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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Nam Le: The Boat

I finished the prize-winning collection of short stories by Nam Le.  My jury is still out.  There's no doubting the technical skill of the writer.  So why do I feel a nagging doubt emotionally?  Have I written before that the collection brings to mind the quote I like of words by Charles Rennie McIntosh?  "There is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist."

Too many of the stories are devoid of an emotional core.  They feel (to me) like expertly crafted writer's workshop projects; hollow, technical examinations of prose style using ideas generated (borrowed from) some other, more authentic source.  So, Cartagena  takes its inspiration from the movie City of God and it just never feels like the voice of a young, Colombian gang member (but it is well written).  Meeting Elise (the weakest story in the collection) feels like a second tier Mirimax movie from the 1990s; one that never lived up to its Oscar-material aspirations.  You can see the joins in Hiroshima: the flash of the camera then the flash of the bomb.  Tehran Calling simply disintegrates in the final two pages and I'm not really sure that I buy the idea of the American woman visiting her former best friend but it is an ambitious attempt to occupy an entirely other persona.  Halflead Bay works well, although its premise is slight.  But perhaps, like Raymond Carver's stories, it's the ordinariness of a tale occupied by almost real people that gives the story legs.

The opening piece, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," is described as "magnificent" on The Boat web site.  Sorry, it's not.  I need to get over my instinctual reaction against metafiction because I was deeply suspicious of the story the first time I read it.  Save me (I thought) from a writer's workshop project about a writer's workshop participant struggling to find authenticity in his writing whilst working out his relationship with his father and to his past.  But if you can get beyond those limitations (which are real barriers, suppressing more interesting and potentially engaging writing on similar themes) the story bears a second reading.  Beyond the metafiction there is an authentic voice, I think.

The final story, The Boat, works best for me.  The fate of the boy is discernible from the outset but that's not a problem.  There is an emotional risk at the centre of the story for its characters.  It's the way we're taken to the heart of that risk, see it exposed and witness the truth of its consequences that makes such an impression.  It seems to me that there's no flashy posing in this story.  It is what it is, told expertly and with an internal consistency and force that far outstrips the other stories.

I may be too harsh with these criticisms.  For any writer's first collection of published short stories The Boat is an impressive, highly readable group.  It augers well for the future.  If this is what Nam Le can give us first time out, we can look forward (I hope) to some remarkable work in the future when he's acquired the confidence to abandon the showy front and simply tell us authentic tales of his own imagining.
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