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What it argues
The Committed is the sequel to Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, continuing the story of the unnamed narrator — the man of two faces, the spy who believes in nothing — as he arrives in Paris with his friend Bon in the early 1980s. Still traumatized by the reeducation camp that closed the first novel, the narrator attempts to build a new life, falling into the orbit of a Vietnamese crime network while navigating the intellectual and political culture of Paris's immigrant communities.
The novel is explicitly about the afterlife of French colonialism — not as distant history but as a lived condition that structures the lives of Vietnamese immigrants in France today. The narrator moves through two Parises: the glamorous city of French self-mythology and the grey banlieue where the colonized end up. He reads Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire between drug deals and violent confrontations, and the novel's most distinctive quality is the way it refuses to separate theory from action. Ideas about colonialism, double consciousness, and the violence done to the colonized are tested against the specific violence of crime, addiction, and survival.
What it gets right
- 1.
Colonialism doesn't end when armies leave. It persists in the bodies, psychologies, and social structures of the colonized long after formal independence.
- 2.
The narrator's defining condition — being 'of two minds' — is a form of double consciousness that colonialism imposed and that he can neither escape nor fully embrace.
- 3.
Fanon's argument that violence may be a necessary component of decolonization is tested against the brutal reality of street-level violence in Paris — and the test is inconclusive.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971 and came to the United States as a refugee at age four. He is a professor of English and American Studies at the University of Southern California and the author of The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction along with numerous other awards; its sequel The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; and a nonfiction work, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. His work is centrally concerned with the Vietnamese diaspora, the legacies of the Vietnam War, and the politics of memory and representation.
