Blaise Zerega: Hello everyone and welcome to Alta Journal's California Book Club. It's a thrill to be here tonight for Pulitzer Prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, special guest Don McKellar, who co-showran and co-wrote the HBO Max miniseries The Sympathizer, and novelist Rumaan Alam, who also had a book adapted by the streaming service, Netflix.
And of course our host John Freeman, who is working the night shift this evening from London. My name is Blaise Zerega. I'm Alta Journal's editorial director. We're grateful for everyone's understanding and flexibility that allowed us to reschedule tonight's event from two weeks ago as we've confronted the devastating L.A. fires and other unforeseen circumstances.
Several people on the Alta team, our contributors, our readers and and of course the people of Los Angeles have been deeply affected. We're heartbroken for those who've lost loved ones, their homes and their jobs. Despite these circumstances, and perhaps even as a testament to the power of California literature, we've got a big crowd tonight.
We're really excited to get together with everyone, and I encourage folks please reach out in the chat and say where they're joining from. Maybe share some kind words of greeting too. I'm Zooming tonight from San Francisco and while you're doing that and getting to know one each other a little bit, I'm going to take care of some housekeeping.
Tonight's event is part of the California Book Club, Alta's free monthly gathering celebrating the Golden State's writers and writing. In the weeks leading up to each club meeting, altaonline.com publishes numerous articles about that month's pick. If you haven't had a chance to read them, I'd encourage you please to go go to our website and do so.
Check out the fantastic essays by our host John Freeman, editors Anita Felicelli and David Ulin, as well as an excerpt, a cocktail recipe. It's called a mango shrub, I think, and even a crossword. There's so much good stuff there. And all these articles are included in the California Book Club newsletter, which is also free.
We also have several other newsletters that you may want to sign up for. Trust me, you're going to love what we do. Also, fun fact, every California Book Club gathering is available on our site for free for watching. Go back and check them out.
We've been doing this for three years now. This club would not be possible without the amazing support of our partners. I'd like to thank the Los Angeles Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, the Huntington USC Institute on California and the West, Book Passage, Book Soup, Vroman's, Books Inc., Green Apple Books, Bookshop West Portal, Narrative Magazine, and please support our partners.
Visit these indie bookstores and buy some books. Buy a copy of The Sympathizer or another one of Viet's books. Pick one up for a friend. While you're at it, please think about supporting the work we do by becoming a member of Alta Journal—you can just visit altonline.com to sign up.
Tonight California Book Club members we have a special treat. Enjoy an exclusive 25% off discount on Alta's All Access subscription. You'll get award winning stories ad free digital access and a free altitude cartoon collection for just $37.50 a year. Plus we have another special offer for tonight's attendees. Show your love your California Book Club pride with our stylish tote bag.
Use the code "cbctote" at checkout and get 25% off this really great tote bag. It's really high quality, so please sign up tonight. And here's our current issue. You'll see it's a large form, an oversized beautiful publication. In this issue we've got an interview with Viet by David Ulin. Each quarter we highlight the upcoming CBC authors.
We also have a special Alta Folio by Rick Bass talking about when he he played semi-pro football at the age of 60. It's a pull out. It's beautiful and if you buy a from our site it's tax free and free shipping on magazines. There's also lots of other cool merch so please check it out. And again I'm so happy to everyone is here tonight. Let me introduce and turn this microphone over to tonight's California Book Club host John Freeman.
John Freeman: Thanks Blaise. Hello everybody. I hope everyone's well and safe and that your families are well and safe, wherever you are. When we started this book club four years ago, we were just trying to keep things going during another difficult time, but we also wanted to celebrate California literature. And more than that, we wanted to look at books which showed us new ways to tell stories.
Books that took broken narratives and came up with more complex and true narratives to what happened in the world. We wanted to find books that found new ways of experiencing beauty and relationships and love that played with genre. And we wanted to find books that also taught us how or showed us how to remember, to be true to how memory actually works.
And that is one of the key themes of the life and the work of Viet Thanh Nguyen, who is our guest tonight. He wrote in one of his books all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. And that's not something he's just thought about, it's something he's lived.
Born in 1971 in Vietnam, his family fled during after the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the US wound up in various parts of Pennsylvania and eventually San Jose, where he grew up. His parents ran a grocery store. He fell in love with writing early. He bounced around various universities and wound up at Berkeley.
We'll talk about this tonight, and it is an extraordinary thing to watch because from 2015 to this year, the last 10 years, he has published nine books, including the one we're going to talk about tonight, The Sympathizer, his debut novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, but also Nothing Ever Dies, which is an extraordinary nonfiction book about war and memory, about the war in Vietnam and how it's remembered by Americans and how it is experienced differently around the world.
He published a book of short stories called The Refugees. He published an anthology about writing by refugees called The Displaced. He published two children's books, Chicken of the Sea and Simone. He published a book that is like a memoir called A Man of Two Faces, a sequel to The Sympathizer called The Committed.
And this spring he's got a new book called To Save and Destroy: Writing as the Other, which is a series of lectures he gave at Harvard about Ralph Ellison and other figures in his life. And I think one of the things that Viet does in his work probably better than anyone alive is just turn optics around and look back at how stories are told.
Look back at how America tells stories about itself, and especially look back at how America tells stories about Vietnam. And the book that really launched that is the book novel we're talking about tonight, The Sympathizer, a narrative story by a man who's in prison, who's a double agent for the Viet Cong, who's come to America after the fall of Saigon to watch the Vietnamese refugees have come here, the South Vietnamese, to report on them.
But he is also reporting on America, and he's reporting on himself. It's one of the best novels, I think, of the last 25 years, for sure. It's one of those books, when you read it, like Beloved, like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, you will never forget having read it, and it will mess with the way you think in the best possible ways.
Please join me in welcoming Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: Hi. Thanks for that really incredible introduction. Such an honor to be here talking with you in front of all of the guests here tonight.
Freeman: Oh, it's really a pleasure to have you. And since we have you, plus Don McKellar and Rumaan Alam, I'm going to start talking. Just jump right in at the deep end with the title of this book, The Sympathizer. In Nothing Ever Dies, you wrote something along the lines of, sympathy is a dangerous thing.
It enables identification with others, but also the potential to consume others. And I wonder if you could talk about that in light of this novel and the character and what that danger means for him and what it means for the characters around him. Because the word sympathy to sympathize is not just used for the captain, the narrator, the sort of double agent.
It's used for many of the other people he meet, including women.
Nguyen: I mean, sympathy is such a complex emotion. And obviously for many of us, not all of us, but for many of us, we think sympathy is something positive and necessary. But there are limits to sympathy. I mean, it allows us access to other people's imagination and to other people's feelings, which is great for those of us who are writers and artists.
And it's obviously also necessary for doing things like taking political action. But sympathy itself is an emotion that's not necessarily an action. You could sympathize and yet not do anything, or you could sympathize and do something like be a writer or an artist and have access to other people's characters and so on, and yet still be a terrible human being.
