Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel, The Sympathizer, can be read as a thriller. It can be read as a war novel as well. We might even choose to encounter it as a satire; certainly, the set piece recounting the unnamed narrator’s experience working on a movie that bears an uncanny resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is a hilarious send-up of the ways Asian performers and subjects have been treated by Hollywood.
“Let’s see,” an actor confides during the filming, “I’ve been beaten to death with brass knuckles by Robert Mitchum, knifed in the back by Ernest Borgnine, shot in the head by Frank Sinatra, strangled by James Coburn, hanged by a character actor you don’t know, thrown off a skyscraper by another one, pushed out the window of a Zeppelin, and stuffed in a bag of laundry and dropped in the Hudson River.”
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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Such absurdity offers a potent comic filter, but it is the blurring of reality into fiction that is the main idea. The Sympathizer, after all, is a book with an agenda: “a novel,” Nguyen has acknowledged, “about a communist revolutionary who becomes disabused of the communist revolution, but who isn’t ready to just become a capitalist.” To that end, Nguyen frames The Sympathizer as a confession, written to the commandant of a Vietnamese reeducation camp and recapitulating the events that have led to the narrator’s imprisonment.
“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man with two faces,” he begins the novel. He is writing both literally and figuratively. His narrator is a North Vietnamese double agent, embedded in Southern California’s South Vietnamese refugee community, where he landed after escaping Saigon during the exodus of April 1975, when the fiction of the United States’ commitment to its Southeast Asian allies was revealed to have been a lie.
The genius of the novel is how it turns the predominant U.S. narrative of the Vietnam War, or the American War, in Nguyen’s telling, on its head. Nguyen has no interest in official stories. Instead, he seeks to investigate the effects of power on his characters. Hence, the device of the confession, since confessions—or political ones—are almost always coerced. Hence, the narrator’s role as a double agent, which renders him stateless: a cipher, if you will. Through his eyes, we see the hypocrisies of the U.S. and its corrupted proxies, of the Communists and the non-Communists. “A spy’s task,” the narrator insists, “is not to hide himself where no one can see him, since he will not be able to see anything himself. A spy’s task is to hide where everyone can see him and where he can see everything.”
Something similar is true of the novelist, who must be everywhere and nowhere at once. In The Sympathizer, Nguyen channels this duality, subverting both our expectations and everything we thought we knew.•
Join us on January 28 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Nguyen will sit down with CBC host John Freeman to discuss The Sympathizer. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
