Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is an American novel published in 2015 and widely acclaimed. The book details the adventures of an unnamed Vietnamese Communist spy. The spy has infiltrated the South Vietnamese army, working closely with a General in that hapless military force. Educated in the United States, the spy, who narrates the novel, is a “double-minded man” (this is announced on the book’s first page), an amphibious being who navigates both the sunlit streets of Los Angeles and the murky, turbid corruption of Vietnam with equal aplomb. (The hero is also a self-described “bastard” – the son of Vietnamese girl and lecherous French priest.) In diagram, the novel has the features of an adventure novel or thriller, although the reader immediately encounters obstacles to appreciating the book as a superior exercise in genre fiction. The first-person voice narrating the story is the book’s principal complication, an exercise in high style that elevates the novel’s historical novel qua thriller apparatus into literary excellence. The book’s texture is intricate and the narrative discourse is not merely, or, even, primarily descriptive – rather, the author is a little like Marcel Proust or Stendhal: the story-teller’s idiosyncrasies are the novel’s primary attraction and the spy thriller plot frequently digresses into miniature essays about American and Vietnamese culture, history, and, even, movies during the glory days of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. The plot is crowded with characters, some of them quite vivid, but all recede into the shadows cast by the glaring, exorbitantly opinionated and comical musings of the narrator.
In structure, the book divides into clearly delineated sequences, very much like the structure of a well-made Hollywood script – and, of course, a book this famous and with many bravura sequences of threat, suspense, and violence is fated (or should we say doomed) to appear on silver screen. In its action and situations, the novel seems designed to be converted into a film. But, of course, the peculiar vehemence of the narrator, the aspect of the book that provides the prose with its distinctive energy, is anti-narrative, a system of rhetorical effects that probably can’t be translated into a plausible movie. It will be interested to see how the book is adapted to HBO – apparently, a mini-series is being plotted as I write.
The novel begins with a literal sort of bang, a bravura passage involving the fall of Saigon. This part of the book is hallucinatory and remarkable, prescient as to the chaos that attended upon the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan – the reader can readily imagine the action in the opening of the book because we saw it unfold on our TV screens in the precipitous pull-out from Kabul. The hero (or anti-hero) escapes Saigon in the company of a friend Bon. On the Saigon runway, Bon’s wife and child are killed. Bon becomes a hollow man, vacant except for grief and rage and, later, depicted as a nihilistic killer. In the book’s second act, the protagonist’s life as a refugee is Los Angeles is chronicled. This part of the book develops into a thriller. For reasons that aren’t clear to me, the General (now running a liquor store while is wife operates a squalid Chinese restaurant) deputizes the narrator to kill a man always referred to as the “crapulent Major.” The killing is accomplished but, as in Macbeth, for instance, the protagonist suffers from pervasive feelings of guilt and hallucinates that the head of the Major is a centerpiece on a table at a wedding that he attends in the aftermath of the homicide. In this assassination narrative, the book invokes Hitchcock and Graham Greene and the killing is described in a set-piece that should be readily adapted for screen. Nguyen effectively depicts the Vietnamese refugee community, a group of schemers plotting to resurrect the War with the help of a gung-ho American congressman. There is much witty by-play between the various factions of Vietnamese veterans and their children, a younger generation who seem rather remote from the passions of the bloody war fought in Southeast Asia. Throughout this part of the book and following, our Commie “mole” narrator writes an account of his activities in invisible (rice-water) ink – this is sent to the protagonist’s Aunt in Paris, presumably for distribution to his handler or spy-master in the Vietnamese secret service. (I was never entirely sure whether the Aunt in Paris is a real person in contact with the spy-master or simply a euphemism for the spy-master himself.)
In the book’s third section, the protagonist finds himself recruited to serve as a consultant on a big-budget Hollywood film shot in the Philippines. The name of the film is The Hamlet, but references in the book’s acknowledgments section make it clear that the inspiration for this part of the novel is Apocalypse Now. (Although it seems that the movie being shot is really more like Oliver Stone’s Platoon). The film’s director, referred to sardonically as the Auteur, heartily dislikes his Vietnamese consultant and the hero seems to increasingly occupy the role as the movie-maker’s bad conscience. An accident on the set, probably triggered by the Auteur in an effort to kill the protagonist, results in the narrator being parboiled by an explosion. He’s hospitalized, paid some damages for his injuries, and shipped back to the United States. This part of the book exploits the familiar notion that Hollywood movies customarily get all factual and historical details right, but that this verisimilitude is in service of a story and characters that are utterly false and completely fraudulent. (In one of his amusing mini-essays, the narrator points out that the director and his scenarist can’t even accurately reproduce the typical way that Vietnamese scream when they are tortured and killed. The protagonist who has much experience with torture and killing knows all about this subject.)
