An extract from HEAT 17

No book in recent literary memory by a young Australian writer has created the same kind of impact as Nam Le’s The Boat. Here is a writer still in his twenties, born in Vietnam and brought to Melbourne when he was a year old, who has succeeded in making his debut with a book of stories that come with blurbs from Helen Garner, Junot Díaz and Andrew Solomon, and who has got the approval of the redoubtable Michiko Kakatani in The New York Times.

Nam Le has studied writing in America and is now the fiction editor of The Harvard Review. And from early on he has had the kind of dream run that looks like the product of exceptional talent. In the background there are scholarships to Melbourne Grammar and exhibitions in school English and Literature. A law degree and an arts degree and the astonishing (and slightly sickening) detail that he wrote his honours thesis – on Auden – for Chris Wallace-Crabbe in heroic couplets. (I know, in your day and mine he would have been told to amuse himself in his own time, but students of poetry are thin on the ground these days, let alone people whose insights come to them in the form Pope’s did in The Dunciad).

The weird thing about Nam Le is that everything you hear about him from afar, both the life history and the recent success of his first book, seems preposterously overachieving in what looks a parody of the Asian maths nerds who dominate the school results.

The trouble is that when you read him for any length of time you realise that he actually is the real thing. The Boat is not simply the next one in the nest who wants to glitter so. This is a formidable literary debut and the fact that its glowing reception has happened everywhere and all at once is not primarily evidence of how someone can move themselves across the careerist chessboard (though there must be some element of that), but of the kind of literary talent and achievement this suite of stories represents.