One of the things I love about Los Angeles is the way we get all the good book stuff. Take Sunday: Nam Le read at Skylight Books in Los Feliz from his debut collection, The Boat. He read part of the first story, which has a character that appears to be himself; this has confused some people, who think this makes the story nonfiction. They should pay attention to the way Le is deliberately playing with literary conventions and expectations. At one point in the story, he introduces a gun, which, shortly later, is fired; if this isn’t a literalization of Chekhov’s dramatic principle (“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there”), I’ll eat the ARC of your choice. All I know of The Boat is what I heard in that story, and I can tell that Le is a writer who is aware of expectations and works to disrupt them — or at least to churn them up a little.
Le went to the Iowa Writers Workshop and a huge posse of his classmates and friends showed up at the reading. I had no idea so many Iowa MFAs had come to Los Angeles. There are great writers everywhere here, camouflaged as all sorts of normal people.
Not that going to Iowa makes one necessarily a great writer. But it is a motherfucker of a program.
