Stories to Explore Someone Else’s Skin

A waiter at Picholine sets down a plate in front of Nam Le: sea urchin panna cotta, a shell-pink colored disk that looks like a powder compact topped with tiny black beads of caviar.

THE BOAT
By Nam Le
Alfred A. Knopf. $22.95.

It is the same appetizer that Henry Luff, a character in one of Mr. Le’s short stories, orders but never gets to taste; Luff cancels it, fearful of offending Elise, the daughter he has not seen in 17 years.
Until now Mr. Le had never tasted it either. Like most of the other details in “The Boat” (Alfred A. Knopf), his collection that came out Tuesday, they were pulled from assiduous research he did from a fungus-plagued farmhouse in Iowa City, his home for two years while at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
“I picked the dishes because they were so exotic sounding,” Mr. Le, 29, says, tucked into a corner table at this fancy Lincoln Center restaurant, which he featured in the story “Meeting Elise.” He is wearing a dark sport coat, bought that very afternoon for the occasion, and a dark shirt, altogether a somewhat more formal outfit than he usually wears.
He lifts a forkful to his mouth. “I’ll confess to you I didn’t know what panna cotta was,” he says, his Australian accent stretching out each vowel like Silly Putty. He tastes. “It’s quite good.”

“The Boat” is Mr. Le’s first book, but it is already receiving the kind of praise usually reserved for far more accomplished writers. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote, “Mr. Le not only writes with an authority and poise rare even among veteran authors, but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the brute facts of history.”

The seven stories display an amazing confidence and range for so young an author, moving from a religious festival in Tehran to the days before an atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima to the cardboard shantytowns of Colombia where 14-year-old boys yearn to get “an office job,” slang for work as a hired assassin.

For the rest of the story from The New York Times............

And for their review.............