Tales of fathers sail on in 'The Boat'

by John Mark Eberhart

LOS ANGELES - Father's Day is a Sunday. Nam Le has time to go out and buy his dad a card or a gift, but he really needn't bother.

"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.

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