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Nam Le to read from assured debut, The Boat

By John Kenyon

Just a couple of years ago, Nam Le’s stories were being critiqued by his fellow students and instructors at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Today, those same stories, after several revisions, are being praised on the pages of the New York Times.

It’s a heady thing for a young writer, but Le is aware of how special the reception of his debut short story collection, The Boat, has been, and plans to savor it.

“In the workshop, peers and instructors are very readily critical of your work, and then you’re moving into an atmosphere that, the presumption is that anything you submit will be rejected,” he says of the publishing world. “It has made me realize the immense rarity and arbitrariness of when something does manage to get attention. And realize how little attention is give to books in general, then debut books and then debut collections of short stories.”

Le will read at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. Listen live via the University of Iowa Writing University website.

His is ascension as a writer is somewhat improbable, a fact that has populated most articles about the book. He was born in Vietnam but raised in Australia after his family fled Southeast Asia in 1979. He worked as a lawyer in Australia for a while, but didn’t like it, so he decided to apply to a writing program.

“Because it was not the law,” he says in response to the question of why. “I had been working on a novel and had finished several advanced drafts of the novel and it wasn’t working at all. Working in the law, I always loved reading and writing. I didn’t know how someone cobbled together any kind of life as a writer.”

Having no idea that it is more difficult to get into the Writers’ Workshop than, say, Harvard Law, he applied only to the UI. Late director Frank Conroy must have seen something in the chapters from that failed novel that Le sent with his application, because he chose the writer for acceptance.

“I didn’t really know that much about the MFA culture, so when I applied to Iowa it was the only program I applied to,” he says. “When I looked it up, I really didn’t know what to expect. I was nervous to come to such an environment, but excited. It was a really formative experience.”

When he arrived at the airport, setting foot in Iowa for the first time, he gave his cab driver the address of the house outside Iowa City he would share with other four other workshop students.

“What happened was, you know how you have a preconceived and prejudicial sense of a place you’ve never been? My very simplistic view of Iowa was encapsulated by white barn and fields,” he says. “So we drove through the funky town and actually stopped at a white farm house in the middle of corn fields. I enjoyed my time there.”

Asked to explain how he improved as a writer between that failed novel and the stories that make up The Boat, Le seems hard pressed to do so.

“Part of me doesn’t really believe in the idea that once you get to a certain technical point (that you can improve),” he says. “It doesn’t seem possible. But your failures are as important and integral to your writing and your mentality as your successes are. It was what I needed to do… part of me looks back at (that novel) and I do cringe at the sheer ineptitude.

“I can’t say I won’t look back at the stories I wrote at Iowa or two years ago and feel the same way,” he adds. “I can say that I have shelved that novel. It was the seminal lesson for me.”

No one is using words like “sheer ineptitude” to describe The Boat. Instead, they are heaping it with deserved praise. For a debut writer, Le presents these stories with confidence and conviction. “His sympathy for his characters and his ability to write with both lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times.

The most striking thing about the collection is its variety. Stories take place in Iowa City, New York City, Tehran, Australia, Mexico and a boat at sea leaving Vietnam. Each place feels real, inhabited by real people.

“I’m not just interested in one place or person or situation or way of telling things,” he says. “I don’t think there’s one story in me that I need to articulate. I do believe a writer’s job is to keep on pressing. At the level of language, if you come across a cliché or common image, you keep on pressing until you find something newer or deeper or truer. It’s almost the writer’s responsibility to keep on pressing. Not knowing is not a good excuse.”

That allowed him to write about a teenaged drug assassin in Medellin, Mexico, in one story, and an aging artist dealing with cancer who is about to meet an estranged daughter in New York City in another.

“The key thing was imagination,” he said. “I did a lot of research. I don’t believe that a place can be separated from the mind through which the place is being seen, so it was important to me to get into the character, the language to create this world. Those details came through research, but I was trying not to use too telling a detail. You can err on so many sides when you’re using details because the reader knows you’re not associated with that place in time. It’s not a linear thing. It always feels to me as though you’re in a control booth where so many things are happening and all you can do is try to react as they happen.”

The story getting the most attention in the collection is “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice.” The story tells of a young Iowa Writers’ Workshop student named Nam Le who came to Iowa from Australia after working as a lawyer.

It allows Le to play with a handful of writing clichés as he explores the line between fiction and autobiography, as well as the role of ethnicity in literature. In the story, Le is urged to write about Vietnam because “ethnic fiction’s hot.” A friend, however, says he is sick of such books: “You can’t tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn’t have the vocal.”

Placed at the beginning of The Boat, it feels like a statement of purpose—Le laying things on the table and saying, “I will not be bound as a writer by who I am.” Not exactly, he says.

“That story was not written first. I’m pleased that you sense the idea of laying it on the table because that story really was one that made demands on me and forced me to do things I’m not comfortable doing,” he says. “I’m not comfortable with self consciousness to that degree. I was dueling in that story with tropes and familiar ideas that you try to avoid as much as you can.

Still, he adds, “a huge part of me as a writer resists being circumscribed at all.”

His next project, a novel, is still in progress. The pages he has so far include a “chunk, some of which deal with Thai pirates,” he says. Though, he adds, he’s not sure how large a role they will play.

He will write that book in a different world than his last; one that knows who he is and expects something based on the success of The Boat.

“I hope and believe I can shut it out,” he says. “Writing, for me anyway, needs to be quarantined in its own little world. It seems it was essential that I block stuff out. You can always find things to titillate or delight rather than getting those words out.”

What he does not seem to worry about are thoughts of whether he made the right choice when he left the law for writing.

“It’s a completely different thing. I am enjoying it more, but not in the sense of it being any easier,” he says. “I enrolled myself in the correct sport. I thought before that I was earning points in an event that had no interest in.”

Le will read at 7 p.m. Tuesday at Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St. Listen live via the University of Iowa Writing University web site.