So I wanted to use that idea of sympathy and get into the complexities and the contradictions of it, its necessity, but also its. Its limitations and its dangers, and embed those feelings in the character of someone who is literally a sympathizer and to show, you know, how that emotion drives him, but also puts him squarely in harm's way as well, both as someone who is going to commit crimes, but as someone who, because of his sympathy for the downtrodden and the oppressed, will find himself being targeted by others as well.
Freeman: What you describe is a very complex moral field. He's always making judgments about what's possible, who's doing what, what's at risk for him. But as the book goes along, he has this sort of tidal wave of regret and guilt to some degree, and it fans out in unexpected ways around him. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about your background, if you will, your moral upbringing and what instilled that in you.
What gave you the ability to feel those complexities as a storyteller. Because just because you can tell a story doesn't mean you can set a moral sphere in orbit the way that you have here.
Nguyen: I give all credit to the library, the public library, for giving me the opportunity to be steeped in stories and in feelings in that way, and getting in you. By immersing myself in those fictions that I was reading as a kid, I think I sort of. Sort of started to learn intuitively the demands of empathizing with characters.
But the other really important part of my life was my parents, who were very devout Catholics and raised me in a very devout Catholic environment. Sending me to Catholic school almost my entire life, making me go to Catholic church every weekend, sending me to Vietnamese Catholic Sunday school. And it didn't work in one way because I came out an atheist, but it worked in another way in the sense that I came out of that education and that upbringing with a really sincere conviction in the idea of social justice as I understood it in the biblical narratives that I was being taught.
And so that that sense of justice, of the necessity for taking care of the weaker, of empathizing with the losers and so on, that was a part of the biblical story that I took out of my experience. And I took the Bible for its word. I took my Jesuit priests. I took everybody else that I encountered who were Catholics.
I took them at their word. And so I think even if the practice of the Catholic Church has oftentimes been disastrous in regards to the poor and the downtrodden and the colonized, the spirit of it that I took away from it was really crucial for that. And I've tried to carry that. I think somehow that sense of justice has become embedded in me.
So that I'm naturally polemical. I'm naturally oriented to politics. You know, I went to Berkeley, and Berkeley offered this sort of secular version of the notion of social justice that really drew me in and instantly allowed me to take the religious part of my upbringing and turn it into a more secular, materialist, literary, cultural version of it.
Freeman: Well, this book is a confession. It begins with him sort of, you know, in these immortal lines. But as he goes, as the book goes along, each chapter sometimes interrupts and he's back at the confession. And of course it ends with him trying to give a confession again. And I felt, and this read is my third time through the book, that it is a very spiritual book.
It's a spy thriller, it's a war novel, it lambasts the makings of Vietnam War movies. But it also, there's a spiritual element that is often not talked about. And I wonder if you could, if there's anything you could say about that.
Nguyen: I mean, the book, I think work tries to take every element of itself and make it multi layered. So the sympathizer and sympathy has a couple of different dimensions. And then therefore, so does the dimension of belief in spirituality. I think the novel at one point says, or maybe I say it somewhere else, but Catholics and Communists are very similar.
They're both communities based on this uncompromising sense of belief and faith in something that people are willing to martyr themselves for and sacrifice themselves for. And so we're used to talking more about religion as a form of spirituality. But I also think of writing and politics as forms of spiritual faith as well done in different ways.
And so the idea of the confession really allowed me to, I think, bring all of that together because confession is obviously important in the Catholic tradition. Confession is important in the Marxist and Communist traditions as well. In both senses, you have to confess your sins, confess your failures in order to improve yourselves and prove yourself in the eyes of whoever is your mentor.
And then finally, the confession is a literary form. People have to write confessions, whether it's the Confessions of St. Augustine or the Confessions of re-education Camp prisoners or in some cases the Confessions of writers. So that notion of the confession really allowed me to touch on all these different forms of spirituality and regret.
That was part of your earlier question and I think just want to go back to that really quickly and say one of the other reasons why I wanted to write this was because I grew up in the 70s and 80s with this sense that my life had taken a particular direction because of my parents and their ability to escape from Vietnam.
But what if I'd been born earlier? What if we had not been able to leave Vietnam? How would I confront the political and moral choices that an earlier generation had had to confront as Vietnamese people had dealt with colonialism and the presence of the French and the Americans and had to make difficult Terrible choices.
Would I have been capable of making those choices? And if I had made those choices, what kinds of ambivalences and regrets would I have had, even if I felt that I had done the right thing? So the novel is really born from that, from my trying to answer those sets of questions for myself.
Freeman: Well, you really feel it when you're reading it. And you feel it especially. So as the book goes along and your main character gets lured into some actions that he really regrets immediately and is kind of haunted by in ways that echo some of the short stories you published before this book, ghosts appear.
But also he starts to get roped into a film project of making a film about the war in Vietnam. And he thinks maybe I can correct some. Maybe I can make good on my existence in the world by at least getting some better representations into this film. And it becomes this boondoggle of a sort.
And I wonder if you could read a little bit from the novel, because it's sort of this moment where you confront to some degree the myth making machine that you're writing against head on.
Nguyen: Sure. I mean, I grew up steeped in Hollywood movies in general, but also very specifically about the war in Vietnam. And I thought that writing this novel would be my opportunity to get revenge on Hollywood for everything it had done to Vietnam and the Vietnamese people and to myself as a young and confused spectator.
So I'm going to read a passage where our spy, our protagonist, is meeting this famous Hollywood director named only as the auteur for the first time. And they're going to discuss this Hollywood script that he has written called "The Hamlet," which is a movie that is sort of like Apocalypse Now, but it's also really mostly about all of Hollywood's Vietnam War movies.
And "The Hamlet" is about American Green Berets who are being sent to Vietnam to train the so called Montagnards to fight communists. My meeting with the auteur had gone on for a while longer, mostly in a more subdued fashion, with me pointing out that the lack of speaking parts for Vietnamese people in a movie set in Vietnam might be interpreted as cultural insensitivity.
Could you not even just have them speak a heavily accented English? I said, you know what I mean? Ching Chong English. Just to pretend they are speaking in an Asian language that somehow American audiences can strangely understand. The auteur grimaced and said, very interesting. Great stuff. Loved it. But I had a question.
What was it? Oh, yes. How many movies have you made? None. Isn't that right? None. Zero, Zilch, nada. Nothing and however you say it in your language. So thank you for telling me how to do my job. Now get the hell out of my house and come back after you've made a movie or two.
Maybe then I'll listen to one or two of your cheap ideas. He was amused by my wordlessness. To see me without words is like seeing one of those Egyptian felines without hair. A rare and not necessarily desirable occasion. How could I be so deluded? Hollywood did not just make horror movie monsters. It was its own horror movie monster smashing me under its foot.
I had failed, and the auteur would make the Hamlet as he intended, with my countrymen serving merely as raw material for an epic about white men saving good yellow people from bad yellow people. I pitied the French for their naivete in believing they had to visit a country in order to exploit it.
Hollywood was much more efficient imagining the countries it wanted to exploit. I was maddened by my helplessness before the auteur's imagination and machinations. 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, in this forthcoming Hollywood trompe l'oeil, all the Vietnamese of any side would come out poorly herded into the roles of the poor, the innocent, the evil, or the corrupt. Our fate was not to be merely mute. We were to be struck dumb.
