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The Sympathizer is the 2015 debut novel by Vietnamese-American professor and writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. It is a best-selling novel, and recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel received positive reviews from critics. It was named on more than 30 best book of the year lists and a New York Times Editor's Choice.
The novel incorporates elements from a number of different novel genres: Mystery fiction, political, metafiction, Black comedy, historical, Spy fiction, and war novel. The story depicts the anonymous narrator, a North Vietnamese mole in the South Vietnamese army, who stays embedded in a South Vietnamese community in exile in the United States. While in the United States, the narrator describes being an expatriate and a cultural advisor on the filming of an American film, closely resembling Platoon and Apocalypse Now, before returning to Vietnam as part of a guerrilla raid against the communists.
The dual identity of the narrator, as a mole and immigrant, and the Americanization of the Vietnam War in international literature are central themes in the novel. The novel was published 40 years to the month after the fall of Saigon, which is the initial scene of the book.
The novel was adapted as a television miniseries of the same name starring Robert Downey, Jr., which premiered on HBO in April 2024.
A sequel, titled The Committed, was published on March 2, 2021.
The narrator lives in a series of dualities, at times contradictions: he is of mixed blood descent (Vietnamese mother, and French Catholic priest father), raised in Vietnam but attended college in the U.S., and a North Vietnamese mole yet a friend to South Vietnamese military officials and soldiers and a United States CIA agent. During the imminent fall of Saigon, he, as an aide-de-camp, arranges for a last minute flight as part of Operation Frequent Wind, to secure the safety of himself, his best friend Bon, and the General he advises. While they are being evacuated, the group is fired upon while boarding; during the escape, Bon's wife and child are killed along with many others.
In Los Angeles, the General and his former officers weaken quickly, disillusioned by a foreign culture and their rapid decline in status. The General attempts to reclaim some semblance of honor by opening his own business, a liquor store. The continuous emasculation and dehumanization within American society prompts the General to draft plans for assembling an army of South Vietnamese expatriates to return as rebels to Vietnam. While participating in the expatriate unit, the narrator takes a clerical position at Occidental College, begins having an affair with Ms. Mori, his Japanese-American colleague, and then the General's eldest daughter, Lana. While living in the United States, the narrator sends letters in invisible ink to Man, a North Vietnamese revolutionary and handler, providing intelligence about the General's attempts at raising a commando army.
When he receives an offer to consult for a Hollywood film on the Vietnam War called The Hamlet, he sees it as an opportunity to show multiple sides of the War and to give the Vietnamese a voice in its historical portrayal. However, working on set in the Philippines, he not only fails to complicate the misleading, romantically American representation of the war, but almost dies when explosives detonate long before they should. There is skepticism as to whether the explosion was a mistake since the director greatly dislikes the narrator.
After he recovers, against Man's insistence that he stay in the U.S. and continue his work as a mole, the narrator decides to accompany the exiled troops back into Vietnam. Before he returns, he executes a left-leaning Vietnamese newspaper editor, "Sonny", who he learns had an affair with Ms. Mori while the narrator was in the Philippines. During his mission in Vietnam, he manages to barely save Bon's life. However, it is to no heroic avail as they are captured and imprisoned.
The encampment is where the protagonist writes his confession, a plea for absolution addressed to the commandant who is directed by the commissar. However, rather than writing what his communist comrades wish to hear, the protagonist writes a complex and nuanced reflection of the events that have led him to his imprisonment. He refuses to show only one side, he leaves nothing out (even his painful memories of a childhood without a father or of his first experience masturbating), and he sympathizes with the many perspectives of a complicated conflict that has divided a nation. While he still considers himself a communist and revolutionary, he acknowledges his friendships with those who are supposedly his enemy and he understands all soldiers as honorably fighting for their home. When his confession drafts are rejected, he is finally brought before the commissar.
The commissar, the man with no face, turns out to be his direct superior Man. Yet, this does not stop Man from subjecting him to torture as part of his reeducation. First, he must admit his crime of being complicit in the torturing and raping of a female communist agent. Then he must realize that he took part, albeit unconsciously, in the murder of his father. Lastly, he must learn Man's final lesson that a revolution fought for independence and freedom could make those things worth less than nothing, that nothingness itself was more precious than independence and freedom. The novel ends with the narrator on crowded boat of refugees at sea as part of the massive maritime exodus from Vietnam that began in 1975.
Many critiques compare the narrator's style to other authors, typically American authors. Randy Boyagoda, writing for The Guardian, describes the initial passage of the novel as a "showy riff on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man". For Boyagoda, the anonymity and doubled life reflection of the narrator closely parallel the African American narrator of Invisible Man's commentary from the perspective of concealment. Ron Charles describes the narrative voice as close to both "Philip Roth-inspired comic scenes of self-abuse" and "gorgeous Walt Whitman catalogue of suffering".
The narrator's duality of race, caste, education, and loyalties drive much of the novels' activities. At first this duality is the strength of the novel's narrator, providing deft critique and investigation into the contradictions of social situations, but eventually, in the last, this duality "becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Jean Genet".
The main critique from reviewers is, at times, the overwritten description in the novel. Though generally supportive of the novel, Boyagoda describes this overwriting: "the Captain's grandstanding against east/west stereotypes and against the putative ills of the US and Catholicism clogs his monologue because it does little more than advance an equally hackneyed set of complaints and rebuttals. Nguyen's own academic background also seeps in, inspiring didactic language."
| 2015 Best Books of the Year: Literature & Fiction | ||
| The 24 Best Literary Debuts Of 2015 | ||
| Best Fiction Books of 2015 | ||
| Best Historical Fiction of 2015 | ||
| 2016 | The Best Fiction of 2016 | |
| The 20 Best Novels of the Decade | |
| The 10 Best Debut Novels of the Decade | |
| 100 Books That Defined the Decade | |
The series premiered on HBO's streaming service Max on April 14, 2024.
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