"A Stunning Debut from a Remarkable New Talent." Book Review. more

Book Reviews FICTION A Stunning Debut from a Remarkable New Talent Nam Le. The Boat. New York: Vintage, 2008. 288 pp. US$15.00 ISBN: 978-0-307388-19-3 Nathanael O'Reilly The University of Texas at Tyler The Boat* Nam Le's remarkable debut collection of stories, has deservedly garnered a plethora of glowing reviews from around the globe for the young Vietnamese-Australian author. In late 2008, Le won the lucrative Dylan Thomas Prize, adding to an impressive array of awards including the Pushcart Prize, the Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, and fellowships from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Phillips Exeter Academy, the Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, and the University of East Anglia. In 1979, when he was three months old, Le escaped from Vietnam by boat with his parents. He was raised and educated in Melbourne, where he worked as a lawyer before moving to the United States to pursue a writing career. Le is the fiction editor for the Harvard Review and divides his time between Australia and the United States. The Boat contains seven stories, six of which have been previously published in journals and anthologies including Conjunctions, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 and The Best Australian Stories 2007. "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," the opening story in the collection, is narrated by a protagonist named Nam who is a young Vietnamese-Australian writer studying at the Iowa Writers* Workshop. As the narrator attempts to complete his final story, he hosts his estranged father, who is visiting from Sydney. When Nam struggles with writer's block, one of his friends advises him to write about Vietnam, since a writing instructor had declared, '"Ethnic literature's hot,'" and two visiting literary agents claimed that a writers background and life experience makes him or her stand out (9). Although Nam chooses to write most of his stories about subjects far removed from his own experience, when faced with a looming deadline he decides to "write the ethnic story of [. . . his] Vietnamese father" (17), who survived a massacre committed by American soldiers. The "Nam" in the story obviously shares the author's name and aspects of his life story. However, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is not autobiography dressed up as fiction; rather, it is a complex, moving and brilliantly conceived examination of the connections between autobiography and fiction, the role of truth in storytelling, and family and national history. In the next five stories, Le covers a dazzling array of settings, conflicts, narrators, protagonists and themes. "Cartagena," the second story in The Boat, is narrated by Juan Pablo Mcrcndez (known to his friends as Ron), a Colombian teenager who works as an assassin in the slums of Mcdellm. In just four months on the job, Ron has already killed fourteen people. However, during the story's present, Ron is in hiding from his boss, since he has failed to carry out a hit on his latest target—his best friend. Both the voice that Le creates for Ron and the descriptions of Medcllm's slums are utterly convincing and enthralling. Just in case the reader has not realized after the first two stories that Le is a master storyteller, the author employs an entirely different narrator, voice and setting for the third story, "Meeting Elise." Set in New York City, this story is narrated by Henry Luff, an elderly artist who is about to meet his eighteen-year- old daughter for the first time since her mother left him and took her to Russia seventeen years earlier. Henry is also struggling to accept the recent death of Olivia, his lover of almost two decades, and the news that he has colorectal cancer. Despite the dark subject matter, the narrator's irreverence, wit, cheeky sexuality and drunken antics imbue the story with a great deal of comedy in a manner not unlike that of Herbert Badgery in Peter Carey's lllywhacker. "Halflead Bay," the fourth story in the collection, is in many ways the centerpiece. It is the only work set in Australia, and at sixty-eight pages is more novella than short story. Utilizing a third person narrator, "Halflead Bay" tells the story of Jamie, a boy in his late teens struggling with a confluence of life-changing events in a small coastal fishing town. Jamie's newfound glory, attained by kicking the winning goal for his school in an Aussie Rules semi-final match, attracts the amorous attentions of Alison Fischer, the most attractive and dangerous girl in the school, who is going out with Dory, the town thug. Le contrasts the mix of schoolyard popularity, sexual tension and the threat of violence with domestic turmoil caused by Jamie's mother's long battle with multiple sclerosis. Le's depiction of small- Antipodes ❖ 93 town Australian life is pitch perfect, right down to the dialogue, and he provides remarkable descriptions of the weather and the coastal landscape- The setting and the subject matter, especially the focus on adolescence, mortality and male relationships, will remind many readers of Tim Winton s work, especially The Turning and Breath; Le's writing more than holds its own in comparison, which is quite a feat. Le's prose is lyrical, concise, inventive, perceptive, powerful and utterly believable. Not content to tackle narratives set in Iowa, New York,Columbiaand Australia, Le sets the