Freeman: I love that section. And I want to bring on Don McKellar, the actor, playwright, filmmaker, and showrunner for the adaptation of The Sympathizer, which ran on HBO. The limited series. A man of bravery and style, and a profoundly amazing adaptation that you've made, but surely I'm going to let you take it away with Viet here.
Don McKellar: I'm smiling like this. I've never really seen Viet perform like that, and I'm amazed. If I'd seen him perform, I might have been more intimidated. I've never seen him play the parts before, but, that was fantastic.
Nguyen: Well, maybe you should have cast me in the TV series.
McKellar: I know we did cast you, but obviously a bigger part was required. Yeah, I mean, I love, I love that section.
Nguyen: So what was the most difficult part of adapting the novel into a series.
McKellar: I mean, I think my biggest. I mean, I love the book. I read it very quickly. I was thrilled by it. I found it really fresh. And yet at the same time, I really identified it, even though it's obviously very different from my experience. But. And it was full of incidents. Because I was reading it for adaptation.
I was thinking, it's full of big set pieces. It's full of comic set pieces, dramatic set pieces. So that was all there. The characters were great. But I think my biggest concern was. What also turned out to be your biggest concern when we met was the actual voice of the book, which is so distinctive in ways you've just been talking about.
And it's. And it's essential to the seductive power of the book that you. It draws you in. He's a bit of a raconteur, but as John was saying, over time, you start questioning his judgment and questioning his morality. That's a very hard thing to achieve with a visual medium. So that was my biggest concern.
Nguyen: Yeah, my biggest concern was just working within this gigantic machinery of Hollywood. I mean, making a movie of any kind, it's already a big enterprise because you're working with dozens of people. Hundreds. In our case, I think it was like 400 people all together at any one point. And then, of course.
McKellar: Yeah, I mean, that. I mean, that goes without saying that I did feel this is a challenging book. No matter what, and no matter what HBO says and. And what all our great producers say, it's going to be challenging in lots of ways. We wanted to keep the Vietnamese language in itself present and alive.
That was going to be a challenge, we knew. And, yeah, it was going to be a big diplomatic challenge, I knew, as a showrunner. So, of course, that was a big concern, too.
Nguyen: Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, I'm sure there was a lot of diplomacy being carried around inside the production. You're working with many, many different personalities and talents, and we had so many brilliant people working on it. But then, of course, there was also the diplomacy of just trying to get this thing made in the context of the politics of Vietnam, which was very, very complicated.
You know, we tried to shoot in Vietnam, but we couldn't do it. A number of complicated reasons. You know, like maybe the government would say, we were going to let you do it, but we just couldn't get around to it in time. And maybe from our perspective, they really were never going to let us shoot.
McKellar: Yes. In Vietnam, they might have been just stringing us along to keep anyone else from doing it. I mean, it's very complicated and you're right, when I said diplomacy I meant with, with our studio and with our producers. But that was head on diplomacy. We were talking with directly with the Vietnamese government and the censor bureau and the culture ministers and trying to pull strings and yeah, it was frankly very disappointed we couldn't shoot in Vietnam which is, you know, it would have been amazing just to actually use the real locations and it would have been much easier to cast and much easier in every level.
But, but as you know. But maybe the, the club members don't know. The book is very controversial over there. Apparently. I'm not allowed to say it's banned, but it's not publishable. Isn't that true?
Nguyen: Yeah, well, we've had a publishing arrangement since 2016, I believe, in Vietnam. And you know, the backstory behind that is, you know, that was arranged at the very highest levels because yeah, you know, I, I, I came to know the, the, the son in law of the Vietnamese prime minister who is a Vietnamese American.
That, that is a son in law. And that was where we initially got the, the publishing deal through those kind. Then the, the prime minister lost power in the next election. The whole new, the new regime in place since then has been much more hardline about things like opening up to.
McKellar: Yeah, they backtracked on a lot of cultural levels too. Yeah.
Nguyen: But we, I bought back the translation. So in fact we are going to publish the translation because the translation is good, isn't it? Like the translation is supposedly good. You know, the limit, the limitation is the contract says we can publish this Vietnamese translation everywhere except Vietnam. So you know.
McKellar: Well, and of course we weren't officially able to broadcast in Vietnam either, which is a shame because although everyone has seen it, everyone, every Vietnamese person I've talked to has seen it. So, and read the book. So it's a shame. But I mean I consoled myself by saying that really my one of my chief aims was to show it to America.
I mean I feel it's important show for America to see and, and the whole sort of hook, if I can be crass of the book and the show is to show Americans the side of the war they haven't seen and the side of the history that, that.
Nguyen: You know, I, I just don't know if Americans want to see it, you know, I mean, I mean. So for example, I, I just, I just spent a lot of time watching a Star wars series called Andor, which is actually really good series, you know. Right. But it's both Entertainment and it's actually about revolution, mechanics of revolution.
And you know, I think that people are willing to watch that because the politics are remote. You know, you can see it unfolding, it's remote. And you're not implicated. Because if, when I watch it, I'm thinking, oh, the empire is the United States and the UK and the west, it's. And the rebels are like basically people of color in the colonized.
Yes, you're watching it as American. You're like, oh, I'm part of the rebels. I'm identifying with that.
But when you watch "The Sympathizer," there's not that allowance, there's not that cushion of fantasy that's allowed for a western or white viewer. You know, you are the white people in the TV series and you are confronting a history that's not that far distant. And so I think that, you know, "The Sympathizer" is, as a TV series, my read of it is that it's still a challenging experience at the level of entertainment for a lot of people who don't want their entertainment to be too provocative.
McKellar: Yes. I mean, well, obviously it is. That edge is what makes it relevant and that is in one hand what makes it interesting and I think and provocative for people to take the challenge. But that's also off putting for people who don't. So I mean, it's a double edged sword. Yeah, I mean it is sadly relevant in lots of ways.
And when I, from when I started working on it, people would always call me up and say, oh, this is just like The Sympathizer, what's happening in the world, Or I withdraw from Afghanistan just like The Sympathizer. And it, you know, I always feel that after, when you read the history after the Vietnam War, there are all these articles and books saying this is a turning point in American foreign policy.
We have to remember the lessons of Vietnam War. And it didn't really stick. Those lessons.
Nguyen: Yeah, I think that's what's depressing. I mean, I'm teaching, I'm teaching my class on the American war in Vietnam in memory to students who were, I think, all born after nine, 11 actually. This is, we're now talking ancient history. You know, the end of the Vietnam War was 50 years ago.
So that, that means for, for someone like me, when I put that into context, I was born in 1971. That would be 1921. That's almost.
McKellar: Yeah, yeah. It's shocking.
Nguyen: I know, it's so shocking. And so the generation that grew up fighting in or witnessing or protesting against the Vietnam War. For them, it's a living history, but for the current generation, it's history. And I just can't help but feel that, in fact, many of the horrifying lessons that supposedly the west was supposed to take away from the war in Vietnam have been completely repurposed, contained, sanitized, so on, for the purposes of new global wars on the part of a renewed United States.
