Bookblog #54: Book Group



Nam Le, The Boat (Penguin 2008)

Book groups, by all accounts, are odd creatures, hybrid offspring of EngLit seminars and CR Groups (as in Consciousness Raising and Women's and/or Gay Liberation). Mine is no different. We're all men, and my impression after three meetings is that the CR gene is dominant: only the three newbies read the books at the first two meetings and each time the conversation has dipped in and out of literary concerns and plunged cheerfully into any number of topics.

Our first book for the year was Nam Le's collection of short stories, The Boat. Let me write about it in three parts.

1. Before reading the book
For a while there it seemed every time I logged on to the Interminalnet I was reading another report of a prize won by this book, or another enthusiastic review. An article by Peter Craven in Heat, responding partly to the book itself and partly to the enthusiasm with which it had been received, managed to tilt me in the direction of not actually reading the book: I thought at the time it was because the article gave accounts of the stories that were so very detailed as to make it seem unnecessary to read them at all -- highbrow spoilerism was how I thought of it. Having now read the stories, I still think the article was full of spoilers, but there was something else going on as well: not so much damning with faint praise, as praising lavishly with a curl of the lip:
This is a formidable literary debut and the fact that its glowing reception has happened everywhere and all at once is not primarily evidence of how someone can move themselves across the careerist chessboard (though there must be some element of that), but of the kind of literary talent and achievement this suite of stories represents.

See what I mean? It's not primarily successful self-promotion. The stories have a kind of talent and achievement. One of the stories has 'a virtuosity that is impressive -- and perhaps for that reason also arouses suspicion'. Another has 'powerful dramatic latencies that structure the fiction and stop it from falling into unfocussed blandness'. Who would want to read a piece of suspect virtuosity or go down a path where blandness lies like a big game trap, covered over with thin branches from a dramatic latency tree. The final paragraph of Craven's piece predicts that Nam Le 'will annoy people because of his facility', and goes on: 'He will annoy people because that facility will make him seem overly dab to the point of being facile. But he will make you sit up because every atom in him is writerly and energised and intent on keeping the art of fiction alive.' I have no idea what the intention was behind that conclusion, but a rough paraphrase of my original reading of it goes: 'This is really well done, clever stuff, but don't waste your time on it because it doesn't touch the sides.'

2. Reading (before the group)
What can I say? I read the book, and loved it. It starts with a story where a writing student named Nam toys with the idea of a writing stories that use his identity as a Vietnamese refugee as a selling point. The story clearly rejects that strategy, and in the rest of the book we are given stories in which the writer explores extraordinarily diverse milieux and characters: young and old, male and female, impulsively violent and punishingly introspective, of a range of cultural heritages, and all recognisably human. Only one story, set in Hiroshima in the days leading up the the bomb and narrated by a young girl, failed to command my commitment. By the time the final, eponymous story arrived, I had no pull at all to read its refugee horrors as the sort of thing that a young Australian Vietnamese man would inevitably write. The story could stand on it's merits -- and it stands strong.

3. The Group
OK, I wrote all that before the group meeting. Just home from the evening now. There were eight of us, and seven had read the book, or most of it. Over a delicious pasta salad, we agreed on its strengths, failed to be annoyed, discovered that the stories one person particularly liked were the ones another didn't care for, enjoyed comparing more than one of the stories to Tim Winton's, and generally admired Nam Le's versatility. We chatted about the rituals of male violence in small towns (as in the story 'Halfhead Bay'), which someone was quick to point out aren't all that different from their counterparts in cities, and then we realised that these things seem to be changing as we now read of people being stabbed or kicked to death outside pubs. One chap said, interestingly, that he wouldn't recommend the book because -- and I may be misremembering -- he didn't come away from it with a sense of an underlying thought. I think I understand that: the stories are so diverse that it's hard to get a sense of the author as anything other than a superb technician. I'm not sure that it's fair to the book. A good evening was had. Thanks, Nam.

Posted: Mon - February 2, 2009 at 10:21 PM           |

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