Finding a home in fiction

[camtieu]

AT JUST 30, Vietnam-born, Melbourne-raised writer Nam Le has been blessed with early success. The Boat, his debut collection of short stories, was published last year to a wave of international critical acclaim. In addition, Le has been awarded several major awards, including the Dylan Thomas Prize - the richest in Britain. Furthermore, he is the fiction editor of the Harvard Review.

Our appointment is at a noisy New York University student cafe in downtown Manhattan. Dressed in a black T-shirt and faded jeans, Nam Le has an easy charm and a broad Australian accent. Tomorrow, he will embark on a short reading tour to promote the US paperback release of The Boat, but this evening, he is spending the night on a friend's couch in a Columbia University dormitory.

Le has led a nomadic existence since he abandoned a career as a corporate lawyer in Melbourne to pursue his writing. The Boat, which was written with the aid of various writing fellowships in the United States, was the culmination of almost four years' work. The book's success came as a total surprise to Le. ''I didn't expect it to be much received at all because it's just a collection of stories,'' he says. ''Even the publishers were dampening any wayward expectations. No one reads short stories.''

One of the most striking aspects of the collection is its eclecticism. The geographical terrain traversed by The Boat - the United States, Colombia, Australia, Japan, Iran, Vietnam and beyond - is just as diverse as the ages, genders and backgrounds of Le's protagonists, each with their corresponding voices.

Curiously though, Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, the first story of the collection, the title of which borrows from a William Faulkner quote and foreshadows themes shared within the entire collection, is narrated by a character named Nam. The following story, Cartagena, is narrated by a teenage hitman in Medellin, Colombia. The contrast jars and challenges the suspension of disbelief crucial to the enjoyment of fiction.

Despite this, Le says his decision to show his hand so early was an easy one. ''If [the question of author identity] is there and if you're thinking about whether it affects the aesthetics or even the ethics of what you're writing, then the only good-faith thing to do is to address it in some way,'' he explains.

Le is, however, quick to point out that Love and Honour and Pity, which chronicles a strained reunion between ''Nam'' and his father at the Iowa Writers Workshop, is not autobiography.

''Even though the character shares my name and my circumstances, it's very much playing with the conventions of what fiction can do and how it differs from autobiography,'' he says.

The author admits that placing himself as a character within the story put him outside his comfort zone, but defends his decision. ''It was exactly what the story demanded,'' he says. ''That's the only principle that you can go by when you're writing. If it feels hard, if it feels wrong, if it feels bad, if you resist it, then the chances are that there's something behind that resistance and it's something worth excavating.''

The story also explores Le's cynical view of ''ethnic literature'' - the ''hot'' genre at the writers workshop. He is ill at ease with his marketability as an author who escaped communist Vietnam by boat at three months of age. ''Much of so-called 'ethnic lit' is purely a commercial innovation to sell authors,'' he states. Although Le arrived in Australia as an infant by plane from Pulau Bidong refugee camp in Malaysia, the story of Nam Le the boat refugee has proven a seductive hook for many journalists and critics. Nevertheless, Le would be the last person to don an ethnic costume for a photo opportunity or dust jacket portrait.

Still, he is intrigued and repelled by the notion of authenticity in literature. He appreciates, however, that readers search for a correlation between an author's life and their work. ''I think we all do it,'' he says. ''No matter how sophisticated you are as a reader, it calibrates your emotional response … It speaks of a desperate longing to believe in something that is clear, unmediated and true because so much of what we see and consume nowadays is the opposite of all those things.''

Perhaps Le's biggest complaint is that such labelling creates an uneven playing field and undermines the role of imagination in writing. ''It does a disservice to everyone because people don't judge it on the same terms that they would ordinarily use to judge literary fiction,'' he says.

Le has always been compelled to write, but says that prior to his short stories, his focus was on poetry. In any case, he never expected that writing would become a financially viable lifestyle. ''I'm happy doing this,'' he says, ''even though there's no security or stability.'' Although he is yet to reach an understanding as to why he writes, his family has accepted his choice.