McKellar: And, well, as you know, America's very actively. The new project is. Is rewriting history again. So, I mean. Yeah, and I mean, I think the Vietnam War is also. It was really the first war with this cultural crux of popular culture. It was the most so documented and. And it was so tied up with American movies and.
And literature, I still think, more than any other war, which makes it even more alive and active in a certain way still. I think it's the. It's the one we reference.
Nguyen: Yeah. You know, I. But, you know, I just think the point needs to be driven home. So that's why I had to write a sequel called The Committed, That's. That goes to France in the 1980s to talk about French colonization and the Algerian war's legacy. And I'm about to leave very soon to go to El Salvador so that, you know, the third novel begins in El Salvador.
McKellar: Well, that was the first, kind of the next mistake.
Nguyen: Yeah. I saw. I came across a phrase I hadn't seen before. El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.
The pictures that I've seen are, you know, showing Salvadoran military people. They look like American soldiers in Vietnam. They're flying Huey helicopters or wearing American military uniforms. They're applying military American counterinsurgency tactics to Salvadoran peasants. And, you know, so for me, you know, the sympathizer was always going to be a part of this larger commentary about the centrality of war to the United States, but also to other countries.
And, you know, the. The challenge of that very depressing topic is also to make it entertaining at the same time.
McKellar: Yeah, yeah. That's what you do. That's your thing, I feel. I mean, on top of all that, the book is so, so entertaining. I mean, that's the other thing I wanted to capture in the show. And what I was so amazed about the book was just how entertaining, how funny it was, how lively it was.
And I can't really think of a book that is really a political book that has big ideas, but that are. That you will with such, you know, dexterity. And it's so fun. I mean, that's. That's what I feel your great gift is, in a way. So. So I look forward to the third, that's for sure.
Nguyen: Well, adaptation.
Freeman: Maybe there will be a second and a third series.
Nguyen: Yeah, we'll see.
Freeman: Don, thank you so much. It's really a treat to have you here. My pleasure. A lot of love and support for the series in the comment queue. And there's a lot of questions coming in for you, Viet, not just about the novel and the series, but, you know, given how much you've written about memory and Nothing ever dies, traveling around the world, going to Korean War memorials for the soldiers who fought in Vietnam and etc.
You know, you have an acute, very weighted sense of what memory means and how important it is and how it's glossed over. So dropping things from your own book in order to make a TV series must have been very hard. And that one question is just simply, you know, what. How closely does the series follow the book?
And I think another question there is just what was hard to give up?
Nguyen: Yeah. So, you know, Don and I broke down the book into seven episodes, although I told Don it should have been 10. You know, we get paid per episode. But anyway, it was seven. So Park Chan-wook and Don thought, no, it's going to be seven episodes. But I trusted the process. You know, I mean, I think Park Chan-wook, the other co-showrunner who directed half of the episodes, is a, you know, is an auteur.
He's brilliant. And I had to trust, you know, Don's genius and Director Park on this. So there were things that were being changed and being, you know, cut and cut and edited and so on. And I understand all that. As part of the creative adaptation and collaboration process, I'll send Don notes. And then Don would sort of politely, you know, say thank you for the notes.
And then, you know, not do all of them. But I think Don did do the things that were most important to me. So, you know, the opening of the Sympathizer TV series, there's a few words that are the preface because HBO wanted to say, what if she was worried people wouldn't know what the Vietnam War was?
And they were probably right. You know, like, again, the Vietnam War is ancient history. So I wrote the opening few words to the beginning of the series that people see, which are taken from my novel, from my book, Nothing Ever Dies. And then when I watched the very end of the show, I thought it was a great end.
And it's so poetic. But a word was missing from the, the end in the draft that I saw the, the visual cut, which was the word revolution. So I wrote Don a long email saying, I love this Don, but can we please put this sentence back that says revolution, like I'm a revolutionary still in search of a revolution.
And Don and Director Park got HBO to put that line in there. And so, you know, the whole nature of collaboration at this level, at this level is oftentimes about making compromises and hoping, hoping that the right compromise is made. And, and for me, I think those. I was satisfied with the changes.
Freeman: This is a great point to ask, a question from Maisie Horowitz, who says, do you think television has the power to revolutionize?
Nguyen: Does television have the. I mean, in as much as any other art form does? I mean, you can ask that question of literature too. And that goes back to the notion of sympathy that we, that we brought up earlier. Literature, tv, movies, they all have the power to move us, to instill in us revolutionary ideas.
By revolutionary ideas, I don't just mean like communism or something like that. There can be many kinds of revolutions that take place at the emotional and political level. But the issue would be, of course, what do we do with the feelings that are stirred up in us by the best of tv, movies, literature, stories, poetry and so on.
And that again is the problem of sympathy. Revolutions are born out of sympathy. But. But sympathy requires action in order to actually make a revolution happen. Then TV can't make us make, can't make us act. If anything, the actual form of TV encourages us not to act because we sit on the couch.
Freeman: Rana Saba Hackman, who says hello from Southern California. "I've been reading The Sympathizer to my 86 year old dad. We're Palestinian refugees multiple times over. We've had interesting discussions. I'm curious if, in the course of publishing
The Sympathizer and the sequel, which you've mentioned, The Committed, which takes place in Paris in the 1980s and involves the history of colonialization that Paris, that France inflicted on other parts of the world, including Vietnam, do you find that you have an endless amount of sort of fellow travelers that you didn't know about before?"
Nguyen: I think that's probably a true statement. And the reason why there's an endless amount of fellow travelers is that the colonialism has been endless. Western colonialism took over so much of the globe and did all kinds of terrible things that are specifically different from one country to the next, but have A lot of formal similarities, which is why during, you know, Israel's, in my opinion, genocidal war in Gaza that's been unfolding since October 7, there were so many connections and parallels I could draw between what happened in Vietnam and what was happening in Gaza.
And of course, there is a whole history of relationships between the revolutionaries in Vietnam and the Palestinian revolutionaries. And when we recognize that things like military warfare and colonialism are really usually global campaigns of global strategies, we can see that particular national situations are not isolated from each other. So it was. But, but, you know, the depth of our ignorance, or my ignorance is astonishing sometimes.
So, you know, I'm going to El Salvador and of course I'm going to El Salvador for the reasons I said, but also because I knew a little bit about what was going on in El Salvador, because I was reading magazines and newspapers when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s and heard these horror stories about US trained soldiers massacring peasants and Jesuits and nuns and so on.
But it wasn't until I started doing research that I discovered, well, after Jimmy Carter, you know, cut off aid to the Salvadoran military and government in the late 70s because of human rights abuses, Israel stepped in and supplied the weapons. Israel was supplying 83% of El Salvador's weapons in a partnership with the United States.
So that's where the, the, the, the. The necessity for solidarity and, and discovering fellow fellow sympathizers is really, really crucial. There's so many connections that many of us are not aware of, but they exist.
Freeman: One of the comments right now is, "I thank you for writing The Sympathizer. It's the history of my colonized Puerto Rico." This is from Alvida Sofia, Anaya Allegria. I think now, speaking of sympathies, I want to bring on another novelist who probably can talk to you about not just this book, but the experience of having a book adapted.
