“What is less certain is how common these experiences are or how constructed in order to form those critical literary moments.”

Nguyen’s collection of short stories is a great introduction to him as a writer, capturing his foregrounding of empathy and circumstance through a variety of stories, all of course from different characters connected to experiences of (un)settlement and (dis)connection. As stories, we might think of them less as complete narratives than as slices of circumstance, of moments or dialogues which reveal, where a tensionAs a literary term, I often use this in place of "conflict" ... More is unveiled.

What is less certain is how common these experiences are or how constructed in order to form those critical literary moments. I’m thinking mostly of the story “The Transplant” where a hospital records error and a series of successive obligations places stolen goods in the garage of a Mexican-American with a gambling addiction. While more of a page-turner, it pushed plausibility some. But others, like “I’d Love You to Want Me” finds a woman caring for her Alzheimer’s afflicted husband who oddly speaks names (perhaps from his past) she does not recognize, but she must now decide whether to elevate his confusion to a self-sacrificing level of present comfort. Terrifyingly real and poignant.

And while these poignant choices, from an assimilation metaphor met through homosexual contact to the naming of daughters motivated by loneliness and obligation, make for despair and anxiety, I could not help as I read to also read them as sentiment, as constructions with the intention to create my empathy. Perhaps I would not have felt so to encounter them separately as they were originally published; but together as an anthology, they feel at times artificial, readerly, working a bit too hard to me, the non-refugee, to feel.

Ah, but this is a minor quibble, and a fraught one, isn’t it? Nguyen is still young in his career and will doubtless produce more seamless works ahead. In the end, I am glad to have read it, and each story carried an original angle, rarely overtly political and more subtly cultural; these are human stories for human readers, and they are worth the time spent.