The Boat

By Clayton Moore, Special to the Rocky

Published June 12, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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* Fiction. By Nam Le. Knopf, $22.95. Grade: A

Plot in a nutshell: Pushcart Prize-winning writer Le delves into his own heritage and craft with exceptional self-confidence in this debut collection spotlighting stories published in venues such as Zoetrope, Harvard Review and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007.

"That's all I've done, traffic in words. Sometimes I still think about word counts the way a general must think about casualties," mourns the conflicted narrator of Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice. It's a cunning bit of metafiction that finds its narrator Nam, a student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, trying to reconcile with his Vietnamese father while struggling to imagine and create original stories. His classmates and teachers, as cynical as sharks, urge him to exploit his upbringing. "It's hot," says a writing instructor. "Ethnic literature's hot. And important too."

Set in a war-torn South American slum, Cartagena features a 14-year-old soldato in a drug cartel contemplating his recent promotion to contract killer. A lengthier story of adolescence, Halflead Bay, intersects a more typical teenager's big soccer game with the plight of his dying mother.

It's when Le is most succinct that his talents shine brightest, not necessarily through literary economy but by their piercing insights - he even makes a crack about minimalism in the first story when a classmate observes: "You can't tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn't have the vocab."

Le has the words, no doubt about it.

Sample of prose: A young girl, glancing idly upwards at the roar of a B-29, captures her last living moments in Hiroshima: "I imagine I hear the song of the tsukutsukuboshi which says: chokko chokko uisu. Chokko chokko uisu. All around me are the eight million kami. I look in my hand. On my left is Mother and on my right is Father. Behind me is Big sister. The paper is mostly gray. Then everything turns white and the left side of my face is warm."

Pros: Le has an uncanny ability to inhabit a diverse cast of characters and settings.

Cons: The writing is first-rate, but it's subdued and demanding as well; a tough book to sample.

Final word: A potent debut with a unique perspective on a larger world.

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