Who is Rumaan Alam, who has been waiting patiently in the wings before the most beautiful painting, who's also. Many of you will know him as a critic and is the author of five novels, including Leave the World Behind, which was up for the National Book Award a couple years ago, and may you always be up for the National Book Award because it's great to see you.
You. Why don't you take it away and ask Viet here?
Rumaan Alam: Yeah, well, I do sometimes work as a critic and I had the opportunity to write about The Committed when it was published for the New York Review of Books. And to my great surprise, that magazine had not reviewed The Sympathizer. And it was sort of impossible to talk about The Committed without talking about the novel that preceded it.
And so I tried to kind of talk about both of those books in my review. It's very daunting to face the subject of two books that you've reviewed, even on a friendly Zoom. Although my review. I don't think of reviews as sort of like buyer's guides, but I think my review makes it clear how highly I think of both of those books.
Hearing you talk about television, about poetry, knowing, as John recited, you've published so many so widely in the past decades. But I wonder whether the novel doesn't occupy primacy for you because you've turned out these two significant novels. And one of the points that I made in my review is that it struck me that The Sympathizer and The Committed are very much in conversation with some of the biggest texts in the American canon, with Catch 22, with The Invisible Man, and even to a lesser extent, but I think it's still salient, The Crying of Lot 49. So I wonder whether, what's your feeling about the novel as a form and what its potential is artistically?
Nguyen: Absolutely right. You know, I think the novel has always preoccupied me, although I initially wanted to be a poet. You know, when I was a kid, I was like. I was seduced by poetry. I love the rhythms and the feel of poetry. And then, you know, I just didn't have the talent for it.
But the novel was the big thing. And that's almost a very 19th century idea that the novel is the big thing, but that certainly I spent so much time reading novels and understanding novels intuitively as a younger person, and I've gravitated to it. And, you know, maybe this would be true for you, too.
But novels are my natural form. I don't know how to explain that. But, you know, I can't write poetry. I can write short stories, but they make me miserable. And I have tremendous fun writing novels, despite the pain. So that's the form. But I don't know if I could have been the novelist that I am without also writing a bunch of other stuff.
Some of the things that John brought up, my nonfiction, my scholarship, the memoirs and so on, they've allowed me to engage with some of the writers and thinkers that you have mentioned, and they've allowed me to think through my relationship to literature, to politics, to aesthetics, to my identity, to the. To the history of the United States and so on.
So, you know, I would certainly like to Write more novels. But would I want to write as many novels as Philip Roth? And the answer is probably no. You know, it's like you. I don't know what your eye is towards posterity, but, you know, I think any of us would be lucky to be remembered for one or two or three novels in the long run.
And so the odds are, If I write 10 novels, maybe one or two or three might be remembered. Writing 30 is not going to help me that much more. But writing a bunch of other things that helped me write 10 better novels, I think that's been the project for me. And so that's why I think I like to call myself a writer more than I call myself a novelist, because it's the writing that comes first, the novelist part that comes second.
Alam: But you are very adept at the form. And as Don had pointed out, one of the most extraordinary things to me about. About The Sympathizer and The Committed are their sense of humor, their sense of play, their sense of fun. If you were. If I were working as a bookseller and sort of trying to hand this book to someone and say, like, okay, here's a great book about the conflict in Vietnam, like, I don't know if that is a good sales pitch, and I don't know if that really explains this sort of texture or feeling of being inside these novels, which is so funny and so vibrant and so just so alive. And hearing you talk before, it struck me as one of the kind of funny ironies of. Of colonialism itself as. As a project that you, this Vietnamese kid, ended up kind of mastering a form inherited from Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth. Like, it's kind of, like, funny that you've taken that as your.
As your tool to talk about the nation that is your home.
Nguyen: Sure. I felt that, you know, the novel. I mean, I felt that literature was my way of belonging to the United States, and literature was my way of. For me to explore myself, but also my relationship both to this country and to Vietnam, where I came from. Both of these are very complicated kinds of relationships.
But if you look at these writers, some of the ones that you mentioned, you know, they. They've used the novel at precisely as their way of exploring themselves, their fictional personas, but also the very idea of belonging. Belonging to the nation, to the culture, but then also to literature as a whole. And to me, that was always a more powerful form of belonging than national citizenship.
I mean, national citizenship has always been, you know, I mean, I've always had ambivalent feelings about it. And the older I get and the more kinds of crimes that I see the United States has committed both in the past but in the present, the less enthused I am about this whole idea of nation, state, belonging and citizenship, but belonging to literature, belonging to art, belonging to my community of fellow writers and readers.
That to me is enormously powerful. And that can never be a bad relationship. But the, the relationship to a nation, the relationship of one's citizenship to inherently compromised political efforts and mythologies and so on, that's. That's something that I'm much more willing to renounce now than I was in the past.
Alam: Don mentioned the sort of imperative of, of maintaining voice. Like there's such a powerful sense of voice in the sympathizer and in the committed. I wonder whether it's a challenge for you artistically to maintain an intimate relationship with that established voice as you head back into the third volume of that. Of that larger work, or whether it's a voice you feel total command over, or whether it will change as you write the next volume.
Nguyen: Yeah. I don't want to give away too much about the third novel, but, you know, it is hard to live with this character for as long as I have. He's a very. I remember my agent, when he first read the first draft, he said, this guy's not a very likable character, is he?
And my reaction was, I like him, you know, but there's that tension, you know, he. He is a complicated person. He's very, very intense. But I do like him. But I, I am also aware of, you know, the fact that, that the logic of his narrative drives him towards conclusions that will make it hard for me to stay in his voice for all the way through the entire trilogy.
So I'm thinking through formal, structural ways of dealing with this. And again, I don't want to give away what I'm. What I'm thinking about, but that's, you know as a writer, I, you know, once I commit to. Once I commit to a form, the form holds true. Once it's. I'm in a first person narrative, I can't get out of the first person narrative.
And so that's why some people read The Sympathizer and they're like, oh, I. I don't like this guy because he's misogynist or he's sexist or whatever. And I'm like, you're absolutely right, but I'm committed. So we have to see him through. And in order to see him through, that's why I felt one of the reasons why I wanted to write two sequels to grapple with his complications and contradictions in ways that were formally justified.
It wouldn't have been true in the first novel for me to step out of character and say, yes, I'm sorry, he's a misogynist, but his misogyny is a part of him and a part of the politics of. Of. Of war and colonization and revolution that I would. I needed three whole novels to work through.
So that is tied into the question of his voice. How do I be true to his voice, but also, by the end of the third novel, subvert it as well. Hey, I want to talk to you, though, you know, I. We've never talked about your adaptation for Netflix of Leave the World Behind, which is, you know, a brilliant novel which had me ripped from beginning to end.
I don't know what was your experience working on that adaptation?
Alam: I think you sort of said something along these lines when you and Don were speaking, but it's a bit like you do have to cede the control. Like, you. You. You maintain authorial control in the text of the novel. Like, you know, you're dealing with your agent, you're dealing with your editor. You're making concessions or adjustments based on their feedback.