''I don't know myself why I'm doing it. I don't even try to plumb those murky depths,'' he jokes, ''but my family has been nothing but supportive.'' He admits that as the child of migrants, there was a certain pressure to become a doctor or a lawyer, but he has fared better than others. ''I know folks in my situation - second or 1.5-generation Vietnamese - who have been far more constrained. I've been lucky in that respect,'' he says.

[camtieu]

Le attended the now defunct Doncaster Heights Primary School - ''a victim of the Kennett cuts'', he points out - before moving on to Melbourne Grammar. After completing an arts/law degree at Melbourne University, he was accepted into the commercial law firm Baker & McKenzie. Still, his eyes were on other horizons. As soon as he had obtained a letter of guarantee on his lawyer's income, he secured a bank loan to fund a round-the-world trip.

''I've always been a wander-luster,'' he says. ''I can think of nothing better than to hit the road.'' Although he has travelled widely, he insists that he enjoys travel independently of his life as a writer.

''I've never travelled to collect material,'' he says. ''I'm very good at quarantining the two parts of my life. If I go somewhere, I'm not there thinking about notes and scenery or mise-en-scene, I'm just there.'' Le insists that, although he has travelled to some of the settings in his short story collection, his renderings of these places are ''substantially and quantitatively different'' from the places that he saw with his own eyes. By way of explanation, he points out that he has not been to Tehran, as featured in his story, Teheran Calling, but if he had, he would not have been in the state of mind or circumstances of his characters. ''I find some liberation and licence in this,'' he explains.

Looking back, Le says the fact that Baker & McKenzie had an office in Vietnam was the only way he could reconcile himself with his decision to become a lawyer. As soon as he signed on, he laid plans to work in the firm's Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi offices. Although this never came to be, he is still drawn to the country of his birth and has returned three times.

''Loads of my [relatives] are in Vietnam, so it's great to see them again,'' he says. ''It's a bit strange, obviously, because I don't know them that well. My language is passable at best … It was strange the first time. I was 14. A lot of people over there treat you different because you're the kid that made it out. There's a scrutiny. Sometimes the scrutiny is envious and laudatory and sometimes it's resentful and hostile. But it's always there.''

Le also points out that just like in many other cultures, blood ties are integral to Vietnamese identity. ''People who I've never met would do anything for me,'' he says.

Nevertheless, he concedes that he is in a quandary about his relationship to Vietnam. ''It's complicated when I go back,'' he says. ''I try not to think of it in absolute terms of, 'Is this home, is it not, do I belong here, do I not?' It's a completely unstable and unpredictable process,'' he says. ''I don't mind that.''

The final story of The Boat, from which the collection takes its title, tells of the hellish voyage of a boat of refugees attempting to flee Vietnam. When asked whether he feels that Australian audiences have responded differently to the politically charged subject matter, Le is uncertain.

''I'm not really up on the ways that story may have been interpreted, in light of real-world events or otherwise,'' he says. ''Writing it, however, was an act of remembering that beneath the glaze and grand movements of history, there are always human elements. Fiction can't afford to forget this - and neither, I think, can politics.''

Talking to Le it is clear that his training as a lawyer made its mark. Although turns of phrase such as ''good faith'' and ''make your case'' bob up in conversation, he has been left with more than just traces of legalese. Two things that have helped him in his post-lawyer life are discipline and the need for precise language.

''Writing is just one long exercise in overcoming procrastination,'' he says. ''I think that saying something so that it is exactly what you want to say - no more and no less - is a good impulse to have. I would use completely different techniques in creative writing - I mean I'd use metaphor to write exactly what I mean sometimes.''

THE art of making something simultaneously clear, yet open to interpretation - ''so you don't get sued'' - has stood him in good stead. ''That's all you do in writing - you marshal ambiguity,'' he explains.

Le is currently working on a novel. He is guarded about this new work, which is understandable in light of the fact that he ''chucked out'' his first attempt at a novel. ''It's on an old computer somewhere in Richmond. I haven't touched it in a while and I'm not going to,'' he says with finality.

Earlier this year, it was reported that his novel is about South China pirates. In the meantime, he has penned The Yarra, a short story first published in the Asia Literary Review, and now in Brothers & Sisters, an anthology of works by 12 Australian authors including Christos Tsiolkas, Cate Kennedy and Robert Drewe, published by Allen and Unwin.

