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The Boat, his debut book, serves as both. Several of the seven masterful short stories here deal with that old generational bugaboo, the tension between fathers and their sons — and yes, daughters.
Le, 29, knows this does not make him unique. Literature abounds with such stories, from Shakespeare’s “King Lear” to Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides.
“There’s an incredibly rich tradition of father/son literature, in long form as well as in poetry and in short stories,” Le said in a recent interview at BookExpo America. “In my case ... you know, there can be a natural reticence between fathers and sons. There’s often a sense that the most important emotional transactions aren’t being spoken at all.”
Such is the case in Le’s opening story, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice.” In it, a young writer in graduate school is working on a piece of fiction even as he receives a visit from his father. We readers are not privy to all the hurts between the two men, yet Le somehow makes their shared pain palpable on these pages.
The story is a piece of what critics like to call “metafiction,” or writing that’s about writing. The main character, like his creator, is a writer named Nam.
“It concerned me,” Le confessed. “If you think about it, the story is annoying in so many ways. It uses so many hackneyed plot devices; you’ve got the typewriter with one copy of the story, the blazing gasoline drum at the end, the father/son stuff, the writer who’s also an alcoholic.”
But Le added he was consciously trying “to play up the essential absurdity of that type of writing, what people call metafiction — what people talk about as elliptical fiction or autobiographical fiction.”
Le is cagey about which elements of the story are drawn from his life. He does allow that he fictionalizes heavily. And his real father is much more supportive of his writing than is the fictional father of the fictional Nam.
Le was born in Vietnam but grew up in Australia, which he still calls home. His father, after reading The Boat in galleys, expressed admiration to his son, even offered to translate the stories into Vietnamese.
By contrast, the father in the story reads his son’s writing and apparently does something to the sole copy of the piece that any professional writer would find heinous, even devastating. Apparently — for the ending of “Love and Honor” is woolly enough that we cannot be 100 percent sure exactly what transpires, at least in an emotional sense.
Earlier drafts had been more specific, Le said. He then decided to remove what had been a key expository passage.
“It was a very deliberate decision to clear that out. I didn’t want to crystallize the tragedy (of what) might have happened to the father ... or to the character. The tragedy in this story is essentially one that hangs over the lives of these characters every minute of every day.”
“Meeting Elise” is another generational yarn, but this one concerns a father and daughter who have not seen each other since the girl was an infant. The father is a New York painter, wealthy and well-known. Daughter Elise is now a young cellist, engaged to be married, whose talents are wowing the world — she’s about to make her debut at Carnegie Hall, in fact.
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