But it's about shaping a book. But what someone like dawn is doing is shaping something altogether different. And, you know, the experience of reading a book, and especially a book like The Sympathizer and The Committed, like, the voice is so intimate and so present in a way that a visual medium could never accomplish and Leave the World Behind works very similarly.
There's an authorial voice that is impossible to translate onto screen. I trusted Sam Esmail, who did the film. It sounds like you had a similar. Happily, a similar experience of trust with the creative collaborators and understood that Sam's respect for the book was sort of his guiding star and that he was going to make a film because that's what he does, but he was going to do it in service of capturing the atmosphere of the book.
And I tried to just sort of. Of trust in that, you know, and I'm happy with it. And now at this point, it feels very removed for me. It feels like something that happened to me that happened around my work, but is not my work, you know, And I wonder if you feel that same.
Like, I feel an intimate relationship to it, but a distant one as well.
Nguyen: Yeah, that was pretty much what I was going to ask you about. Like, you know, does the. The fact that you have a TV series or we have TV series. Do they now displace the books that we. That we wrote, or are they separate creations altogether? It's very hard for me because, you know, I know some writers, you know, sell their books and then they have nothing to do with the project.
And so in some ways they can treat the. The TV series or the movie as something completely different. But I was very involved in the project because I really did believe that, you know, TV is such a powerful medium, maybe not quite revolutionary, as one of the audience members asked, but still, you know, something that harnesses the power of capitalism and commodification and global circuitry to exploit sports stories so.
So broadly. But one of the paradoxes or that that have been really interesting to me is just encountering so many people who have said, well, you know what? You know, we really love literature. The book still comes first. And that was actually affirming for me in some ways. Of course, there are other people, including people in the book world who are like, wow, your book's now a TV series.
Like, they got all excited about it and they weren't as excited about the novel when the novel came out. So those contradictions are. Are uneven. I don't know if you felt that way when you're. Yeah.
Alam: And it's not your responsibility necessarily to do the hard sell of getting the book into the hands of every reader. And I think about the reader that I was when I was young and I didn't know anything, and so I had watched James Ivory's adaptation of Howards End, and then I went to the library and I got Howards End and I read the book and I was like, oh, this book is better.
It's a great movie, but the book is better. And so this there. Books don't expire, you know, they don't fall off of streaming platforms. They're always there in the library. As long as this country maintains libraries, which is an open question, but they're always ready to kind of receive you. And, you know, people come into adulthood constantly.
And so there are readers who are old enough now to read The Sympathizer, who would have been kids when you were writing it. And that is sort of an extraordinary thing. And I just think that's. For me, books have that primacy. You know, I love films, I love movies, but books are where I live.
Nguyen: You mean, you brought the idea that they will always be streaming these TV series. And now I think maybe not.
Work has happened. And so we are in really a new world where we can't even depend on these things happening anymore. So, for example, one thing that I assume which is apparently not true is that a TV series will always have a bigger impact than a book. I mean, I've gone around saying, oh, even a bad TV series will be watched by millions of people and a good book might be read by, if we're lucky, hundreds of thousands of people.
But now there's so much digital content out there that it's actually easy for TV series to be sort of lost and overwhelmed. And so, yeah, it's a different world than it was when I was watching TV in the 70s and 80s when everybody was watching TV. Yeah, yeah. And now, yeah, when there were three channels, it was a completely different situation. You know, Everybody was watching "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, their family. It's not like that anymore. But I do think that is one of the principal attractions of the book. You know, we're still talking about Joseph Heller and Philip Roth, you know, and we'll probably talk about you.
Freeman: Rumaan, it's so great to see you. Thank you for coming on.
Alam: Thank you.
Freeman: There's a lot of questions piling in Viet. I'm going to try to get to them as rapidly as possible as, as Don, maybe you can jump into because some of these do address the series as well. But there's a couple questions about specific books and how you see yourself. One is have you read a book called The Conformist?
The book spoke more to the evolution of fascism and pre war Italy and I saw parallels to your protagonist bundled with that. I'll also ask someone is asking how you see yourself. Your books alongside fiction depicting wars, colonial wars in Indochina, such as Tim O'Brien.
Nguyen: And others, you know, ironically, sadly, I've watched "The Conformist." That was a Bertolucci movie, I believe it's a brilliant movie, but I did not read the book. So now I have to go. Now you caught me. So now I have to go. Go read that. But yeah, I think that, you know, anybody who's lived under these regimes of authoritarianism or counter revolution, counterinsurgency, there's a lot of similarities. Anybody who's lived under experiences of colonialism there will find similarities. So one of the most affirming things for me is to get messages from people from very different places, you know, saying, oh, I'm from Afghanistan or I'm from Pakistan or wherever.
And this book spoke to me in some way or another because of these parallel colonial kinds of Histories or moments of revolution and encounter revolution. I'm sorry, what was the second part of the. What was the second book that was.
Freeman: Someone was asking about Tim O'Brien and how you. Your novel alongside the novels about war.
Nguyen: And I teach Tim. I'm teaching Tim O'Brien the things they carried right now. You know, and, you know, my thing about this is that the. The Vietnam War for Americans was really interesting from a literary point of view because so much literature was produced out of this war. It's a very literary war, and we should be reading that literature.
But I just. It irks me when people come up with lists of the great Vietnam War novels, and they're all by. By white American soldiers, excluding, you know, Bao Ninh's the Sorrow of War, for example, from the North Vietnamese perspective, or Yung Tu Hung's Novel Without A Name from the North Vietnamese perspective, or any number of Vietnamese, American, or French Vietnamese works.
So all four reading Tim O'Brien and Michael her and all these other really canonical American writers about the war, but you definitely have to start including Vietnamese, Lao, Hmong, and Cambodian writers as well.
Freeman: Yeah. I cannot recommend this book enough. I think it's. If you were looking for a wider range of references of how the war in Vietnam was experienced, how it's remembered, how it's passed through time, been written into books and made into films outside of the U.S. i don't think there's anything even close to like it.
And I was curious, when you were making this series, if there were tropes of films about the war in Vietnam that you thought, I am gonna. I'm not gonna fall into that, or I'm gonna avoid that, or I'm gonna subvert that. That weren't already in Viet's book.
McKellar: Yeah, well, of course. Because. Because as I'm making a TV show, and as you saw, the book explicitly references, is the big section about this sort of movie, this sort of Apocalypse Now, like, movie movie that I. I couldn't avoid. All those sort of. All that material I played with our writers room.
I think one of the first things we did kind of as a bonding experience was played Heaven's Gate. And, you know, I looked through all that stuff and read all the books. It's impossible not to. I mean, I think that that's one of the really fun things about the book, that it effortlessly makes these references to other books and movies, and sometimes you don't even recognize it until you're thinking about it for a while.
Say, oh, yeah, that's just like something else. So, yeah, I'm sure that was a lot of the fun.
Freeman: One of the questions that had been lingering around is about Robert Downey Jr. Playing three characters. And yet that, to me, it seemed like the most amazing joke about how many films treat non white actors as sort of interchangeable. Don, do you want to talk a little bit about that decision to cast him for all three?
