The Next-to-Last Page: October 2021

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am reading this for the third or maybe fourth time, this time preparing to teach it for the first time.

I don’t have much to add other than that it remains for me, possibly alongside Marilynne Robinson’s, the best American novel I know of from the 21st Century. Yeah, there’s a lot I haven’t read, but I think I’ve read my share, especially of the books touted as among the best. I cannot recommend this more highly. It is, as far as I can tell, as good as fiction gets.

I remain staggered by the clever dimensions in which Nguyen explores his opening theme of double-ness. Our unnamed narrator is a “man of two minds,” but he is split in many different ways. He is a double-agent. He is a child of mixed ancestry. He comes from a split nation, Vietnam. He splits his loyalty as a sympathizer for the North but an apparent apparatchik to the South. He is Vietnamese in America. And, later, he is American in Vietnam. He is an obedient son to a mother who cannot help him, and he is a traitorous son (in multiple ways) to the General and father-figure who can.

All of that I remembered from my earlier readings, in particular the tour-de-force ending where he is called upon to see the duplicity of the language of the revolution. In that climax, he has to recognize that “nothing is more precious than independence and freedom” is both the cliched literalism of a revolution that’s devolved from its true aspirations and, simultaneously, the recognition that “nothing,” – the failure of that revolution – has become more important than its abstract promises.

I find two things fresh this time, and I expect I’ll find more in future readings.

First, I am struck by the instances here where the stability of the narrator’s double-ness gets disrupted by a third element. That comes when he tries to balance the peculiar blood-brother bond he has with Man and Bon, friends from different sides of the war. It comes as well when he stumbles into love triangles and finds he cannot stay in them long. And it comes when he is a third point in the ideological showdown between the Commandant and the commissar.

Second, though I have seen it before, I am struck afresh at how funny this novel is. I thought I’d have to point that out to the students, but I didn’t. They greeted me with relief about it. This one will make you laugh throughout, including a couple of these gems:

Discussing a philo-Asian academic who can’t see his attention is a kind of condescension: “He had hung an oriental rug on the wall in lieu of an actual oriental.”

Thinking of his biological father, a priest who seduced his teenage maid: “Original sin was too unoriginal for me” (103).

Or, the extended sequence in which he serves as technical advisor to an Apocalypse Now-type film and, along the way, corrects the way extras scream and manages to get blown up by special effects.

This one may look long, and it may look serious. It’s both those things, but it’s also a sustained joy to read. Again, I recommend it as highly as anything I’ve read in over a decade.

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Original review from 2016

This is a great book. I mean, really great.

Our narrator is a divided self. He is born a half European, half Vietnamese in the North of Vietnam, and then, despite being positioned to welcome Western influence in his country, aligns himself with the communists before the Vietnam War. Then, because of his excellence as a student and his not looking like what people would expect, he’s cast as a sleeper agent and rises to be aide-de-camp to a key South Vietnamese general. Most of the novel takes place in the United States where he finds himself secretly supporting the communist government and chronicling the exiles’ dreams of returning to Vietnam and creating a new counter-revolution.

The structure of the novel reflects that fundamental schizophrenia. Half of it is brooding and historical. We revisit American atrocities in Southeast Asia, we relive a history that some of us once new well but that current generations may never have known, and we get a first-hand glimpse at the horrifying re-education camps. It is, as I gather at least some critics have seen it, a history of the Vietnam War and its aftermath – in English – told from the other side.

The other part is deeply personal, though, and that’s the half that seems to me to take this from a very good novel into the realm of greatness. Our narrator cannot help but map the two halves of his identity – a Vietnamese loyalist willing to murder on behalf of his theoretical cause and a Westernized refugee/immigrant addled by sex and aware of the ambition of his ego.

Somehow, through all of that, the novel has moments of inspired hilarity. At one point, imprisoned in a camp, he contemplates the meal digesting in his stomach and labels the shit forming in his intestine another “brick” to help build the revolution. At the end [apologies for a kind of SPOILER] he finds a manic joy in deconstructive reading of “Nothing is more important than life and liberty,” turning the empty slogan into a powerful, almost-pun that undermines revolutionary thought and sloganeering. At another, echoing Portnoy’s Complaint, he recounts how he would sometimes masturbate into squid, a delicacy his Western father rarely doled out to his impoverished Vietnamese mother. It’s a tour-de-force scene, conflating an “f-the-father” Freudianism with Marxist revolution and good old fashioned teenage horniness.

In that light, a good part – though not all – of this novel works for me as what I call (Port)Nguyen’s Complaint. The two novels share a structure: Roth’s narrative is cast as an American Jew talking to his psychoanalyst while Nguyen’s is of a double-agent writing his confession for his communist allies in a reeducation camp. Both also deal with unreliable first-person narrators, characters who have reason to cast themselves as abject examples of what they once aspired to and yet who have also accomplished substantial things.

I think there’s a lot to learn in casting the two novels in conversation (maybe I have an academic project) as well. Roth, writing as an American in America, has the luxury of presenting his story as, implicitly, the story of a new sort of American. Nguyen, writing as a Vietnamese unable to ignore the intellectual gravity of the Western-American experience, can’t stand on such stable ground. Portnoy may eventually come to a kind of self-recognition at the end (though whether it’s a break though is open to interpretation), but our narrator here goes face-to-face with the failings of the Vietnamese communist project and the pangs of that country’s early rebuilding. Roth is granted what the communist’s might have called the privilege of Western decadence, while Nguyen has to reach through layers of irony just to reach the position of irony where Roth begins.

This one is already on my list of books to re-read in the next few years. Like its protagonist, it’s split along many axes: Vietnamese and American, coherent and careening, brooding and comic. With all that, it surely deserves a second reading too.

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