‘Committed’ to crime
Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his protagonist’s change of vocation in the sequel to ‘The Sympathizer’
“The first book deals a lot with racism and war and colonization, but the focus is on the United States and on American ideas and principles, as well as Vietnamese ones. And, you know, in that book I set out to offend everybody, by which I mean the Americans and Vietnamese on all sides. But the French got off easy, so I thought, time to write a sequel to offend the French, and that’s partly what I set out to do with ‘The Committed.’ ”
— Viet Thanh Nguyen
At the end of “The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 debut novel, the nameless narrator vows to survive.
This so-called sympathizer, a Vietnamese communist spy, has come to the end of his “confession,” the tale that forms the whole of this 2016 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
“He’s been deeply traumatized by what he’s been put through,” Nguyen says. “And in that novel, he’s a revolutionary grappling with disillusionment with communism.
“And I wanted to write a sequel because I thought that wasn’t the end of the story,” he says of “The Committed,” published last week.
“He was disillusioned with communism, but he still believed in the idea of a revolution — that the world still needed to be changed, that there was justice that needed to be fought for.
“And that’s what ‘The Committed’ takes up,” Nguyen says. “What does a revolutionary do who still is in search of a revolution?”
While sequels are less common in literature than spy or crime thrillers, Nguyen says he didn’t hesitate conceiving “The Committed” both as a crime novel and as the middle book of a planned trilogy.
“‘The Sympathizer’ is a spy novel, in addition to being about all the rest, and in the world of spy novels it’s perfectly acceptable to have sequels and trilogies,” Nguyen says. “And that was my thinking for doing ‘The Committed,’ that it works within the same kind of genre, except it becomes a crime thriller.”
Where the first book shifted between Vietnam and Southern California, “The Committed” takes place in Paris, a city in a country that had colonized and oppressed the Vietnamese people.
“We continue a lot of the action from the first book, but it’s also a sequel in the sense of continuing the ideas that the first book interrogates as well,” Nguyen says. “The first book deals a lot with racism and war and colonization, but the focus is on the United States and on American ideas and principles, as well as Vietnamese ones.
“And, you know, in that book I set out to offend everybody, by which I mean the Americans and Vietnamese on all sides,” he says. “But the French got off easy, so I thought, time to write a sequel to offend the French, and that’s partly what I set out to do with ‘The Committed.’ ”
The French, Nguyen realized, had in the course of their colonization done as badly by Vietnam and its people as the Americans. Though French involvement in Vietnam is much less familiar to many.
“The version that we get in popular culture is really a romantic version,” Nguyen says. “And here, the French got lucky, because what the Americans did in Vietnam, they recorded a lot of photographs and full-color television and movies.
“And so, ironically, the United States itself has been responsible for circulating an image of the war in Vietnam as a bad war,” he says. “The French did some equally horrible things, but we only have black-and-white photographs of that time period of French colonization, and some beautiful movies including ‘Indochine’ with Catherine Deneuve, and ‘The Lovers.’
“The French have gotten away with putting this sheen upon their history there in such a way that it hasn’t disturbed our romantic image of them.”
In “The Committed,” the nameless narrator arrives in Paris with his staunchly anti-communist best friend, Bon. They fall in with a Chinese-Vietnamese gangster known as The Boss, and almost by accident the narrator takes over a hashish business, selling drugs to a range of intellectuals and a politician or two while hiding his communist past.
Nguyen says he spent time in Paris during summer breaks from USC, where he is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity. The author, who grew up in San Jose and graduated from UC Berkeley, lives in Pasadena now.
Avoiding the tourist neighborhoods in favor of grittier locales, he spent his time in France imagining the lives of the Vietnamese, Algerian and French characters in the book.
He talked to many French Vietnamese residents to find out how they’ve been treated and what impact past colonization has had on their lives, learning that colonization of Indochina is scarcely ever mentioned or taught all that deeply. There were few complaints about discrimination, either.
“That is one of the things I bring up in the novel, and I want to satirize,” Nguyen says. “Because I think one of the reasons why the French of Vietnamese descent are treated as the equivalent of a model minority is because they don’t happen to be Algerian, which was really, really the war that the French are still hung up about.”
As the nameless narrator falls deeper into the criminal underworld, he and the gang headed by The Boss come into violent conflict with a band of French Algerian criminals. While Nguyen doesn’t reveal his narrator’s name, he does give him, and many of his other characters, memorable nicknames, like
Le Cao Boi or a gang known as the Seven Dwarfs.
Even the narrator, who is most often referred to as “the Crazy Bastard,” gets a name of sorts: Vo Danh, which in Vietnamese means “nameless.” The term appears on the graves of the unknown war dead in Vietnam.
“It’s a joke because it’s the name on his passport, but it’s also ‘anonymous’ or ‘nameless,’ ” Nguyen says. “And that, again, speaks to his condition.
“In ‘The Committed,’ a lot of the decisions I made are simply for having fun,” Nguyen says. “Why not do this, why not do that? And when it came to names, part of these novels is a sort of mythic dimension where the characters come to represent certain things.
“I was thinking back to Homeric epics where characters had names but they also had identifying traits, and the traits are what we remember about these characters,” he says. “The names are meant to be playful, ironic, easy to remember.”
The books have been optioned for development as a television series, Nguyen says, and he’s at work on a memoir that looks at his family’s refugee experience from the ’70s to today.
Then, the third book in the trilogy of “The Sympathizer” and “The Committed” can begin.
“He comes back to Southern California to make amends and seek revenge,” Nguyen says. “He’s going to continue to be a man of two faces and two minds, but whether he resolves that by the end of the third book, I don’t know yet.”