The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Slander by Linda Lê
Marc Lowenthal

Linda Lê. Slander. Trans. Esther Allen. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1996. 156 pp. Paper: $14.00.

In Slander, Linda Lê’s fifth novel, a young writer, with obvious resemblances to the author, seeks information from her mad uncle concerning her unknown father; the uncle in turn begrudgingly provides a report on her family’s history, and the novel unfolds in alternating chapters from their two perspectives.
Slander concerns itself with a quintessential foreigness, an almost ferocious pride in not belonging. The writer’s mad uncle describes her as a “métèque, a dirty foreigner who writes in French. For her, the French language is what madness had been for me: a way of escaping the family, of safeguarding her solitude, her mental integrity.” But Lê’s conflicted background (she came to France from Vietnam at the age of fourteen) scarecly accounts for the desperate freakshow nature of her estranged characters: screaming and homicidal madmen, suicides, a shoe repairman with a legless mother (a half-woman who starts eating enough for two), and idealists who sink into pathetic crimes of failed passion and bitter misogeny. Lê plays a bleak tune on the registers of love, with a fierce antipathy for blood ties, a dispirited outlook on romantic ones, with the closest ideal being that of the impassioned incest at the root of her uncle’s madness. But while her uncle’s shared loathing for their family brings the two narrators together, it also divides them. As the uncle states at one point: “She is my enemy because there can’t be two escapes in this family.” This inability to coexist creates the novel’s structure.
The writing is good, but tends to announce itself as such. Slander offers a relentless and voyeurisitc gaze on uncongeniality. Lê is an author to keep an eye on. [Marc Lowenthal]