The boat

The phrase "world literature" always bugged me. While it sounds broad enough, it's often used to mean "all that other literature that's not written in my country and/or the US/UK", often with the added implication (especially in connection with awards) that it's difficult, obscure, or at least exotic. For instance, when Le's The Boat came out and started piling up accolades, I remember reading an article that pointed to The Boat as an example of how all the good reviews in the world couldn't make a weird foreign book sell as much as Dan Brown.

Now, obviously very few authors regardless of nationality or critical acclaim sell as much as Dan Brown, so it's a pretty unfair comparison. But I still wonder if it would have occured to anyone to use this book, written in English by an Australian lawyer living in the US, as an example of weird foreign literature had the writer's name been Bill Johnson. Because honestly, if anything stays with me after reading it, it's how original it's not.

Which isn't to say that it's bad. It really is world literature in the literal sense, in that each of the seven stories in it is set in different parts of the world, and Le is obviously aware of the risk of being filed under "exotic foreigner" and deals with it right away in the first story, in which a Vietnamese-Australian writer named Nam Le is told by his friends to stop trying to write general fiction and just write about his Vietnamese father's horrible experiences during the war. Which, as it turns out, isn't a good idea at all. So from there he bounces us from the US to Colombia to Australia to Japan to Iran before finally returning to (or, to be exact, leaving) Vietnam, covering deceptively simple stories about people trying to take some small amount of control of their lives in a world where most things that happen to them are beyond their influence. And even if it's occasionally obvious that Le isn't quite fully developed as a writer yet (more than once, he seems to have started a story with a few overcooked phrases and then stretched the rest of the story to fit them in rather than killing his darlings) he has a great command of emotions and characters. At his best – say, the story about the American woman trying to understand the complexities of Iranian politics, or the Japanese girl in Hiroshima who unknowningly explains to us how indoctrination works – he's almost brilliant.

And yet, I'm left mostly shrugging. His stories have a tendency to fizzle out without really delivering all they could; he doesn't depend on twist endings, which is admirable, but instead he goes the other direction and too often fails to surprise us at all. Here's where I'm puzzled that anyone would think this is in any way difficult literature: it's all basically Babel or Crash, one of those "we're all the same underneath and everything's connected" movies Hollywood has been pumping out in recent years, with some hard questions that are ultimately simplified, dodged and answered only with emotional payoffs. As such, it gets the job done, even if it's mostly a job that's been done before. Does he deserve to be read more than Dan Brown? Well, who doesn't. Give him a few years and a proper plot to hang his writing on and he might deliver, because there's definitely stuff going on beneath the surface. As it is, though, The Boat neither rocks nor sinks.