Across seven seas

At THE risk of being accused of judging a book by its cover, I would like to begin this review of Nam Le's astounding collection, "The Boat," with a simple observation. The word "stories" does not appear on the cover. Pulling the book off the shelf, you could reasonably assume you were holding a novel in your hand. The omission reflects publishing's current wooziness toward short-story collections. The common wisdom is that they don't sell; the word "stories" is to be avoided, and the more linked the collection, the better.

In this context, "The Boat" is a refreshingly diverse and panoramic debut. Its seven stories are set in Iowa City, the slums of Colombia, Manhattan, coastal Australia, Hiroshima, Iran and the South China Sea, with characters as varied as a Japanese third-grader, an aging painter with hemorrhoids and an American woman visiting Iran for the first time.

In "Cartagena," a gripping tale of adolescent friendship, crime and loyalty, Juan Pablo, a 14-year-old assassin from Medellin, has been ordered to kill one of his closest friends. After he fails to eliminate his target, he is summoned by his "agent," known as El Padre, a meeting that will most likely end in his own death. In less capable hands, this material would quickly devolve into cartoonish violence and two-dimensional stereotype, but Le's masterful treatment results in a rich unveiling that renders the story more complex at every turn. The atmosphere is utterly authentic, the language spare and idiomatic: "Street kids scavenge for food by the roadside, some of them inhaling the pale yellow sacol from supermarket bags -- their eyes half-open and animal and unblinking." Assuming that Le has never himself been employed by the Colombian drug cartels, the story must have required a considerable amount of research -- yet the narrative never feels weighed down. Reading these stories, you're left feeling that Le has been all over the planet and has poked at everything with a sharp stick.

In "Meeting Elise," Henry Luff, an aging, "well- regarded neo-figurative painter," prepares to meet his adult daughter for the first time since she was an infant -- she's giving a cello recital at Carnegie Hall. Luff's narration ranges from the comic to the pa- thetic, and the world is vividly drawn, but what is most remarkable about the story is the way in which Le deftly juggles dialogue, memory and the physical sense of an aging man's ailing body to create a continuous, seamless consciousness, wholly convincing throughout.