The story, inspired in part by the Salt nightclub murders, is Le's first published work since The Boat.''It's based in the Vietnamese community in Melbourne, so people will invariably draw things from that,'' he says. ''It's a fruitless exercise looking back now, but I wonder whether if I'd written this back then, it would have fit into The Boat. My first confession would be that it wouldn't.''

He says he finds writing a painful process and understands that his next effort is to be met with anticipation. Le does, however, feel that the weight of expectation for his follow-up is lessened by the absence of a single distinct voice running through the stories in The Boat.

Still, he looks back on his days of obscurity while writing his debut with a distinct wistfulness.

''When anyone writes their first book, unless they're completely self-confident or delusional, they don't write under the assumption that it is going to get published. I certainly didn't.

''Now I look back and there's a certain romance and nostalgia associated with toiling away when no one knows or cares. There's a certain delicious solace in that anonymity.''

Le will return to Melbourne next month and is relishing the thought of his first summer at home in years. While he is looking forward to reuniting with family and friends, he will soon be bound for France for a four-month stint at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis on the Cote d'Azur. Le intends to return to Melbourne later next year to take up a writing residency at RMIT University.

As yet, he has not set a specific deadline for his novel, but rather a number of self-imposed deadlines. Regardless, Le claims that he is not feeling the weight of great expectations. ''I think that most writers would agree that they put more pressure on themselves than any external source could match.''

NAM LE CV

BORN Rach Gia, Vietnam, in 1978. Arrived in Melbourne with family in 1979.

EDUCATION Melbourne Grammar School; University of Melbourne, graduated with honours in arts-law in 2001.

CAREER Lawyer at Baker & McKenzie, Melbourne, 2002-04.

ACHIEVEMENTS Editor of Melbourne University student newspaper Farrago (2001); Truman Capote Fellowship, Iowa Writers Workshop (2004); fiction fellowship, Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, Massachusetts (2006); writer-in-residence fellowship, Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire (2007); writer-in-residence fellowship, University of East Anglia, Norwich (2008); The Boat published and rights sold in 15 territories, named as best book of year by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Independent and others (2008); winner, Dylan Thomas Prize (2008), Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (2009), Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist Award, (2009); writer-in-residence fellowship, Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France.

Dave Tacon is a Melbourne-based freelance writer and photographer.

[camtieu]

THE venue might have been a clue. Against the creaking masts of Sydney's National Maritime Museum, The Boat by Nam Le was named winner of the $100,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction yesterday.

The much-awarded debut short-story collection by Melbourne-raised Le, 30, who came to Australia as a Vietnamese refugee, covers characters from a Colombian gangster to Vietnamese boat people.

''Le combines almost reckless artistic boldness with highly disciplined craft,'' said the judges, chaired by academic and critic Peter Pierce.

Two books shared the Prime Minister's Literary Award for non-fiction (and split the $100,000 prize money) - House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann, by Evelyn Juers, and Drawing the Global Colour Line, by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds.

In announcing the awards, Arts Minister Peter Garrett did not mention the political timeliness of Le's subject, but others noted topical themes.

''Both [non-fiction] books are about the disease of the 20th century - racism,'' said Phillip Adams, who chaired the non-fiction judges.

''They are all books about arrival in Australia,'' said James Boyce, author of the shortlisted history Van Diemen's Land. ''That is interesting given the intersection with the Rudd Government's policy.''

Le is the second debut author to receive the fiction award, after Steven Conte's first novel, The Zookeeper's War, won the inaugural award last year. Le's win recognised ''short stories are so much part of our literary tradition,'' said shortlisted novelist Peter Goldsworthy.

Le's arrival last night from Europe was too late for the awards lunch. But in a speech read by his publisher, Ben Ball of Penguin, he thanked the judges for rewarding a ''collection of unlinked short stories from an ex-lawyer'' and said he felt ''like a petty thief on murderers' row'' in the company of other finalists, Goldsworthy, Murray Bail, Geraldine Brooks, Richard Flanagan and Joan London.

[Tanyenbai]

Good news. Congratulation!

[tiêu sáng minh]

hay, goood