Boat (Le)

The Boat 
Nam Le, 2008
Knopf Doubleday
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307388193


Summary
The seven stories in Nam Le's masterful collection The Boat take us across the globe, from the slums of Colombia to Iowa City; from the streets of Tehran to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea. They guide us to the heart of what it means to be human—and herald the arrival of a remarkable new writer. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1978
• Where—Vietnam
• Raised—Australia
• Education—B.A. and L.L.B., Melbourne University; Iowa
   Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Dylan Thomas Prize;
   NSW Premier's Literary Award; UTS Glenda Adams Award,
   Pushcart prize; Michener-Copernicus Society of America
   Award; U.S. Naitonal Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Award
• Currently—lives in the USA and Australia


Nam Le was born in Vietnam, and raised in Australia. His work has appeared in Zoetrope, A Public Space, One Story, Conjunctions, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. Currently the fiction editor of the Harvard Review, he divides his time between Australia and the United States. (From the publisher.)

More
Nam Le came to Australia from Vietnam with his parents, when he was less than a year old, as a boat refugee. He went to Melbourne Grammar School and Melbourne University from where he graduated with a BA (Hons)/ LLB (Hons). His Arts thesis supervisor was the Australian poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe. He worked as a corporate lawyer and was admitted to the Supreme Court of Victoria in 2003/2004.

However, he decided to turn to writing, and in 2004 attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the United States of America where he completed a Masters in Creative Writing. He became fiction editor at the Harvard Review. His first short story was published in Zoetrope in 2006. Nam Le also held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2006, and at the Phillips Exeter Academy, in 2007.

In an interview on Australian ABC radio, he said he turned from law to writing due to his love of reading: "I loved reading, and if you asked me why I decided to become a writer, that's the answer right there, because I was a reader and I was just so enthralled and thrilled by the stuff that I'd read that I just thought; what could be better? How could you possibly better spend your time than trying to recreate that feeling for other people". In the same interview he said that his first writing was poetry.

He returned to Australia in 2008, but is moving to Great Britain to take up a writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia.

When asked about his source of inspiration, Nam Le said in 2008 that "I’d say I’m most inspired by my parents for the choices and sacrifices they’ve made. It still boggles me."

Regarding his style, Nam Le said in an interview that "one of the demarcations is writers that deal primarily with language, the more lyrical minded writers, and writers that are more structurally oriented. I always used to...I started out writing poetry and reading poetry, and so I always knew that that was the side that I was most predisposed to, and so I actually had to be quite careful in these stories to not overdo that impulse, to not throw too many images or indulge too many lyrical flights of fancy."

His debut story collection, The Boat, published in 2008, comprises seven short stories which take the reader to such places as Colombia, New York City, Iowa, Tehran, Hiroshima, and small-town Australia. In the opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," he writes about a Vietnamese-born character called Nam Le who is attending a writing workshop in Iowa. In a conversation with Michael Williams he said about the practice of using a narrator close to "self" in a story:

A lot of people presume if I'm writing a narrator who has clear parallels to me, that's just sheer inertia; that there's a natural adaptation from so-called life to so-called text. But any careful reader or writer would understand how much artifice and contrivance go into making this self-standing and self-contained. Actually it's tougher: if I stick in something that has more resonance for me than is communicated on the page, then that's a failure of my charge as a writer.... I'm not creating a good enough space for the reader to come in and fully partake in that scene or that language or that line.

Each story provides "a snapshot of a pivotal point in the characters' lives." Nam Le has said of his Vietnamese heritage and writing that:

My relationship with Vietnam is complex. For a long time I vowed I wouldn’t fall into writing ethnic stories, immigrant stories, etc. Then I realized that not only was I working against these expectations (market, self, literary, cultural), I was working against my kneejerk resistance to such expectations. How I see it now is no matter what or where I write about, I feel a responsibility to the subject matter. Not so much to get it right as to do it justice. Having personal history with a subject only complicates this — but not always, nor necessarily, in bad ways. I don’t completely understand my relationship to Vietnam as a writer. This book is a testament to the fact that I’m becoming more and more okay with that.