In the fourth section in the book, the protagonist joins a quixotic raid, conducted through Thailand and Cambodia on the Communist regime in Vietnam. The raid revives the dormant General and provides an occasion for some inspiring speeches about how the clandestine military action restores to its hapless refugee participants honor lost in their defeat in Vietnam. (Aspects of this section of the book harken back to the Bay of Pigs debacle.) However, the narrator’s participation in this covert action comes at a high price. To show his loyalty, the protagonist has to assassinate Sonny, a fellow Vietnamese Communist, also educated in Los Angeles and well-known for his opposition to the war in southeast Asia. This murder arises from obviously impure motives: the narrator sympathizes with Sonny’s ideology and has reason to personally dislike his victim: Sonny has appropriated Ms. Mori, the hero’s girlfriend while he was in the Philippines and they are rivals for the woman. Further, there doesn’t seem any good reason to eliminate Sonny; he’s politically ineffective and no threat to anyone. The General, it seems, orders the murder to compromise the narrator, alarmed that the hero has been courting his daughter, a thoroughly assimilated young woman who sings in a rock band. Once again, the murder is presented in a cinematically described set-piece. After killing his former friend, the narrator adjourns to the apartment of the General’s daughter for a sexual encounter – there’s nothing like a good murder to stir the libido. We next see the hero in Cambodia attempting a reconnaissance mission through Laos and across the Mekong River, the border with Vietnam. The part of the book seems written under the influence of Joseph Conrad, full of sound and fury and ornamented with impressive descriptions of landscape – the narrator’s prose style is reminiscent of “The Heart of Darkness” or some scenes in Conrad’s masterpiece, Nostromo. After a bloody firefight, the narrator is taken prisoner and his plight in a Vietnamese re-education camp comprises the final, or fifth act, of the novel.
Up to this point, the novel seems to me fully realized and highly successful. The last part of The Sympathizer, however, palls and, unfortunately, the book’s narrative climax is also its weakest link.
Here the narrator’s elaborate rhetoric takes over and Nguyen’s propensity for highly ornamented discourse overwhelms the story. The hero is isolated in dank, suffocating cell, allowed access to fresh air and light for only an hour a day, and nourished, if inadequately, on wretched, verminous provisions. (It’s detestable to be lectured at length by a moron and, even, more awful to have to endure those speeches on an empty stomach.) The Commandant entrusted with re-educating the narrator is a tedious fool and Nguyen repeats his speeches berating our hero at length. The general burden of the Commandant’s diatribe is that the narrator, despite his ostensible allegiance to the cause, is irretrievably damaged in, at least, two ways – first, the hero’s immersion in California culture specifically, and Western politics and literature, in general, taints him and must be purged from his system; in other words, the very flexibility that made the narrator an asset as a spy compromises him badly in the eyes of the dogmatic interrogator. Second, the narrator’s status as a “bastard”, the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French priest makes him a mongrel, a half-breed who is, somehow, genetically predisposed to betray the glorious Revolution. In support of these theses, the Commandant quotes gibberish by Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao and has required our hero to write a lengthy confession, several hundred handwritten pages composed in his putrid cell by the light of a tiny tallow candle. The confession is supposed to be self-criticism, but is deemed unworthy and, even, subversive on the basis of our hero’s elaborate prose style: “The bad news (says the Commandant) is that your language betrays you. It is not clear, not succinct, not direct, not simple. It is the language of the elite.” At this point, it becomes evident to the reader that the Commandant is describing the very novel that we are reading. The self-revelatory text presented to the dogmatic Commandant is the novel entitled The Sympathizer. At one point, the hero observes that his smudged and stained confession consists of 307 pages. Checking the margin, I see that the book numbers the pages up to this point in the story at 317. Thus, one of the revelations in the novel’s denouement is the nature of the text we are reading.
