Seth Marko over at The Book Catapult is one of my trusted culture scouts, especially when it comes to books, and he's really angry that short stories don't get the respect they deserve.   He sent me the following defense, bolstering his argument by reviewing a new addition to the genre, Nam Le's The Boat.

A Defense of the Short Story, by Seth Marko

As a bookseller, I often hear the following refrain: “I don’t want that. I hate short stories.” To me, this is pure crazy talk. David Sedaris, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chuck Klosterman, and Nora Ephron are all fabulously successful based on their short writing pieces. So what gives? While I can understand not wanting to “get involved” with a story that isn’t novel-length – your emotional investment may be disproportionate to the number of pages available –  but to just dismiss what could be a potentially life-changing experience seems, well, too dismissive. Wouldn’t reading an eloquent, beautifully written short story that hits you like an emotional freight train be more worth your time than some forgettable, throw away, pulpy thriller you picked up in the airport?  I don’t mean to sound so righteous, it’s just that I feel passionately about this overlooked, kicked-around, stepchild of a genre and I feel it could use some love. Thankfully, a gentleman named Nam Le has written a brilliant collection of shorts called The Boat that just may change the way we all read (or don’t read) the short story.

The Boat is composed of seven stories, each set in vastly differing locales – Colombia, Iowa, the South China Sea - that are thematically tied together in such a way that you almost miss it at first glance. Each appears unrelated to the others, yet the emotional toll of living life manages to breathe on every page, creating a thematic bridge. I know, “emotional toll” doesn’t sound like much fun, but in the hands of Le, the raw emotional power shines through in a way I have seldom encountered.

In the opener, "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice," our character shares the same name and resume as our author.  Nam Le was born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, and has earned a fellowship from the Iowa Writers Workshop. (The real life Le has also won the prestigious Pushcart Prize.) In fact, this piece turns out to be one of the strongest of the collection, and sets a remarkably dramatic, emotional tone for the rest of the book. Fictional Nam has been working fruitlessly on his final short story for the Iowa Writers Workshop. A friend tells him to use his family’s experiences to break out of his writer’s block: “Just write a story about Vietnam.”  Another friend adds “ethnic literature is hot.” But it takes a tense visit from his estranged father to help Nam see the obvious story right in front of him, just aching to be told, or so he thought.

In "Meeting Elise," a self-absorbed artist with failing health prepares to meet the daughter he has never known, while trying to ignore his secret fear of soul-crushing rejection. In "Halflead Bay," an Australian teenager struggles mightily with the pain of…well…being a teenager.  He also has to balance a family life teetering on the edge of collapse due to potential poverty and the looming death of his ill mother.  The Boat, the final story in the collection, packs perhaps the most emotional wallop. Young Mai faces starvation and death on a fishing trawler transporting people out of war-torn Vietnam, where she meets a child who alters her perspective and forces her to make a terrifying decision.

Again, I know that these summaries seem grim, to say the least.  But Le has the skill to craft these stories into something other than raw misery. Each protagonist ends up learning something about themselves that challenges their assumptions.  As emotionally heart wrenching as some of the tales can be, the characters undergo soul-defining, identity-cementing experiences – the kinds of experiences we all long for. The resulting book is the best collection of shorts I have read since Robert Olen Butler’s Pulitzer winner, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain.  It’s truly a breath of fresh air for the genre. Long live the short story!