The unusually various characters in Nam Le’s excellent debut collection, The Boat, live between worlds. In “Cartagena,” for example, a teenage contract killer in Colombia moves from squalid shantytowns to his master’s opulent mansion; in “Hiroshima,”a young girl shifts unambiguously toward death in the days and hours before the atomic bomb is dropped; and in the title story, a Vietnamese refugee overtaken by a storm on the South China Sea feels as if she is “soaring through the air, the sky around [her] dark and inky and shifting.” As these brief descriptions indicate, the book’s seven stories are also diverse in setting and mode. Consequently, the reader, invited to travel from, say, a tale of cultural and generational estrangement in Iowa City to a brooding coming-of-age story in an Australian
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