Australian short story writer, Cate Kennedy, interviewing Nam Le said that The Boat has put the short story back in the "the literary centre stage." (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews 
[A] remarkable collection...Mr. Le not only writes with an authority and poise rare even among longtime authors, but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the brute facts of history…his sympathy for his characters and his ability to write with both lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


Ambitious and confident, these seven stories rise from diverse cultures and are filtered through characters of radically different sensibilities. Nam Le combines research and dreaming in a wonderfully wide range of imagined worlds.
Jonathan Penner - Washington Post


A collection that takes the reader across the globe. From Iowa to Colombia to Australia and Iran, the characters in Le’s stories each shape the world around them. In each story, the protagonists create a new atmosphere.... While Le is a writer who seems to be interested in the issues of the world, he is also a writer interested in the young.... Le does not downplay the lives of his children as fiction often does when portraying younger characters but presents them with a seriousness and intelligence that is refreshing.... The Boat is an impressive debut from a writer with a lot more to give. A writer to be remembered.
Marion Frisby - Denver Post


Powerful... Lyrical... Devastating... A harsh and masterful effort, each tale a clean shot through the heart, the aim true. In seven stories covering six continents and an ocean, Le delivers a powerful and assured vision that offers a clear look at his impressive talents.... Le is the sort of writer who taps directly into the vein of desperation and offers no shelter. He’s not for the faint of heart, but the reward for soldiering.
Amy Driscoll - Miami Herald


Twenty-nine-year-old Nam Le demonstrates the aesthetic ambition and sentence-making chops of a much more experienced writer.... Each moment of technical brio [in the opening story] deepens the dramatization of the all-but-unspeakable power of love between parent and child. By the end, any perceptive reader will agree that the "world could be shattered by a small stone dropped like a single syllable".... The plot unfolds with remorseless logic, harsh beauty, and an almost unbearable tenderness that reminded me of The Dubliners. [The story’s] scenes [are] exact in their details and gorgeous in their musicality... I've been telling friends about The Boat for weeks now, saying "This guy’s got it." Now I’m telling you. Pass it on.
John Repp - Cleveland Plain Dealer


From a Colombian slum to the streets of Tehran, seven characters in seven stories struggle with very particular Swords of Damocles in Pushcart Prize winner Le's accomplished debut. In "Halflead Bay," an Australian mother begins an inevitable submission to multiple sclerosis as her teenage son prepares for the biggest soccer game of his life. The narrator of "Meeting Elise," a successful but ailing artist in Manhattan, mourns his dead lover as he anticipates meeting his daughter for the first time since she was an infant. The opening "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" features a Vietnamese character named Nam who is struggling to complete his Iowa Writer's Workshop master's as his father comes for a tense visit, the first since an earlier estrangement shattered the family. The story's ironies-"You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing," says a fellow student to Nam-are masterfully controlled by Le, and reverberate through the rest of this peripatetic collection. Taken together, the stories cover a vast geographic territory (Le was born in Vietnam and immigrated to Australia) and are filled with exquisitely painful and raw moments of revelation, captured in an economical style as deft as it is sure
Publishers Weekly


Born in Vietnam, Le was raised in Australia, where he trained as a lawyer, and came to the United States to attend the Iowa Writers' Workshop. So it might panic a few readers that the protagonist of the first story in this stellar debut collection is the Vietnam-born Nam, a former lawyer from Australia trying to meet a deadline at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when his estranged father blows into town. Will this be a bunch of autobiographical stories exemplifying "ethnic fiction" (which the story actually manages, rather slyly, to dismiss)? Absolutely not-unless Le is also a 14-year-old assassin in Colombia, asked to kill a friend; a crotchety if successful painter coming to terms with a cancer diagnosis just as the daughter he's never met prepares for her Carnegie Hall debut; a high school boy in Australia who's achieved a modest sports victory and must face down a bully as his mother faces death; and an American woman visiting a friend in Tehran who risks her life battling the regime. Le writes rawly rigorous stories that capture entire worlds; each character is distinctive and fully fleshed out, each plot eventful as a full-length novel but artfully compressed. Highly recommended.
Barbara Hoffert - Library Journal


A polished and intense debut story collection of astonishing range. Some of the stories border on novellas, and this allows the author, who was born in Vietnam in 1979, more latitude to develop the complexity of his characters as well as his twisted narrative strands. The opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is a brilliantly conceived narrative about a writer called Nam who is trying to meet some deadlines at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. When his father, a Vietnamese immigrant who "was drawn to weakness, even as he tolerated none in me," interrupts both Nam's schedule and his personal life, Nam begins to fret, for he's worried about being able to produce a story on the tight deadline he faces. He's not interested in falling back on the "typical" survival story about Vietnamese boat people, and he remembers that at an earlier time his father confessed to having witnessed the My Lai massacre as a boy of 14. This revelation leads Nam to a stunning realization about the nature of father-son relationships, and his epiphany becomes the true subject of his story. "Halflead Bay," the longest story in the collection, finds Jamie, a recent rugby hero at his school, being seduced by the popular Alison-and then beset by Alison's erstwhile boyfriend, the egregiously Neanderthal Dory. (A complicating subplot involves Jamie's mother slowly dying from MS.) Among the other entries is "Hiroshima," which considers a girl whose life is to be radically altered by the incipient dropping of the atomic bomb, and "Tehran Calling," which examines the relationship between two friends, an American and an Iranian, and the gulf that divides them during the Muslim holy week of Ashura. The book is very good, even if sometimes the stories lack satisfying resolutions. Ironically, and slyly, with a nod to the opening story, the final piece, which gives the book its name, is an imaginative reconstruction of what it felt like to be a boat person, to launch into a 12-day journey with no foreseeable end. Consummately self-assured.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions

"Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice”

1. When his father arrives, the narrator is dreaming about a poem he is writing. His father “had a habit of speaking in Vietnamese proverbs” [p. 3]. Why is the juxtaposition of the father's use of proverbs and the son's efforts to create new words significant in the story? How would you describe the relationship between the father and son?