McKellar: Yeah, it's a big idea. I mean, as I said at the beginning, one of the things I was worried about was capturing the voice of the book. And I didn't want it just to be in the voiceover, like literally quoting the words from the book. I wanted to be in the style itself.
I wanted it to be in the form of the TV show. And that meant this kind of. Of visual wit and this sort of playfulness that I think that the book has. So we were talking about that Park Chan Wook and myself, and one day he said, what do you think if I had this idea, what if all these white patriarchal characters, because we've been talking about how they're these recurrent father figures who are all these sort of paternal mentor characters who all also lead them astray.
And we didn't want it to be repetitive and we wanted to be thematically unified like it is in the book. And he said, what if they were all played by the same actor, like Dr. Strange Love with Peter Sellers and Dr. Strange Love. And I immediately loved it. We thought it was a really cool idea because it had a kind of cheekiness that I think the book has.
We asked Viet. We were very worried what he was going to say, and he liked it right away, which is. And yeah, so it plays two ways, I think it. It sort of makes it more subjective in a way, because you think of them all as the same character reacting to the hero.
But it also is, like you say, a bit of a flip on the joke about all these Asian characters looking the same in American movies and the sort of interchangeability of the Asian characters. We thought, why don't we do that with the white characters and make Rob Robert Downey Jr. A supporting role?
So that was the motivation.
Freeman: It's incredible to hear this from behind the scenes. There's a great comment, Viet, from someone named Kyle Freudenberger. Freudenberg, who says, my mother was born in 1962 in Saigon, the daughter of an American serviceman and my Vietnamese grandmother. I always got the impression, given her trepidation to talk about her brief years in Vietnam, that she faced discrimination based on her Mixed parentage.
Is this something you've observed as it was a point of contention for your protagonist? And do you feel like the protagonist's dedication to anti imperialism and colonialism was a way for him to compensate for this?
Nguyen: Absolutely. I mean, I'm well aware of the fact that there are many mixed race people in Vietnam because of the consequences of colonization and then the, the American presence there. And they were as a whole treated very badly, but they were treated much worse if they were dissen of black fathers versus white fathers.
But regardless whether you were Eurasian, Amerasian and who your father was, you faced discrimination and racism in general. And I wanted to write a novel in which my character was mixed race because I knew so many mixed race Asian Americans when I was in university and they all shared very similar kinds of stories about how out of place they felt no matter where they happened to be.
And I wanted to use a mixed race character also to prevent people from reading this book and identifying purely with the narrator. I did not want Vietnamese people to read this book and say, finally, a novel about Vietnamese people. I was like, yeah, it is about a Vietnamese person, but he's a mixed race Vietnamese person.
And bringing that up allows me to point out that racism is coming not only from the French and the Americans, but from within the Vietnamese people themselves. And you know, that point was really, really crucial to me. And, and it's, it goes completely over the heads of almost all of every Vietnamese reader who has ever talked to me.
Like very few Vietnamese readers will bring up, oh, he's a mixed race character, whereas mixed race readers will always bring it up to me. And again, one of the things that I find really, you know, moving for me is like how there's never been a mixed race reader who's come up to me or sent me a message and said, you got it wrong.
They've always said, you get it right. And, and I thought that was so. That was so crucial, you know, for me, going back to the question of sympathy, to be able to try to see from this point of mixed race view in order to destabilize so many inherent notions about what racial identity is and who we are.
Freeman: I have a question here from Annabel Chang that will relate to some degree to what something Don has already said. But Rumaan, you might be able to weigh in, since both of you are novelists and you're dealing with weighty themes, dualities within identities, the flattening of identity through cultural products such as movies, and the way that storytelling, whilst being exported, can sometimes reiterate those things or it can subvert them.
And yet you also want to entertain. And Annabel Chang says, I read an interview that when coming up with the idea for The Sympathizer, you knew the book would be serious, political and literary, but you also wanted it to be entertaining and reach a wide audience. How do you balance the two? And what were the hardest and most important parts to balance?
And, Rumaan, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
Alam: Well, I mean, I can start by talking about Viet's books, actually, because I think that part of. Again, when I was speaking earlier with my critic hat on, I really marveled at his. At the authorial relationship to the extant literature and the ways in which he was having a good time. You can read a Graham Green book.
Like, the reason Graham Greene's books are so good is because they are spy novels. So those are fun to read when you're at the beach. And only as you get into it that you start to think, well, oh, this book is actually about, like, the Catholicism and all of this other stuff, and it's hidden in this form of the spy novel, which is the thing you want to read when you're at the beach.
And that is what I think The Committed and The Sympathizer do so well, is that they. They do not neglect the imperative to entertain, which should be something we ask of the novel. And actually, I think far too, novelists provide it in terms of a sense of humor and a sense of play and a sense of fun.
I don't think that means. Or I don't think that demeans the ability to talk about something important. If you have like a body joke or a sex scene. It doesn't mean that the book, book, the text is not serious about its themes or its interests. I think it's acknowledging the sort of demands of the novel as a form that you're dealing with a reader and their attention, and you want to keep them going.
You want to provide them a sense of story.
Nguyen: Yeah, absolutely. And I grew up reading Graham Greene novels as a kid, you know, so reading Our man in Havana and the Power and the Glory and so on. And so I already had the sense that spy novels could be serious and entertaining at the same time. And then I got my hands on Catch 22, which we mentioned a couple of times, and I was like, oh, this.
This is like, very, very, very funny. And I was a teenager when I read it, and also has something really important to say as well. So that was sort of the benchmark for me is this idea that literature could do all these things simultaneously and we shouldn't give up on that hope, you know.
And, you know, I think maybe too many writers and Roman's sort of gesturing that maybe have given up a little bit on this, this idea that we can be serious and weighty and have all the complex, complex thematics, but we can also be really, you know, crude and oriented towards entertainment and make jokes and engage in violence and all these kinds of things.
And it's fun to write. I mean, it was fun for me to write these kinds of scenarios in the book. I think in your, maybe your review, John, of my book, you said that there's a lot of well done violence in the novels. And yeah, I had such a blast killing people as I was writing.
And you know, the corollary to that in the TV series is watching people get blown up on set. I wanted to get blown up on set. You know, I told Don, I want to be blown up, I want to. But Don said, no, it's too undignified for the writer to be killed on set.
McKellar: That I always think that in the show is something we tried to capture is that the Captain's sort of impulse to be entertaining when he is writing to be his stylistic flourishes are kind of what, what. What keep him. His. His bulwark against totalitarianism was keeps it fights against the sort of. This sort of doctrinaire binary fight that's going around all, all around.
And so it's kind of his. It's kind of what keeps him alive in a way at the end. That's what I said to our actor a couple of times.
Freeman: I want to ask you one question about voice, Viet and you know, because I think Don Don's and Park Chan-wook's series really captures the voice of the book. And I was really kind of almost fell out of my chair when I heard that you had studied with Maxine Hong Kingston. Because I thought, of course, but I think people don't make the connection as much between your writing and what you care about and Voice, because I think one thing you really have in common with Maxine Hong Kingston is the way that she uses voice and the way she assembles a voice in front of you on the page.
