Boat (Le) - Book Reviews

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