Books

Questions of loyalty froth at the edges of Nam Le's muscular and impressive debut collection, The Boat.

In the title story, a young woman adrift on the South China Sea makes a horrifying decision about a sick child. "Tehran Calling" tells of a young professional who travels to Iran and discovers her best friend has become a revolutionary firebrand. The hero of "Halflead Bay" snags the girl of his dreams but winds up in the middle of a punch-up that has more to do with his dying mother's honor than his own pride.

Not yet 30, Mr. Le effortlessly gives all seven tales a different register, structure, vocabulary and tone. "Halflead Bay," which unfolds in Australia, where he spent part of his childhood, is a wind-swept, craggy love story, a modern-day Wuthering Heights set on the continental shelf. He writes beautifully of the weather as a violent, sensuous power that signals some things cannot be changed or resisted: "The baked smells of the earth steamed open," he writes of one storm. "Potted music of running through pipes, slapping against the earth; puddles strafed by raindrops."

The most impressive story in the bunch is "Cartagena," which bounces through the teeming slums of a Colombian city and brings to life Juan Pablo Merendez, a teenage assassin who has been roped into the drug business when an act of self-protection (and vengeance) puts him in desperate need of protection.

Mr. Le must have conducted some research to enter these disparate worlds, but his stories never creak under the weight of reportage. Even "Hiroshima," a brief, heartbreaking tale about a young girls' routine in the hours before the bomb drops, has a riveting magnetism that is somehow truer than the awful truth of that day.

We are all encased, as if by accident, in such flesh, bound for deterioration, this book reminds. Somehow this dilemma has become more complicated for nonwhite writers to explore, as they're expected, mostly, to tell of where they came from.

In the opening story, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," a young writer named Nam Le studying, as the author did, at the University of Iowa tries to write the story of his father's survival of the My Lai massacre. Le, the character, wants to resist becoming yet another slice of ethnic literature.

In the end, Mr. Le has skirted this issue with amazing deftness, that first story a signal that yes, he has thought about what he is supposed to write, and chosen a different path.

Reading The Boat, however, it's clear this first story isn't the work that accomplishes this cultural sidestep. It's the six stories that follow. And they do it as all great stories can. Their author, by sleight of hand and virtue of skill, forgets all that he is and puts his searching, observant voice wherever he likes. It's a wonder to watch.

John Freeman is writing a book on the tyranny of e-mail.

Nam Le

(Knopf, $22.95)

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