Back to Vietnam
The Sympathizer
By Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press; 371 pages; $26)
The unnamed narrator (he is simply “the captain) in “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s powerful and evocative first novel, leads a divided life in every possible way. The son of a Vietnamese mother and a French priest, he is a spy, he explains, “a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds … able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent [but] I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you — that is a hazard.”
The story, which is related in the form of a confession addressed to an unnamed “commandant,” opens in gripping detail in 1975, just as the United States is airlifting personnel and certain South Vietnamese allies out of Saigon before the communists take charge. The setting is the evacuating villa of a general whose fate, from Vietnam to Los Angeles and back, the narrator’s will be bound to. In America, the general opens a liquor store and later a restaurant, as he and other exiles raise funds and quietly plot their return, and as the narrator continues to infiltrate their conspiracy, entangling himself to an ever greater extent in a morally meaningless web of betrayal and eventually murder.
“Remorse,” the captain confesses, “was ringing me up a few times a day, tenacious as a debt collector.” The general finally organizes his army and, with American backing, returns on a doomed mission to Vietnam. The captain, who has been keeping his Viet Cong superiors abreast of the scheme, nonetheless joins him, attempting to salvage what he can.
The Turner House
By Angela Flournoy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 341 pages; $23)
Angela Flournoy’s expansive, intergenerational saga of one enormous Detroit family’s struggle to hold on to their home in the wake of the Great Recession is a poignant and timely novel. It is 2008, and Viola Turner and her 13 children are struggling after the death of Francis, the family patriarch, to figure out what to do with the house on Yarrow Street that they’ve lived in for over 50 years, but which now carries an underwater mortgage. The narrative delves into the past via flashback from Viola’s and Francis’ perspectives half a century prior, when they came north to an East Side neighborhood that was then comfortably working class. It follows three of the siblings — Charlie (Cha-Cha), Lelah and Troy — through the present as the family debates what to do with the memory-filled property.
Flournoy paints a vivid picture of the embattled city across three African American generations (Cha-Cha, a former truck driver, at 64 is old enough to be the father of his youngest siblings). In addition to the novel’s central dilemma, the siblings have problems of their own: Cha-Cha, haunted by ghastly visions, is recovering from an accident; Lelah, the youngest Turner daughter, is homeless, battling a roulette addiction and navigating a tumultuous relationship with her own daughter; meanwhile, Troy, an unscrupulous police officer and the youngest son, is plotting to short-sell the house to his off-and-on lover.
It all comes to an explosive head one night when the siblings confront each other in the home they grew up in. Composed with deep sympathy — especially for the character of Lelah — “The Turner House” is an apt and engrossing response to Cha Cha’s tormented query: “Why not give in to every impulse, break free and go insane … in a world where people made structures disappear overnight?”
Academy Street
By Mary Costello (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; pages; $22)
In this richly drawn novella, Mary Costello, the Irish author of a previous collection of short stories, introduces us to Tess Lohan, a 7-year-old in rural 1940s Ireland. Her mother has just died, the first of a series of calamities and losses in a life that is never easy. Eleven years later, she follows her sister to New York, where she becomes a nurse and a misguided one-night stand leaves her pregnant with a boy.
Motherhood offers Tess a chance at reinvention: On the subway one day she reflects that “she could never have kept Theo” back home; she would have had to give him up. Ireland “seemed to her now to be a place without dreams, or where dreaming was prohibited.”
But as the boy grows — and Tess grapples with the social and emotional travails of single motherhood in the 1960s — so does the distance between them. Theo resents her passivity and debilitating shyness, and the reader understands why. Tess can’t bring herself to live: “The paucity of her life made her unspeakably sad,” writes Costello. “A pall grew, a feeling of ennui, at the thought of the daily mundane, the restraint, the stasis.” But reading provides some consolation, “stirring, as it did, the kind of emotions and extreme feelings she desired, feelings of innocence and longing that returned her to those vaguely perfect states she had experienced as a child.”
A beautifully understated and painfully wrought account of one woman’s unremarkable, melancholy existence, Costello’s book inevitably draws comparisons to early Joyce or Colm Tóibín, but there is also something of the strange and hypnotic beauty of a single life span, compressed in its entirety and recounted matter-of-factly, that recalls Roberto Bolaño’s lengthy short story “Anne Moore’s Life,” in these pages.