2. A friend at the Iowa Writers' Workshop tells the narrator (whose name is Nam) to exploit his “background and life experience” and write a story about Vietnam [p. 9]. What happens when Nam decides to do so? Why does his father burn the manuscript at the end of the story?

“Cartagena”

3. After his friends seek out and attack “the target” at the opening of the story, Ron realizes that “this business was personal” [p. 36]. He later learns why his friends were taking their revenge on this man. Discuss the plotting of the story, and why its careful unfolding of surprises is effective.

4. Ron is summoned to the home of his agent, El Padre. Why is El Padre's history relevant to the tale? What does it suggest about how he will treat Ron for refusing to kill Hernando? What is Ron planning to do with the grenade?

5. What details—of setting, speech, or character—contribute to the impact of the story?

“Meeting Elise”

6. As a painter, Henry has a weakness for beauty. His estranged daughter, he realizes, has “a severe beauty all the way through her. . . . She has everything she needs. She has wrung all of my weaknesses out of her strong, straight body” [p. 93]. What is the effect of the story's juxtaposition of the daughter's beauty and the father's ravaged physical condition?

7. What does Henry hope to gain by seeing his daughter, and why does Elise refuse to see her father, finally? What is the connection, for Henry, between his lover Olivia (who died young) and Elise [p. 89, 93]? How do you interpret the final two paragraphs of the story?

“Halflead Bay”

8. “Halflead Bay” is the longest story in the collection. As such, it is able to convey quite a broad array of information, including the way of life of a family in a coastal town, the subjectivity of a teenage boy, the confusion of sexual attraction, the power dynamics among teenagers. Given the story's richness, what seems to be its central focus in terms of its plot?

9. What is significant about the scene in which he hooks a seagull while fishing, and his mother has to kill the bird for him [p. 135-37]? How does this scene relate to the fight with Dory, when his father and brother come to help him out [p. 158-62]? Why is the family juxtaposed to the drama involving Alison and Dory?

10. What is left unresolved or is unclear in this story?

“Hiroshima”

11. During a war game played by the evacuated children staying at the temple, Mayako imagines herself as a soldier who has died in the service of the Emperor: “I lie dead on the ground, looking into the deep blue sky, overwhelmed with a glorious feeling of happiness” [p. 167]. How does this moment work with the scene we can presume will exist just after the final sentence?

12. How much time passes in the story? How is time slowed down as the bomb makes its way to Mayako? How do her memories work to enlarge the picture of her life, which is about to be lost? How effective is Nam Le's choice to have the story's final moment recall the flash of a photograph taken by Mayako's father earlier [p. 166, 177]?

“Tehran Calling”

13. Sarah feels that Paul was “the aberration of her life: the relief from her lifelong suspicion that she was, at heart, a hollow person, who clung to hollow things” [p. 182]. Is there evidence for this in the story? Why do she and Paul split up?

14. What does the story seem to say about the nature of the friendship between Sarah and Parvin? What brought the two women together? How do you interpret the ending of the story, and the paragraph beginning with the words, “You could never know” [p. 229]?

“The Boat”

15. Why have Mai's parents sent her away from home [p. 245]? What do you understand about the political situation, and about what Mai's father has experienced?

16. What is the nature of the bond that develops between Mai and the little boy, Truong? How is it connected to the story of Mai and her father, which is told in flashbacks [p. 254]?

General questions on The Boat

17. Given that Nam Le says that he has never been to many of the places depicted in these stories, discuss the imaginative work involved in creating this particular array of settings and characters. What does Nam Le do to create a convincing sense of the subjectivity of his characters?

18. What is notable about Nam Le's prose style in these stories? It is apparent that his writing vocation began with the desire to be a poet? What kinds of details are striking, what word choices are unusual, what senses does he appeal to?

19. Nam Le has said of The Boat, “I find it hard to figure out whether this book as a whole is an exercise in hope or in despair. I think all of us are more alone than we would like to think of ourselves as being” (Interview the New York Times, May 14, 2008). Discuss the effect of the collection as a whole; what conclusions do you reach about the vision of life in these stories?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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