Some authors coax their audience into seeing through their eyes. Others immerse you in their worlds. Nam Le does the latter. His voice captured me in the first story of his debut collection "The Boat."
The narrator of "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" is a writer, also named Nam. He is direct, adrift, and broken. His relationship with his father is starkly sketched. For Nam, Vietnam's history only resides in his familial recollection. For his father, the memory is visceral. Their relationship is fragmented, but there are moments when they stumble on the pieces that can make them whole. In their extension toward one another, father and son reach their limits. At the conclusion of Le's first 30 pages, I felt the palpitations of their shared sorrow; the contortions of misunderstanding that direct the course of a life cannot be blamed or anticipated.
Le is a young Vietnamese writer who grew up in Australia. He is careful not to assume an ethnic voice. In fact, he insists that his craft be founded on a heritage littered with untold tragedy. Le emphasizes his rejection of this narrow categorization by conjuring narratives that have no rhyme or reason to their content. His stories' subjects range across age, continent, gender, and race. Le possesses an innate ability to adopt any voice that will serve his purpose and he demonstrates this talent with vigor.
This author's style is both fluid and sharp. Le is not embittered, but the tone is deftly shaped. However, Le dares to use adjectives. He fills his sentences with them. There are times when writing is entirely about winnowing away, constructing a piece of beauty merely from the structure, but Le defies the sparseness of this model. He paints with his descriptors and these illustrative words do not weigh down his prose. They are a light varnish that burnishes the underlying hues. Le does not pair adjectives in a surprising way so much as he couples them with precision.
None of Le's stories are founded on happiness. Redemption, however, is a tone that is struck in many of the narratives. There is a pervasive if not an insistent search for understanding. Not all of the characters' circumstances are dire, but every one seems to be on a precipice. An older man seeks to reconnect with his daughter. A son grapples with his mother's debilitating illness and the disturbing allures and confusion of adolescence. A woman travels to Tehran, hoping to comprehend her friend's new life and revive her own purpose. Nothing is simple for these people. Life is a convoluted layering of action and inaction, only a sliver of which is revealed through these pages. Moments of reprieve are stumbled upon but much of what is encountered is an unsteady battle with limbo.
Ironically, the story of Le's that affected me most deeply was the first one, which reflects his own struggles. Le is capable of embodying other voices, but the one he fills best is his own. This strength in no way discredits his diverse assortment of character, but I wonder whether he should continue to resist. On principal, perhaps, his battle against being an "ethnic writer" is well-founded. In practice, this hesitance might become an impediment.