The Boat

The Boat
Author: Nam Le 2008 272 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started May 2 2008, Finished June 4 2008

“You couldn’t turn back from something like this. You saw it through and it ruined you.” (pp 132-3)

This promising debut collection of short stories is characterized by its remarkably diverse settings and perspectives: the former include Iowa, Columbia, New York City, the Australian coast, Japan during WWII, modern day Tehran and the South China Sea in the mid 70s. The protagonists are a seemingly autobiographical aspiring writer of Vietnamese extraction, a teenage hit man, an aging, ailing painter, a teenage Australian jock, a war orphan, a thirty-something American woman lawyer, and a teenage Vietnamese boat person. After reading some reviews, it seems everyone has different favorites, but the two stories that worked best for me were “Meeting Elise”, a Rothian take on the elderly painters attempt to meet his daughter for the first time in her adult life while confronting the ghost of his deceased lover/muse and his own rapidly impending mortality and “Cartegena”, a riveting tale – attention Hollywood -- of the barely adolescent assassin trying to survive in amidst impossibly conflicting loyalties in a world of limitless, post-sensate violence which was bolstered by convincing detail – its child thugs navigate at night “by the blue light of their cell phones” and are delayed in a urgent mission when one detours to check his email. The stories in the voices of Asian children did not work as well for me. “Hiroshima”, with its childlike view of the world switching continuously and seamlessly between the past and present, reminded me in its need for close reading of The Sound and The Fury, but was too brief to fully engage and marred by some historical anachronisms and inaccuracies: it seems quite unlikely that a child of that period would have aware of the concept of the guided missile and worse, there was never an operational bomber designated the B27. The voice of “The Boat” was probably true to its young Vietnamese protagonist and the cadences of her native language, but struck me as somewhat nebulous and difficult to relate to.