Author returns with a brainier sequel
In 2015, a professor at the University of Southern California published his first novel called The Sympathizer. The story was a cerebral work of historical fiction and political satire cleverly infiltrated with cultural criticism. Although cloaked as a thriller, it didn't fit neatly into that popular genre and could have slipped by unnoticed.
Except that the author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, was too startlingly brilliant to ignore. The Sympathizer flushed colour back into those iconic photos of the fall of Saigon and recast the worn lessons of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a communist agent hiding in the United States. An instant classic, the novel aggressively engaged with the nation's mythology and demonstrated Nguyen's extraordinary intellectual dramatic range. The Sympathizer swept through the year's literary awards, winning a Pulitzer Prize, a Carnegie Medal, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Asian/Pacific American Award, an Edgar Award and more.
Now, Nguyen returns with an even brainier sequel called The Committed.
If you haven't read The Sympathizer, you'll be hopelessly lost, so don't even think of jumping in here. The setting and action of this second book are different, but The Committed is dependent on earlier relationships and plot details.
The Committed takes place entirely in Paris, beyond the tourist haunts and photo shoots: along dark avenues of warehouses, clubs and restaurants controlled by battling gangs. Just as The Sympathizer transformed the hulk of an old spy novel, The Committed does the same with noir crime.
The novel opens in 1981 when the dangerously sympathetic spy arrives in Paris with his old friend Bon. They have survived a year of torture in a re-education camp in Vietnam and are now being rewarded with new lives among the French. Although the narrator is no longer a professional spy, his life is no less clandestine. Bon, his blood brother, is still determined to kill communists and has no idea that the narrator is one. But perhaps that won't matter in their new line of work as underlings for a Vietnamese drug lord. Here, surely, they can just pretend to be waiters at “the worst Asian restaurant in Paris” and brush ideological concerns aside while collecting protection money and distributing hashish.
Au contraire. The narrator encounters an even murkier world here than in the U.S. Beneath the facade of Parisian elegance, Nguyen describes the carnage of ethnic violence carried out by Vietnamese and Algerian immigrants competing for territory in the narcotic trade. With alarming regularity, drug deals go bad and crooks seek vengeance in the language they all speak fluently: pain.
But all that agony — and there's a lot of it — is subsumed within the narrator's introspection. “All my life I only ever aspired to one thing — to be human,” he cries.