Tuesday Morning Read
This really is the end. With the last two stories in Nam Le’s collection, The Boat, I close this season’s Morning Read. We’ll see when I begin the next one. I have already pulled out the Library of America volume that contains Moby-Dick, as well as Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote. Also in the pile is David Remnick’s selection of the writing of A J Liebling — another book that I’d never get through outside the Morning Read format.
The Boat is the kind of fiction that makes me feel superannuated; when I was young, it made me feel that I’d never get it. The Boat is a collection of more or less experimental short stories, written by a young man who’s trying things out. It’s clear from the Acknowledgments that Mr Le enjoys formidable artistic patronage; in that sense, he’s clearly doing something right. But I felt that he had been misguided into cramming big stories into small bundles. Reading “Tehran Calling,” yesterday, I wondered if the writer was rushing against the deadline of a fatal disease, madly scribbling out the contents of his imagination just as fast as he could type. In the hurry, it’s left to the reader to decide what’s wrong with Sarah Middleton, the thirty-five year-old American lawyer who dons chador to join a dangerously activist friend in the Iranian capital during the din of the feast of Ashura. Owing perhaps to some kind of narrative short-circuit, Sarah seems both grandly adventurous and vanishingly solipsistic. The story registered as a scenario — as a kind of motion-picture sketch. Nothing in the writing warmed me.
As for the title story, all I could think of was the lawyerly phrase, “incorporated by reference.” I have no idea what kind of sense the story will make to anyone unfamiliar with the aftermath of the war in Viet Nam. Surely this is understatement carried to the point of literary anorexia. I hope that someone will encourage the gifted Mr Le to slow down and dilate.