And I wonder if it's kind of remarkable to look at your history as an academic and you started at USC in 1997 and then 18 years later your first novel comes out and you had two academic books. And so this, when your first novel comes out, it's like this voice comes out fully developed, it's funny, it's ribbled, it's wise, it's smart.
And you've talked in other places about making sure that your character could be the kind of person that says the kind of things, things that you want him to say. But what is it, do you think, that makes a voice? And what did you learn from Maxine Hong Kingston, if you learned anything about voicemaking?
Nguyen: Voice is a very mysterious concept, right? I mean, a lot of writers talk about voice and finding one's voice and, but no one can really teach it. That's, that's the problem. And so when I was in Maxine's class as a 19 year old, I was certainly trying to find my voice. But I don't think I can only speak about my own experience.
You know, I don't think I could have found my voice without both a sense of discipline and maturity. And maturity can only be acquired through experience and discipline can only be carried out over time. And so, you know, reading Maxine's work, she published the Woman Warrior when she was relatively young. I think she was in her 30s.
But the voice in that book feels totally natural. It is Maxine Hong Kingston, but it's also this Persona named Maxine. And it's a very magical moment when a writer can find their voice and their voice can carry them through. And for me, the voice seems to be an expression of one's own conviction, one's own character, one sense of aesthetics, one's view of the world.
And every writer will find their own voice at some undetermined time. In my case, it just took decades and decades. So theoretically I understood what the voice, voice was supposed to be. But like you said, it took 18 years from starting as a professor to being able to write that book. And the only way to, to really do that was to keep on writing.
Other writers might find their voice in some other way, but, and maybe, Roman, you can talk about how you found your voice, but for me, it was just like writing, writing, writing and finding, getting, getting rid of all the things that weren't me and looking into myself and looking deeper into my own own emotions.
And that's a scary, I found that to be a very scary thing to do. So the writing part, the discipline of writing was really hard, but looking into myself was even harder.
Alam: It's a problem with the sort of cultural preoccupation of being young and an imperative to feel like you have to begin young and dazzle when you are young. But as you say, it takes time and it takes discipline and it takes exposure. For me, less in terms of writing, but in terms of reading.
You have to have a relationship to the literature that precedes all of us and understand what you respond to and what you can leave behind, what's not of interest to you or what's not salient to what you want to pursue. And as you say, I don't think there's a shortcut to that. I don't think it's that it can't be taught.
I think it can be sort of. You can be apprenticed to that process. I just think it takes a really long time.
Freeman: Don, in something like tv, where there is a main character who has a voice, who's giving a confession, it seems like there are two voices. There's the Captain, his speaking voice, and then there's the camera, which is a voice in and of itself. And I wonder how you worked in making sure that they weren't sort of fighting each other.
McKellar: Well, that's why I said that we really wanted the. His voice is not just his literal voice, but is. His voice embodies the style. That's why we wanted to show early on that he's capable of controlling the chronology and manipulating what's happening. We're literally seeing it through his eyes, even though, no, it's not point of view in the traditional sense.
So one of the reasons I was excited about this series was that Park Chan-wook, the director, such a brilliant stylist that I thought he could create a style of visual style or a voice similar to the Captain's. So, to me, we worked as hard as we could to keep them together, to make them, to make it clear that we're seeing it through this point of view.
And the. Having Robert Downey Jr play multiple parts was one of. One of the little clues to that that were kind of. That sort of becomes. I don't want to give away for those who haven't seen the series, but it's sort of. It's a sign that this is all quite subjective. So that.
I mean, it was one of the big discussions. We talked about it an awful lot, but that was what we were shooting for.
Freeman: The only other place I'd seen that recently was in David, the adaptation of David Mitchell's novel that the Wachowskis did. God, I'm forgetting Hugh Grant played like four characters.
Nguyen: Yeah.
McKellar: In what is that, Cloudless. Yeah.
Freeman: I'm afraid we're running out of time, so I might have to ask one last question here. And it comes from Anna Sharp, which I don't think gives away too much of what you're going to do next yet with the new novel. But she asks, as you write the final installment, how do you try to incorporate the captain's psychological development as a middle aged man, especially leading a fulfilling life versus stagnation, or not focused on what other people think and having a strong sense of who he is while he's also going ever more deeper into a moral morass, I guess, if you will.
Nguyen: Sounds like my autobiography, bad choices and limitations. You know, it goes back to this idea that earlier I said, you know, once, once a form has been established, you have to follow it. Once you have a point of view and once you've created a character, you have to follow it. So I mean, now there's, now that we have two novels with this, with our captain and, and you know, I've inhabited him.
He's, he's, he's got a psychology, he's got a history, he's the history of action as well. And he has to do. What he's going to do is going to be very, I think, logical to his own development. And so in some ways I, he's. I, in some ways I think, you know, the third novel is already predetermined in terms of his fate, what's going to, what he's going to do and what's going to happen to him.
I just have to be able and willing to follow him along no matter how terrible that, that fate might be. But that's not the novel itself. I mean, the novel itself, you know, how I choose to narrate the novel, if other voices come in, the structure of it, that, that's different. But the, I think the character has to, as in a Greek tragedy, meet us, meet his destiny.
Freeman: Well, I'm so grateful that your, you, fate and destiny brought you to be with us tonight. We've been wanting to get you onto the show for a long time and we actually thought about waiting for the third book and then we thought, no, we can't wait, this is too good. There's a, there's a series out.
Don, it's very kind of you to join us. And you too, Rumaan.
McKellar: Absolute pleasure.
Freeman: Absolutely wonderful. If you've been watching and listening, some of the books we've mentioned are The Committed, which is the sequel to The Sympathizer, A Man of Two Faces, which is a memorial, a history and memoir, Viet's stories, The Refugees, Nothing Ever Dies, and of course The Sympathizer, and if anyone else has Chicken of the Sea and Simone, I think you are winners of the Viet Nguyen bingo night. Blaise, I think you're lingering around out there to tell people where to go to maybe download the YouTube clip and maybe get a bag.
Zerega: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, thank you. Thank you so much for tonight. Viet, Rumaan, Don, John; just extraordinary. I mean it's already what, 6:15? We've gone way over. But gosh, we could hear this forever. So, so, so great. A lot of people have been asking. Yes, tonight's program is being recorded.
It will be posted very late or first thing in the morning. Come back to altonline.com to watch. Watch it. We'll also send out an email to everybody with links to things that were discussed, all the different books and so forth. So watch for that. Please be sure to mark your calendars for February 20th.
That's next month when we'll be hosting Manuel Munoz with The Consequences. So look forward to that. And to close out again, thank you so much everyone for joining us tonight. We'd really be honored if you consider becoming a member of Alta Journal. You'll get our award winning quarterly and years worth of laughs.
This is Altatude. It's really a great cartoon collection. Back page of every issue has cartoons. Or check out of course, our fabulous tote bag. There's all kinds of discount codes for California Book Club members. So watch your email for that. And then finally, would be grateful if you would participate in a one minute survey that's going to pop up as soon as this program ends.
So if you could give us some feedback, we'd appreciate it and look forward to seeing you in, in February. Stay safe and, and thanks everybody. Have a nice evening.•