This development is pretty clever and motivates the florid prose style in which the book is written. But the problem with the scenes with the hero’s doctrinaire and vicious interlocutors is that this stuff has all been done before and much better. The immediate precursor to The Sympathizer’s interrogation scenes is the similar, and much better managed, material at the close of Orwell’s 1984. The loquacious and terrifying torturer in the Orwell novel, O’Brien, the man who ultimately persuades Winston Smith that 2 + 2 = 5, is the spiritual predecessor the Commandant and the “faceless man”, the reeducation camp’s big boss whom the hero encounters at the end of The Sympathizer. (Of course, the granddaddy of all of these torturers in Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor” from The Brothers Karamazov). Nguyen’s Commandant and the napalm-burned “faceless man” don’t have much to add to their distinguished lineage and the dialogue sequences in the book’s last act are implausible and tedious. There is a concept called “haranguing” in Marvel and DC comic books. Before the villain delivers the coup de grace to his helpless victim, he unburdens himself of a lengthy harangue, a megalomaniacal monologue that usually gives the various caped crusaders a chance to rescue the target of the bad guy’s ire. This is how the speechifying toward the end of The Sympathizer comes off. As the Commie villains blather on and on, we expect a colorfully garbed super-hero to alight in the re-education camp and act as a deus ex machina that will levitate our narrator to safety.
The inevitable problem of a book of this kind is that the hero’s wise-ass stance can’t be sustained in the face of the horrors presented. (Nguyen makes a valiant attempt – there’s a good joke about the rock-hard products of the narrator’s defecation, a stony, petrified cube of shit formed by conditions of near-starvation forming “one of the bricks” in Communism’s heroic structure.) As in Catch 22, deferred atrocities and horrors catch up with narrative and the witty steam, as it were, leaks out of the book under the pressure of its ghastly content. We reach the serious parts of both Catch 22 and The Sympathizer with a sense of dread – the light touch has to be abandoned in favor of a gravely earnest tone that falsifies the earlier, better parts of the book. It’s easy to move and appall readers with descriptions of horrors; comedy is a lot more difficult to sustain.
Nonetheless, there’s three-quarters (or, even, 4/5ths) of a very fine novel here. The Sympathizer’s plot is entertaining and full of exciting incidents. But, the book’s chief appeal rests with its narrator. The protagonist is an accomplished rhetorician and adept at devising remarkable figures of speech. His discourse is showy, an excuse for all sorts of literary pyrotechnics. In modern literature, the narrator seems most closely akin to Yossarian in Catch 22, a book that The Sympathizer resembles with respect to its dizzying shifts in tone – like Catch 22, The Sympathizer oscillates wildly between absurdist comedy, complete with pratfalls and one-liner gags (C-rations look the same entering the body as leaving it), and bleakly horrible violence. Some critics have claimed that the book’s central consciousness is like the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man – this is an inept comparison. The speaker in The Invisible Man is far more rancorous, obsessive, and bitter than the hero of The Sympathizer who seems a resourceful fellow, rather avuncular, and (until the end) with an excellent sense of humor. (The Invisible Man is largely a series of allegories strung together into a first-person narrative that can’t hang together because the narrator’s personality is fractured by the racism that he experiences; The Sympathizer’s narrator is far less anguished and, despite the horrors around him, quite cheerful – nothing touches him deeply because he isn’t actually real in the first place: the hero is an artifact of a historical moment of divided consciousness, a poster-boy, as it were, for the contradictions that Marx thought doomed Capitalism and its military-industrial complex but that are equally applicable to modern Communist societies.) As I read the book, the narrator seemed to me cousin to the witty, resourceful picaros who inhabit late 18th century literature – the protagonist seems like a figure from a novel by Henry Fielding, someone like Tom Jones or the narrator of novel by Laurence Sterne such as A Sentimental Journey or a character in a grotesque comedy like Humphrey Clinker by Tobias Smollet.
Nguyen’s unique prose style is well-illustrated by an episode at the beginning of Chapter 13. The self-described “subversive” protagonist has returned to Los Angeles after his ill-fated foray into Hollywood film production. Before departing for the Philippines, the narrator was enjoying a rather casual, if mutually satisfying, sexual relationship with Ms. Mori, a secretary for the professor at the University where the hero works as a graduate associate in the department of East Asian studies. Ms. Mori’s parents are Nisei Japanese. Hoping to revive his affair with Ms. Mori, the narrator goes to her apartment and finds that she is entertaining another Vietnamese man, Sonny. Sonny is a Communist himself and the hero accuses him of lacking commitment to the cause – instead of returning to Vietnam, Sonny remained in southern California, espousing Revolution but doing nothing to further his ostensible political objectives. I am concerned, however, with demonstrating Nguyen’s flamboyant metaphors that are characteristic of the diction and tone throughout the novel.
