The Boat

Starred review from March 31, 2008
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.

This collection of seven short stories is a tour de force of both writing and narration. The author has created several memorable tales that take place around different parts of the globe, including the story of a teenaged assassin from Colombia, a middle-aged artist about to meet his daughter for the first time in years, and a Vietnamese writer whose father comes to see him in America. The narrators represent a cross section of styles and voices. James Yaegashi has a slightly husky, authoritative tone. Henry Strozier is the epitome of a grizzled and slightly weary man. Gideon Emery has a soft Australian accent, and Jennifer Ikeda carries us along with her lyrical, measured, and crystal-clear reading. Some of the narrators provide character voices, but they're spare and serve only to enhance the stories and their themes. R.I.G. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine