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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 Trade Paperback edition.

Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and SacrificeMy father arrived on a rainy morning. I was dreaming about a poem, the dull thluck thluck of a typewriter's keys punching out the letters. It was a good poem--perhaps the best I'd ever written. When I woke up, he was standing outside my bedroom door, smiling ambiguously. He wore black trousers and a wet, wrinkled parachute jacket that looked like it had just been pulled out of a washing machine. Framed by the bedroom doorway, he appeared even smaller, gaunter, than I remembered. Still groggy with dream, I lifted my face toward the alarm clock.

"What time is it?"

"Hello, Son," he said in Vietnamese. "I knocked for a long time. Then the door just opened."

The fields are glass, I thought. Then tum-ti-ti, a dactyl, end line, then the words excuse and alloy in the line after. Come on, I thought.

"It's raining heavily," he said.

I frowned. The clock read 11:44. "I thought you weren't coming until this afternoon." It felt strange, after all this time, to be speaking Vietnamese again.

"They changed my flight in Los Angeles."

"Why didn't you ring?"

"I tried," he said equably. "No answer."

I twisted over the side of the bed and cracked open the window. The sound of rain filled the room--rain fell on the streets, on the roofs, on the tin shed across the parking lot like the distant detonations of firecrackers. Everything smelled of wet leaves.

"I turn the ringer off when I sleep," I said. "Sorry."

He continued smiling at me, significantly, as if waiting for an announcement.

"I was dreaming."

He used to wake me, when I was young, by standing over me and smacking my cheeks lightly. I hated it--the wetness, the sourness of his hands.

"Come on," he said, picking up a large Adidas duffel and a rolled bundle that looked like a sleeping bag. 'A day lived, a sea of knowledge earned." He had a habit of speaking in Vietnamese proverbs. I had long since learned to ignore it.

I threw on a T-shirt and stretched my neck in front of the lone window. Through the rain, the sky was as gray and striated as graphite. The fields are glass . . . Like a shape in smoke, the poem blurred, then dissolved into this new, cold, strange reality: a windblown, rain-strafed parking lot; a dark room almost entirely taken up by my bed; the small body of my father dripping water onto hardwood floors.

I went to him, my legs goose-pimpled underneath my pajamas. He watched with pleasant indifference as my hand reached for his, shook it, then relieved his other hand of the bags. "You must be exhausted," I said.

He had flown from Sydney, Australia. Thirty-three hours all up--transiting in Auckland, Los Angeles, and Denver--before touching down in Iowa. I hadn't seen him in three years.

"You'll sleep in my room."

"Very fancy," he said, as he led me through my own apartment. "You even have a piano." He gave me an almost rueful smile. "I knew you'd never really quit." Something moved behind his face and I found myself back on a heightened stool with my fingers chasing the metronome, ahead and behind, trying to shut out the tutor's repeated sighing, his heavy brass ruler. I realized I was massaging my knuckles. My father patted the futon in my living room. "I'll sleep here."

'You'll sleep in my room, Ba." I watched him warily as he surveyed our surroundings, messy with books, papers, dirty plates, teacups, clothes--I'd intended to tidy up before going to the airport. "I work in this room anyway, and I work at night." As he moved into the kitchen, I grabbed the three-quarters-full bottle of...

 

 

"Not yet 30, [Nam Le] is already an extraordinarily accomplished and sophisticated writer. In [The Boat's] opening story, he plays with the elusive boundaries between truth and fiction . . . [The Boat] offers strong evidence that the most effective way to convey the universal human qualities Faulkner admired in literature is, paradoxically, through the individual and the particular. . . . The range of characters is unusual, but what is truly remarkable is that the language and tone of each [story] is perfectly suited to the characters and setting . . . The stories are so different from one another it is hard to believe all seven are the work of a single author. What they all have in common is that each one portrays its characters in a crisis that reveals resources of courage and resilience even he or she was not aware of. All but one of the stories concern what is arguably the deepest, most complex and most poignant of human relationships: the bond between parent and child. . . . The most moving and unforgettable is 'Halflead Bay' . . . Rarely has one read such a sensitive and empathetic treatment of adolescent angst, all the more remarkable because the story's main character is shy and inarticulate. . . . The story is especially memorable for its richly poetic Australian vernacular, a language Nam Le clearly feels in his bones. The future looks bright for Nam Le. As Faulkner observed, voices like his not only record the human condition but also help us endure and prevail."

 

"Astounding . . . A refreshingly diverse and panoramic debut. [The Boat's] seven stories are set in Iowa City, the slums of Colombia, Manhattan, coastal Australia, Hiroshima, Iran and the South China Sea, with characters as varied as a Japanese third-grader, an aging painter with hemorrhoids and an American woman visiting Iran for the first time. . . . 'Cartagena,' a gripping tale of adolescent friendship, crime and loyalty [would] in less capable hands . . . quickly devolve into cartoonish violence and two-dimensional stereotype, but Le's masterful treatment results in a rich unveiling that renders the story more complex at every turn. The atmosphere is utterly authentic, the language spare and idiomatic. . . . What is most remarkable about ['Meeting Elise'] is the way in which Le deftly juggles dialogue, memory and the physical sense of an aging man's ailing body to create a continuous, seamless consciousness, wholly convincing throughout. The stories tend to establish a future event and conclude just before that event occurs. . . . This lends them a narrative propulsion while also placing the characters in a space in which they interact, collide, struggle to connect, fail or succeed. Le's characters tend to be people in transit, people who, for one reason or another, have come unmoored and find themselves among other unmoored people, all of them trying to find their way to safety and stability. He resists the urge to explain them away and instead inhabits them with the sort of visceral empathy that cannot be taught. . . . The finest story in the collection is 'Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,' . . . a deeply moving story about a son and father attempting to come to terms with themselves, with each other and with the past. . . . In its complexity, in its range, in its depiction of a struggle to make sense of experience, [it] achieves the realm of Literature."

 

"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. . . . 'Love and Honor and Pity . . .' is a thought-provoking introduction to the world of the author, and 'Halflead Bay,' a story that takes place in Le's native Australia, is a very moving, brief coming-of-age tale. . . . 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."

 

"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. The range is ambitious. Le adopts the persona of a young drug assassin in Cartagena, an aging New York painter, an American woman visiting a radical friend in Tehran. Steered by a less-certain voice, readers might suffer whiplash. But Le never loses his way. In the searing first story, 'Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,' he nails with bitter precision the tension between a Vietnam-born former lawyer trying to meet a deadline at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his father . . . Le sketches the life of the immigrant writer son with spare, sure strokes. . . . His kaleidoscopic world view is on display throughout the stories, which seamlessly blend cultural traditions, accents and landscapes that run from lush to barren. The collection works in part because Le's confidence as a storyteller is the solid base on which the structure rests. Le doesn't turn away from...

 

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.

www.namleonline.com

From the Trade Paperback...