When he casts his eye on Ms. Mori’s books, the narrator sees “bookshelves bowed as the backs of coolies with the weight of Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Angela Davis and other women who had wrestled with the Woman Question.” The metaphor, which would be considered offensive if perpetrated by a non-Asian writer, suggests both Ms. Mori’s oriental heritage, the south Asian background of the narrator, and implies that the “Woman Question” is a luxury item borne on the backs of the wretched of the Earth. The presence of the hero’s rival in Ms. Mori’s apartment induces “an anaphylactic reaction to his presence.” The cork of an open bottle is “wine-bloodied”, another image that implies the potentially murderous hostility between the men. The narrator poetically imbues mute objects with voices – a bottle of Stolichnaya vodka “maintain(s) a stoic Russian demeanor...” And the narrator assures us that “every full bottle of alcohol has a message in it, a surprise that one will not discover until one drinks it.” This is trope foreshadows later words spoken in anger in the chapter under the influence of booze. The characters sit in “the frigid waters of embarrassment” except for Ms. Mori’s “grace” in defusing the situation. Ms. Mori’s cat yawns in “regal contempt” and climbing onto the lap of her current lover, Sonny, “sneers” at the hero, before falling “asleep out of boredom.” Thoughts take on the form of “fleeting, evanescent material shape” and a “ghostly version” of the hero hovers over his rival’s head. The hero perceives himself as an “unwilling partner in this complicated menage a trois.” Ms. Mori’s “gaze (is) loaded with with pity, which was ever only served lukewarm.” As the characters get drunk, the language becomes extravagantly fluid: “(l)onging flood(s) the basement of (the narrator’s) heart.” The vodka is “pungent and wonderful... the paint thinner I needed to strip down the stained, flaking walls of my interior.” This latter image of the vodka as a solvent abrading basement walls apparently ruined by previously adumbrated “floods” of longing is compact, vivid, and wholly baroque, a metaphysical conceit after the manner of John Donne.
I have selected this passage to provide readers with a sense of the highly mannered, almost rococo style with which this book is written, an array of fireworks bursting on every page that has the effect of congesting and impeding the narrative, indeed, even establishing a counter-motion to the flow of events described in the book. The various tropes listed in the preceding paragraph occur in the scope of four pages in the novel – and I have left out a number of less showy conceits.
Nguyen’s rather fragrant and luxurious literary style is central to the book’s conception. In Nabokov’s Lolita, the narrator Humbert Humbert, after a particularly exuberant literary flourish, makes the self-deprecating remark that you can “rely on” a murderer to have a florid, ornamental style of writing. (This is thematic to Lolita – the narrator’s exorbitant style masks and distances the sordid events that the story depicts: that is, the rape and destruction of a child.) Similarly, Nguyen’s elaborately ornamented style keeps us at a distance from the violent and, even, horrific content comprising the story. These stylistic devices are a means by which the narrator expresses his “double-mindedness” – terrible things are narrated in an elaborately rhetorical and humorous way. Indeed, the book proposes that the role of spy is an equivalent to the author’s stance in writing an ironic novel of this sort. The spy reports on what he sees. Similarly, a novelist writes about things that he knows. The novelist is making a confidential report to the reader (in the form of a confession to the Commandant). Like the spy, the novelist is both inside the events that he chronicles as well as dispassionate, even scientifically abstracted, from those events. The stance of reporting from a perspective both inside and outside of a society – that is, pretending to be a member of a polity while simultaneously undermining that polity – is integral to the book’s conception.
The novel’s stylistic felicities and the narrator’s witty, engaging perspective implode in The Sympathizer’s final pages. Detached and mordant observations give way to the Sturm und Drang of extended tortures scenes that unpleasant to read and oddly disconnected from the rest of the book. Several technical problems arise. First, physical pain (like music) can’t be plausibly described in the first person. Pain is an isolating experience that is all inside. But good writing is outside – that is, the writer extracts a feeling, impression, or idea from within his or her mind and, then, casts that as an exterior, that is a structure of words and syntax within the common parlance, to expose that subject to the reader. Sex, described from first person point of view, poses similar problems and is a shoal on which many prose narratives have foundered – but most people have some experience of sex and can apply the writer’s approximations to that experience; thankfully, few modern people have the experience of being tortured.
Furthermore, Nguyen’s symbolism implies that the hero’s torture is, somehow, beneficial to him. Arguably, the reader may dislike the narrator to the point that he or she might uncharitably desire to see the protagonist get his proper comeuppance; but this isn’t the effect for which the writer seems to be striving. Nguyen takes seriously the premise that the narrator must be “reeducated”, that his perceptions and cultural pretensions are askew and need to be forcibly corrected. But this is a strange stance for the author to impose on his readers – it’s as if Orwell were asking us to be pleased over the fact that O’Brien’s torture has made Winston Smith “love Big Brother.” The imagery of The Sympathizer’s torture scene involves brilliant lights, sensory deprivation, and electric shocks to prevent the hero from falling asleep – indeed, the hero’s worst affliction seems to be the Vietnamese torturers depriving him of sleep, surely an awful thing. But the descriptions of this torture emphasizes that the narrator comes to certain realizations – that is, becomes educated – by the misery that he endures. The constant brilliant light pouring down on the hero actually comes to signify something like enlightenment. Sensory deprivation compels semi-monastic self-reflection. And the fact that the hero is brutally kept from sleeping suggests the metaphor of becoming fully awakened. Lest this interpretation seem extravagant, Nguyen emphasizes how the experience of torture restores to the hero memories and feelings that he has apparently repressed.
