The boxing ring and the nail salon collide in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s first novel

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Souvankham Thammavongsa chooses her words carefully, on the page as much as in person. The writer, who won the Giller prize in 2020 for her debut short story collection How to Pronounce Knife, speaks quietly and deliberately; in writing, her prose feels direct, clear, certain.

Her first novel, Pick a Colour, shortlisted for this year’s Giller, takes place over the course of a single day in a nail salon. “In the publishing world right now, when you’re a writer of colour, you’re supposed to write these epic novels that try to address the question, where are you from? You go back generations to explain how we got here,” Thammavongsa says over juice in a coffee shop in Toronto’s Queen West neighbourhood, not far from where she lives. “And for me to purposely refuse that – I worked really hard to do that. To push that pressure away and to do what I want. I made this story happen over one day; I’m not going to explain where I come from.”

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More than simply not being a multigenerational epic, the novel plays with readers’ expectations in many other surprising and satisfying ways. The protagonist narrator, Ning, for example, is both the owner of a nail salon and a retired professional boxer.

“I like ‘fish out of water’ stories, where I can throw two things together that are from different worlds,” she says. “Like the boxing phrase ‘you control the fight when you control the centre line.’ And then bringing that to the idea of threading an eyebrow. When you control the centre line, you control the fight.”

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It’s not the first time Thammavongsa has collided the disparate worlds of boxing and nail technicians. Mani Pedi, one of the stories in How to Pronounce Knife, follows Raymond, a semi-pro punching bag who never titled as a boxer, into his new career at Bird Spa Nail Salon, where his sister teaches him about life beyond the ropes. Raymond and his sister, Rachel, are deep in the background of Pick a Colour, and often pop in to Ning’s thoughts.

So does Murch, her former boxing coach. And Nok, an employee who used to bring her children in and had them sit and colour during her shifts but who has recently disappeared, after asking Ning to front her pay. Then there’s the pigeon outside the front door, bobbing its head and making the salon look less approachable. Ning’s thoughts are often sharp but tend to circle, and Thammavongsa captures beautifully the quality of how consciousness moves like the tide, pushing onto and pulling away from the shore of the present.

The novel feels contained, almost claustrophobic. Thammavongsa asks me if it feels like a short story, and I tell her no, but it does almost remind me of a play. Ning enters the nail salon in the morning and the action takes place there, closed in among the chairs and the register and the colours lining the walls. The sounds of the street sometimes filter in, but everything happens in the one place. She smiles, says she understands the play aspect, like a performance carried by a single voice. “So much of it works only if you can hear her voice,” she says. “I spent so much time in her voice.”

In her first draft, Thammavongsa had originally attempted to write the novel in the voice of Murch, Ning’s former coach. You still hear his guidance, his hopes for his once-promising fighter, echoed in the protagonist’s thoughts; this too feels like cognition, like consciousness, how figures from the past endure in informing one’s sense of self, the border between self and other as discreetly porous in the mind as that between now and then.

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“But I realized, I didn’t want a man to be the main voice, you know? It had to be a woman,” she says. “Her voice has a strut and a confidence to it, but also it’s vulnerable, too.” Finding Ning’s voice led the way. Once Thammavongsa could hear her protagonist, she finished her first draft in only six weeks. “It just comes,” she says, “and then you just follow it and try not to mess with it.”

Through Ning’s voice, sound suffuses the novel with a rare sophistication. The employees at the salon spend the day in one long conversation among the bubbling of water in pedicure sinks, the whoosh and rattle of traffic outside enters the salon every time the door opens, the constant, humming refrain of asking customers to pick a colour, the ringing phone signalling desire for service, appointments yet to be booked.

Thammavongsa says she approached the novel’s sense of sound with intention; she looked to other novels to see how she could use noise and dialogue in her debut. “In a film, you can use the sound in a room, like say at a party, but then you then can take that sound and make it intimate, one-on-one. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby because I loved what he does with sound, when you’re at a party, when you’re up close one-on-one, when you’re in your own mind and how you move within those sounds in each of those moments,” she says.

“I don’t like the way that most novelists write direction around dialogue. You know, like ‘he said, she said,’ where they put their arms, what they’re doing with their hands or their bodies, but that often feels really, really boring. But in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, those moments were so profound, where he’s directing you where to look and what he does with the sound of people’s voices, what the sound of their voice means. So you can do it in a way that’s not boring to read, but still adds direction to character, voice and conversation.”

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Conversation plays a pivotal role in Pick a Colour, where what goes unsaid between Ning and her employees lands softly but proves just as important as what is spoken aloud. Ning often refers to speaking “our language,” using the phrase to separate the customers from the workers and to create a sense of the intimacy in the salon. But Thammavongsa, herself a Laotian immigrant, never identifies precisely what language the women are speaking. In one scene, Ning is making a joke to her colleagues about a client’s long toes. Even before the woman, Mary, asks why they’re all laughing, Ning thinks to herself: “It’s sad that Mary doesn’t know our language. Not a lot of people do. I feel sorry for her, if you want to know. She seems like she could use a friend.”

“Throughout the whole book,” Thammavongsa says, “we hear from English speakers twice. And the rest of the time it’s just her narrating their talk and speech indirectly. Like there’s no direct English language speech except for those two moments. So I make the English language feel foreign. I ask the reader to pretend that the English language in front of them is not there.”

In another scene, the employees gleefully put on fake accents, playing to the Asian nail tech stereotype for each other, making both a connection to and a mockery of the expectations of the whiter world outside the salon for how these women would act, what they would say. “I could have made the whole book have that accent,” Thammavongsa says. “But then, that’s just a gimmick. When someone does have an accent, they don’t know it, they don’t hear it that way. So who would it be for, if I were to write it that way? But I wanted to introduce that sound, that accent, into the novel. As if to say, I had this, I had this way of doing it, and I purposely chose not to.”

There’s a depth of power to Pick a Colour, built precisely out of the choices and conceits Thammavongsa has made and constructed; the novel is compact, honed, lean. To use a boxing metaphor, it packs a punch. Thammavongsa, who spent two years training to fight in a boxing gym as preparation for writing the novel, has clearly put in the work. “Not to tip my hand,” she says, “but I think this is like my best work. It’s really good. It’s funny, profound, fun. And I feel like I really got the mechanics right.” It’s impossible to argue with her on this point, but her accomplishment is more than technical.

Pick a Colour begins with an uncomfortable opening line: “Everyone is ugly. I should know. I look at people all day.” By the end, we see that Ning, no matter her conviction, is not wholly right. Thammavongsa shows instead the bottomless beauty one can find in paying close attention.