, tries to forgive him for his mistakes, but finds the leap a difficult one to make and it is this fractured relationship between parent and child that the author explores with impressive dexterity and resonance.
"Here is what I believe," Le writes. "We forgive any sacrifice by our parents, so long as it is not made in our name. To my father there was no other name – only mine, and he had named me after the homeland he had given up. His sacrifice was complete and compelled him to everything that happened. To all that, I was inadequate."
The two stories that bookend the collection may or may not be shards of autobiography and the Nam about whom the author writes may or may not be himself. All we know is that the man narrating the tales has in common with the author three things: a name, a family history and several key life experiences.
Occasionally, parts of Le's stories can feel more like student exercises in characterisation or plot than fully realised works of short fiction, but when he succeeds he does so with an astonishing deftness and originality.
The Boat is a volume that deserves to be read and appreciated for its many moments of beauty rather than criticised or derided for the comparatively rare moments at which it falters.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/entertainment/books/the-boat/story-e6freqkx-1111116604246