First, the hero regains a vivid memory of his participation in the rape of a female VC agent. The narrator’s horror as to this event, seemingly repressed, is supposed to humanize our protagonist even as the first-person speaker dwells on conspicuously salacious and awful details involving the assault. In addition to restoration of this repressed memory, the hero experiences restoration (or revelation) of a repressed emotion – namely, that he has always hated his French father.
I am generally suspicious of plot developments that involve the recovery of suppressed feelings and memories. This narrative tactic can yield revelations on cue supposed to deepen psychological elements in the story. But the notion that one can repress a powerful, even life-altering, memory seems specious to me at best – a revenant from Freudian models of the mind probably best laid to rest. The rape scene is sufficiently vivid that it seems highly unlikely that the hero would need torture to bring this recollection to light. And, throughout the book, the narrator’s references to his father have all been disparaging – therefore, it comes as no surprise that the hero dislikes or, even, hates the French priest who begot him. The only surprise is that the narrator himself is surprised that this emotion surges into prominence during his torture.
The protagonist’s sleep-deprived meditations on these freshly unearthed memories and feelings yield a Heraclitean system of oppositions. Everything is divided: father from son, north from south Vietnam, Europe opposes Asia, the Commandant is a dialectal opposite to the Commissar, Communism opposing Capitalism, mind is separated from body (the narrator imagines himself floating over his torture as a spectator), cells, themselves, divide and divide again in reproduction creating life from division. What does this all mean? “Nothing,” the narrator proclaims. At the bottom of all systems, there is merely nothingness. These are fancy thoughts, but can’t be logically deduced from anything that we’ve seen in the novel. Indeed, the novel is maximalist, multiplying scenes and situations (the hero commits not one murder but two), filling up the interstices in the plot with vividly described minor characters and the story is replete with love scenes, violence, and comedy. To assert, in the penultimate chapter, that this all amounts to “nothing” falsifies the book’s narrative.
The Sympathizer comes equipped with a coda or postlude in its final chapter. Events in this chapter imprint an allegorical aspect on the novel’s already densely packed content. The protagonist realizes that he is just another refugee cast adrift by the calamity in Southeast Asia. He expresses solidarity with others like him – no longer a “double-minded” man he announces his identity with the collective. Antinomies are overcome; the hero’s divisions are healed. From a narcissistic “I”, the first-person narrator has become part of a “we” – the word “we” figures prominently in the slogan that ends the book. All of this is summarized in the narrator’s response to a riddle repeated to him during his torture: “What is more precious than freedom and independence?” The answer engraved into the hero’s psyche by his torture is simple enough, but syntactically ambiguous: “Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence” – in English, this sentence can mean either that “freedom and independence” are the highest of all values bar none, or that “nothing” itself is more precious than “freedom and independence”, a Buddhist recognition that all forms, including the self, are empty. (Presumably, the narrator’s interrogation is conducted in Vietnamese and I doubt that this ambiguity exists in that language – but if the reader has not suspended disbelief by this point in the book, he or she is no longer reading it.) From the liberating perception, that “nothingness” precedes “something” and that all forms are empty, the narrator forges his new consciousness. I would like to believe that the metaphysics in the last few chapters are ironic, but find no trace of that attitude at the end of the book.
The Sympathizer is an impressive and exceptionally ambitious novel. The fact that I am comparing it with similarly flawed classics like Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 demonstrates the book’s formidable brilliance. The fact that I don’t like the book’s conclusion may be idiosyncratic with this writer. Perhaps, there are many others who find the ending of the book plausible and just. In any event, the novel casts a fascinating perspective on the end of the war in Vietnam, a subject that is relevant today in the light of the way that the conflict in Afghanistan ended. No doubt there will be thousands of “double-minded” refugees from that conflict and their destinies will be inextricably entwined with ours. In America, we are always blithely starting wars and heedlessly ending them as well and so many of the truths expressed in Nguyen’s book will remain to perplex us for the foreseeable future.
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