THE SYMPATHIZER, a five-star twisty, turny, edge-of-my-seat read

THE SYMPATHIZER
VIET THANH NGUYEN
Grove Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

Don't miss this episode of Novel Dialogue with the author in very interesting conversation with a scholar of his wonderful work.

The Publisher Says: Accolades:
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2016 Edgar Award for Best First Novel
Winner of the 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Winner of the 2015 California Book Award for First Fiction (Gold)
Winner of the 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 2015 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Adult Fiction

The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who arranges to come to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.

The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER AT MY REQUEST. THANK YOU.

My Review: It appalls, revolts, and disgusts me that this book was Author Nguyen's first published book. It is grotesque that such a polished, accomplished, and inventive result should come first in his career. I am outraged that his naked, shameless display of far, far too much talent isn't subject to some form of censure and/or censorship.

Whatever people say about the General today, I can only testify that he was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.
–and–
So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to believe that our nation was dead.
–and–
What do those who struggle against power do when they seize power? What does the revolutionary do when the revolution triumphs? Why do those who call for independence and freedom take away the independence and freedom of others?

There's a reason all those accolades rained down on Author Nguyen: He bloody well earned them. (Even the squid sex scene. Yes, I said it.)

Anyone who's paid me the slightest scintilla of attention knows that I am not attracted to stories of torture and experiences of the violation kind. But this book's entire existence is, in the end, a meditation on the truth that comes out of one's existence in crisis. The corporeal violation of torture, the absolute honesty of a man in extremis, is what lifts this above sadistic pornography. It easily could have been that, in fact it was a close-run thing...but read those passages again. That isn't smut disguised as literature. That is the efflorescence of brilliance in the cess-pit of war, the striking of a tocsin for even bodily autonomy in a world very much not run for the benefit of the narrator:

All of us - we're all in jail cells without bars. We're not men anymore. Not after the Americans fucked us twice and made our wives and kids watch. First the Americans said we'll save your yellow skins. Just do what we say. Fight our way, take our money, give us your women, then you'll be free. Things didn't work out that way, did they? Then after fucking us, they rescued us. They just didn't tell us they'd cut off our balls and cut out our tongues along the way. But you know what? If we were real men, we wouldn't have let them do that.
–and–
I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness.

That, mes vieux, is the unvarnished truth smacked like a haddock in our complacent, complicit faces. The author, the perpetrator of this painful outrage against our unknowing...unwilling to know...minds is just gonna keep pile-driving until his point is made. How dare you, says Author Nguyen, how bloody dare you pretend that your world-view of "freedom" can be bought with the misery and unfreedom of entire nations...and he is correct. "Freedom isn't free," say the hawkish. They don't mean it. They mean "MY freedom is worth more than yours" and they're not honest, or self-reflective, enough to say it outright.

Movies were America's way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences with the hit, the smash, the spectacle, the blockbuster, and, yes, even the box office bomb. It mattered not what story these audiences watched. The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.
–and–
Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching's accompaniment. Beethoven's Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.

What a view of the world America purveys. What a travesty of a slogan is "Freedom isn't free" in a country where even the popular culture of the place is strictly divided...youth has rap and hip-hop, the regressives have country or classical European orchestral music (depending on class), the old have yacht rock...and there are fewer and fewer places for us to meet, to exchange knowledge and ideas. Television? Not the Great Isolator it was once bemoaned to be (or else my Twitter feed is weirder than most, and my inbox full of popculture websites' come-ons is abnormal). Music, the one-time Great Uniter, ain't no more. Literature, and its bumptious cousin book publishing, are never going to rise back to the heights they once commanded. Games, computer games, MMO games, are pretty much in the grips of the lowest of the world's humans from what I can see.

Yet our films, sent all over the world!, are solidly behind a view of the USA as a Defender of Right, Justice, ORDER!

Honestly, it revolts me, this dissonance between reality (what in the name of all that's unholy did Iraq under Saddam Hussein have to do with the Al Qaeda takedown of the World Trade Center?! and that war cost thousands of lives and TRILLIONS of dollars!) and the vision in the exported product. China is on the rise, y'all, and its tastes are going to form the next wave of filmed exports, so be watching what comes up that doesn't make you feel all warm and fuzzy. You're about to get your own medicine back.

That medicine will be progressively more bitter. The author's interview, included in later editions of the book, says it succinctly (as one would expect):

I did not want to write this book as a way of explaining the humanity of Vietnamese. Toni Morrison says in Beloved that to have to explain yourself to white people distorts you because you start from a position of assuming your inhumanity or lack of humanity in other people’s eyes. Rather than writing a book that tries to affirm humanity, which is typically the position that minority writers are put into, the book starts from the assumption that we are human, and then goes on to prove that we’re also inhuman at the same time.

Are you, white readers, aware of the subtle (to us) and bitter (to those not us) demeaning subtext, if only barely so, of reading about Others? The perpetuation of Othering in confining through your commercial choices of Black, Asian-American, Hispanic, et alii writers into "explanatory" writing? Yes, you aren't doing it out of overt racist motives (or you wouldn't be likely to read my reviews) but you're enmeshed in a system of deeply, unexaminedly racist underpinnings. It is extremely difficult to break those lenses. If you try, you will fail at times. But you will, and I speak from experience, gain from every success and learn from every failure.

IF you will pursue the effort in an honest attempt to shed the ugly, distorting framework.

Starting by reading Author Nguyen's twisty, deceptive, and very very sneaky story will repay you on so many levels.