A Vietnamese double agent straddles racial, cultural, and ideological binaries as he moves between falling Saigon and California. Viet Thanh Nguyen takes an unflinching look at the failings of Vietnamese and American society.
The Sympathizer is written from the first-person perspective of a Communist Vietnamese double agent, writing a confession for a Communist commandant. The novel follows the (unnamed) narrator’s life from Saigon to America and back. After making a childhood pact with his two best friends, the war tests the narrator when him and his friend Man become Communist agents, while their other friend Bon fights for the South. When Saigon falls, the narrator becomes a Communist spy embedded in the Vietnamese American refugee community.
From the first page, the narrator lets us know that his strength lies in his ability to see both sides. The ingenious nature of the narration is Nguyen’s greatest strength. Nguyen gives voice to a combination of voices that have never been put together. He constructs a plot and narrator that enables him to write from the perspective of a Vietnamese American as he assimilates in Los Angeles as well a North Vietnamese Communist. Repeatedly, Nguyen triumphs by finding ways in which the content of the story give form to the narration: two perspectives elegantly synthesized into one tense individual.
The resulting anxiety propels this literary novel with a spy thrillers’ pace. In many ways, Nguyen has attempted to write the Vietnam War novel to end all Vietnam war novels by encompassing every side and exposing the mutual shortsightedness. The voice of the narrator is elegant, literary, compelling, even a bit old-fashioned in it’s mid-century earnestness and florid expression. The style has appropriately been compared to writers like Graham Greene and Nabokov. Again, Nguyen has let content dictate the form by motivating his narrator with a spite that compels him to be the most able English writer in the room.
Other outlets like the New York Times have remarked the Nguyen is a “voice of the voiceless.” It is an unfortunate piece of praise. A cursory search of Vietnamese literature reveals countless voices speaking loud and clear: Duong Thu Huong, Andrew Lam, Barbara Tran, Phong Bui. I make no claim of expertise in Vietnamese or Vietnamese-American writing, but I must have a better internet search engine available to me than all the writers, reviewers, and fact checkers at the New York Times.
The Sympathizer is a difficult book to find fault with. As an academic who writes about the Vietnam war and the experience of Vietnamese Americans outside of fiction, Nguyen is aware of the shortsightedness of his narrator even as he tries to get off his ideological see-saw. The narrator is seductive and intelligent, but he is also a murderer and misogynist. Just as Nguyen addresses the Hollywood myths of the Vietnam war, he also perpetuates prejudices within patriarchal cultures, Vietnamese and American. The extent to which he acknowledges and addresses this is subject to every reader, but a careful reader can find the author’s tentative disgust with his narrator. By the conclusion, one gets the sense that the narrator is only beginning to understand the real conflict: not how to pick one ideological side, but how to escape the corrosive aspects of ideology outright. It’s one thing to pick a team, but it’s quite another to leave the game entirely.
The Sympathizer is compelling, enlightening, and virtuosic. The Pulitzer Prize, Carnegie Medal, among a litany of other awards should be enough to convince any reader that it is worth reading, if not necessary reading for anyone who thinks they, as an outsider, understand the Asian American experience or the history of the Vietnam War.
Hermenauts 