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What it argues
The Sympathizer is narrated by a nameless communist spy who is also the aide-de-camp to a South Vietnamese general. The novel opens in April 1975, the fall of Saigon, and follows the narrator as he evacuates to the United States along with the South Vietnamese refugees he is sent to infiltrate and monitor. He is a man of two minds — literally, he says — a child of a French priest and Vietnamese mother, educated in America, ideologically committed to the North, emotionally entangled in the South. The novel is structured as a forced confession, addressed to a Commandant, and the narrator's self-awareness about his own contradictions is what makes the voice extraordinary.
Nguyen uses the spy's dual consciousness to run a sustained critique of American imperialism, Vietnamese nationalism, and the self-serving narratives that every side of the Vietnam War constructed about itself. The narrator watches a Hollywood director (a barely-veiled Francis Ford Coppola figure) make a war film in the Philippines that erases the interiority of Vietnamese characters; he participates in a botched assassination attempt; he endures a re-education camp whose horrors are rendered with the same ironic clarity as everything else. The novel refuses any camp — American, North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese — a comfortable position.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel argues that the most damaging thing about American imperialism is its refusal to imagine the interiority of those it acts upon — the Hollywood film subplot is the sharpest articulation of this.
- 2.
The narrator's dual consciousness is not a personal quirk but a colonial product — a mind split by competing cultures and their competing claims on loyalty.
- 3.
Nguyen refuses to sentimentalize either the South Vietnamese diaspora or the communist North. Both are capable of atrocity; both construct self-serving myths.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese American novelist and professor of English and American Studies at the University of Southern California. The Sympathizer (2015) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Edgar Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among others. Its sequel, The Committed (2021), continues the narrator's story in Paris. Nguyen is also the author of the story collection The Refugees and the nonfiction work Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War.
