Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel, ‘The Sympathizer’, has some of the best opening lines I’ve read in many years:
‘I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds…Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent, and although it is admittedly one of a minor nature, it is perhaps also the sole talent I possess. At other times, when I reflect on how I cannot help but observe the world in such a fashion, I wonder if what I have should even be called a talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess.’
This title character, this ‘sympathizer,’ unnamed throughout the novel, is writing his confession, which implies that whatever use he has put his talent to throughout the course of the novel, has gotten him captured or caught in a trap of some kind.
The theme of doubleness permeates almost every aspect of this novel. The title character was the product of a French priest’s rape of a South Vietnamese woman in the 1950’s. At some point he was fortunate to go to the USA for an education, then return to South Vietnam to aid in the South Vietnamese war for independence, becoming the captain of a Special Forces unit and reporting to ‘the General’—many characters in this novel are never named, only referred to by their role in society. The sympathizer is a double agent, ostensibly aiding the South Vietnamese cause but covertly reporting back to his communist North Vietnamese handlers in letters sent back to his “French aunt” in which messages between the lines are written in invisible ink. He went to college with two best friends, Bon and Man. Bon is a fellow South Vietnamese soldier. Man is one of his North Vietnamese handlers.
At one point, the narrator is offered the job of a consultant on the production of a film about the Vietnam War, titled ‘The Hamlet’. What follows is a brilliant satire of American moviemaking in the years immediately following the end of the war. The production has allusions to ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘Platoon’, ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and many other films of that era. The director of the film, The Auteur, doesn’t really care about authenticity beyond what serves his ‘vision’, despite the Sympathizer’s attempts to populate the extras with authentic South Vietnamese people’ he is pretty clearly Francis Ford Coppola. The Thespian seems modeled after Marlon Brando, the veteran actor whose method acting leads to his refusal to bathe for six months. The narrator pities any actor who has to be in close proximity to the Thespian for hours at a time while the Auteur insists on take after take to arrive at ‘perfection’. Lingering in a set designer-built graveyard on which he wrote the name of his mother, honoring her at a movie grave as he never could honor her at a real one, the Sympathizer is almost killed when the overzealous Auteur adds additional explosives to detonate the graveyard as part of the big climax to the film. He escapes with a concussion and burn injuries, paranoid enough to believe that the timing for the detonation may have been intentional, considering the value the Auteur put on this troublesome Asian’s life.
The Sympathizer executes two ‘double agents’ after presenting evidence to the General to prove his usefulness as a faithful aid but their ghosts haunt him throughout the rest of the novel. When the General rounds up his army of former soldiers that served under him as part of an effort to retake their country back, Bon, who saw his wife and young son killed as they were attempting to board the plane out of Saigon, has nothing left to live for and is anxious to serve in the force. Despite the General’s (and his North Vietnamese handler’s) insistence that he is of much more use to the Movement (overt and covert) by staying behind in the U.S., he insists on accompanying the soldiers back to their homeland. He wants to save Bon’s life but he is aware of the paradox of betraying him while saving him. Both of their lives are spared but they end up as captives, where the Sympathizer is in a solitary cell, given pens and plenty of paper and instructed to write his confession. When the confession is rejected for lack of sincerity and the honest desire to be purged of his subversive inclinations, he is brought to a completely white room and subjected to psychological torture conducted by his other best friend, Man. The torture scenes have a similar effect to the relentless torture in ‘1984’, rendered with tedious monotony until the prisoner has lost all sense of self or identity that enabled him to function as an egoic being.
I bought the ebook version of this novel and highlighted almost every other paragraph of the first half of the book. There are so many quotable passages:
On America: ‘America, land of supermarkets and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of supercarriers and the Super Bowl! America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the quartet of the USSR. Although every country thought itself its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?’
On Hollywood movies made about the Vietnam War: ‘His arrogance marked something new in the world, for this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most efficient propaganda machine ever created (with all due respect to Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis, who never achieved global domination). Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or antihero than virtuous extra, so long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage.’
‘The Sympathizer’ is a brilliant espionage novel and a welcome change from the Americentric stories that have been told over the last half century to enable Americans to make narrative sense of a war that was waged and lost for a number of less than noble reasons. What is often lost in Vietnam War narratives is the perspective of the Vietnamese people themselves, including the ‘boat people’, of which Viet Thanh Nguyen is one, having come to the U.S. at the age of four. The nameless narrator’s perspective provides a unique vantage point from which to view the entire episode.
While it is masterful, it doesn’t quite reach universal classic/masterpiece status as one of the works to which it has been compared—Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, for example. There are a few narrative strands that are not satisfactorily resolved such as the narrator’s affair with the General’s daughter. While the narrator’s re-education by the Communists is questionable, his torturer is not as heartless as he would need to be in order to be an effective brainwasher. The sympathizer lives to occupy another story; hence, the sequel, ‘The Committed’, which I intend to read. ‘The Sympathizer’ is a great novel with a few flaws but definitely worth reading. Viet Thanh Nguyen is a brilliant writer.
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Top reviews from other countries
Ralph Blumenau
I was perplexed by the last fifth of the book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 3, 2018
dave
....was the author on bad drugs when he wrote this....Pulitzer?
Reviewed in Canada on January 10, 2021
Volker Jentsch
Nichts für zarte Seelen: Die verschiedenen Gesichter des Vietnam-Kriegs
Reviewed in Germany on December 1, 2017
Len
More Anthropological Study Than Well-Crafted Novel
Reviewed in Canada on September 29, 2015