remaining three stories in Japan, Iran and Vietnam. Set during the Second World War, "Hiroshima" is the beautiful and haunting tale of Mayako, a girl in the third-grade who has been evacuated from the city into the nearby countryside along with her classmates. Narrating the last days before the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima from a young girl's perspective, Le provides a fascinating exploration of nationalism, propaganda, childhood and traditional Japanese family life. "Tehran Calling" explores contemporary life in Iran through the eyes of Sarah Middleton, a thirty-five-year-old American lawyer who visits Parvin, her radical Iranian college friend, in the midst of a religious festival and government crack-downs in response to "un-Islamic" activities. For the final story, "The Boat," Le returns to subject matter of a personal nature, using a third person narrator to relate the escape from Vietnam by sea of Mai, a sixteen-year-old peasant girl. The journey to freedom is marked by fear, suffering, deprivation, storms, illness and the deaths of hundreds of fellow refugees, many of them children and infants. "The Boat" is a bleak and harrowing conclusion to an astonishingly diverse collection of narratives. The Boat may be the greatest first hook by an Australian author in decades, and Le is well on the way to attaining a global reputation as one of the finest writers in the English language. FICTION Finding Meaning in the Mundane Steven Carroll. The Time We Have Taken. Pymble, Sydney: HarperCollins, 2008. ^77 pp. A$32.73. ISBN: 978-0-7322-7837-3. Lyndall Nairn Lynchburg College Those who consider lite in the suburbs to be boring have not read Steven Carroll's The Time We Have Taken, the winner of the 2008 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the third in the trilogy of the Glenroy Novels. The first two, The Art of the Engine Driver and The Gift of Speed, which are set in the 1950s and early 1960s, focus on the predictable lives of a couple, Vic and Rita, who live in a Melbourne suburb. By 1970, their son Michael, who is just finishing his university education and starting on a career as a high-school history teacher, emerges as a main character in The Time We Have Taken. Steven Carroll starts with the ordinary events in the lives of these characters and their neighbors and then probes beneath the surface into their personal quest for meaning. As the title indicates, Carroll is preoccupied with time. Most of the people in this novel believe that the passage of t iine means pr. >gre»; this attitude prevails among the main characters who meet in a committee to plan the celebrations for their suburbs upcoming centenary. They decide to commission a mural to commemorate the development ot their community and the achievements of its residents over the last century. They are obviously proud of the construction of houses, shops, schools, hospitals, a town hall, and a large factory, which employed many locals for decades. However, Carroll undermines this overly optimistic attitude to the passage of time representing progress. For instance, Mulligan, theartist who paints the mural, includes a group of Aborigines in the picture. These original inhabitants have been dispossessed of their land and were forced to give up their lifestyle and their lives to make way for the "progress" of the White settlers. Mulligan also paints the members of the centenary commit tee into his mural, but he ironically paints them looking backwards, admiring the past achievements of their suburb. Surely, if they truly believed in the passing of time resulting in progress, they would be gazing hopefully towards the future. Similarly, when Cough Whitlam, that prominent symbol ot change in the early 1970s, makes an appearance for the centenary, the committee members view him with ambivalence; it seems as if they appreciate progress only when it has been safely accomplished in the past and not when it involves changes in their present or near future. When progress becomes too close for his characters' comfort and when they are completely unaware of this discrepancy in their own attitudes, Carroll gives us a glimpse into the superficiality and hypocrisy that operate in daily suburb.in lite. Carroll's preoccupation with time also becomes evident in his treatment of the plot, which plays only a minor role. This novel contains very little action and very few key events. In this way, Carroll attempts to portray suburban life as realistically as possible. People win) happen to live in close proximity to each other will cross paths from time to time, but that does not mean that the events of their lives have profound consequences on each other. Carroll seems to have sacrificed some ot the omniscient author's power to control events in favor of a description of the concurrent situations ot his characters: Rita just happens to be talking to Mrs. Webster, the factory owner's widow, at the same time that Vic is contemplating going fishing and at the same time that Michael is turning down an unenthusiastic invitation to his girlfriend's farewell party at work. The absence of a strong plot line emphasizes the random nature of everyday life. Even though people may seem to be linked by simultaneous events, the connections among them are often arbitrary and tenuous. As well as attitudes to time, Carroll takes on other equally serious themes, like the unsatisfactory nature of many personal relationships. For example, 94 ❖ June 2009