THE COMMITTED (The Sympathizer #2), a different, still very powerfully caustic, look at illusions and their costs

THE COMMITTED (The Sympathizer #2)
VIET THANH NGUYEN
Grove Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The long-awaited new novel from one of America’s most highly regarded contemporary writers, The Committed follows the Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts and prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.

No longer in physical danger, but still inwardly tortured by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, and struggling to assimilate into a dominant culture, the Sympathizer is both charmed and disturbed by Paris. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals and politicians who frequent dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds not just stimulation for his mind but also customers for his merchandise―but the new life he is making has dangers he has not foreseen, from the oppression of the state, to the self-torture of addiction, to the seemingly unresolvable paradox of how he can reunite his two closest friends, men whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition.

Both literary thriller and brilliant novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.

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My Review: My 5* review of The Sympathizer from 2016 is here: https://tinyurl.com/2p9he4wj.

"The American Way of Life! Eat too much, work too much, buy too much, read too little, think even less, and die in poverty and insecurity. No, thank you. Don't you see that's how Americans take over the world? Not just through their army and their CIA and their World Bank., but through this infectious disease called the American Dream?"
–and–
But the only revolution you can commit to is the one that lets you laugh and laugh and laugh, because the downfall of every revolution is when it loses its sense of absurdity. This, too, is the dialectic, to take the revolution seriously but not to take the revolutionaries seriously, for when revolutionaries take themselves too seriously, they cock their guns at the crack of a joke. Once that happens, it’s all over, the revolutionaries have become the state, the state has become repressive, and the bullets, once used against the oppressor in the name of the people, will be used against the people in their own name. That is why the people, if they wish to survive and to dodge those bullets, must be nameless.

Home truths, not dodgeable conversational bullets, but full-on machine gun nests of home truth.

It is Author Viet Thanh's stock in trade, isn't it? Follow the link to my 2016 review if you haven't encountered him and his cleaning-vinegar acidulated prose. Powerful the takedowns, sick the burns, and no human is spared from the collateral-damage list:

Those who believe in revolutions are the ones who haven’t lived through one yet.
–and–
......you, yourself, human and inhuman, are demented enough to believe that if the human species does not self-destruct—an IF that should be capitalized, it is so big—then one day the nobodies of the world with nothing to lose will finally have enough of not having enough and realize that they have more in common with the nobodies on the other side of the world, or just the other side of the nearest border, than they do with the somebodies of their own kind, who care nothing about them, and when these nobodies with nothing finally unite, stand up, take to the streets, and claim their voices and their power, the only thing that the somebodies with something must do is nothing, realizing that their Ideological State Apparatus cannot stop all these people, because for all of its might their Repressive State Apparatus cannot kill them all. Can it?"

It can now. It hasn't started to yet. But AI-plus-facial-recognition drones? You'll see 'em soon enough. I guarantee you they're being or have been prototyped and now can be deployed...what's a few extra dead who were "innocent" whatever that means? "God" will know her own, after all.

I have never been a chirpy optimistic sort. I fall into the Butlerian Jihadist camp these days. I do not know Author Viet Thanh, so I speak without certainty of his opinion on matters facing us today. I think, having read his exploration of revolution in these two (to date) novels about the Sympathizer, that it is likely to be the case that he does not view anything that increases the capacity of humans to oppress and exploit each other ever more efficiently in a positive light.

...what the most sympathetic Federico García Lorca, assassinated by the Spanish fascists, once said, “I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace,” an empathetic principle that, if followed with action, whether it is doing something or doing nothing, depending on the dialectical need of the situation, will never lead you in the wrong direction, even if that direction is death, since so many people are committed to the exact opposite principle, to side with those who already have something and want everything, and if you were sane you would side with them, too, but revolution is always an act of insanity, because revolution is not a revolution unless it is committed to the impossible.
–and–
There was only one solution to this alienation that was created not by the Negro or the bastard, but by the real bastards, the racists and colonizers who blamed the victim for the conditions that the victimizer created. And that solution was “to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal.”

That is exceedingly well-put and inarguably accurate; it's also the next thing to impossible to achieve. In reality, no one escapes reaching out for the universal's darkest spot:

Organized religion was the first and greatest protection racket, an economy of perpetual profit built on voluntary fear and coerced guilt. Donating money to churches, temples, mosques, synagogues, cults, et cetera, to help ensure a spot for one’s soul in the express elevator to that penthouse in the sky known as the afterlife was marketing genius!
–and–
This was the silence my father encountered every day during his prayers, the silence that hundreds of millions heard every day as they beseeched God to say something, anything. He always said nothing, which hardly disabused His legions of fans. For someone who never said anything, God certainly spoke to a lot of people.

Religion has become the Way and the Life for those too scared to rebel, too lazy to think, too smug to see past their own privilege.

No, of course I'm not bitter and rage-filled, why ever would you ask?

There remains the matter of my missing half-star. I've quoted the book at you to show how deeply I liked the read, to give the percentage of you who won't read it a taster of the treasures you're disinclined to see for yourselves. I was not as utterly swept up in this part of the Sympathizer's tale for several reasons. One was, I'm not coming to it fresh; I've been in his head before, so the impact is lessened as the flint cores of meaning flake into eye-surgery-grade blades. Another is deeper: howinahell did these men get into this awful, messy business? "Why not" is the only answer I can find in the story. It allows Author Viet Thanh to ladle on the Perils-of-Pauline hairsbreadth rescues and other coincidences. I'm not a massive fan of that kind of storytelling. It shows the author, unlike in The Sympathizer, already knows the ending, so we're along for the (entertaining) ride.

I forgive it all, almost unreservedly, for this moment where I felt so Seen: "You are upset because I made you see yourself. You like to think of yourself as just a man, not a white man, unless you call yourself white, with a certain kind of self-aware irony. But for me to call you a white man is unacceptable, downright racist, even if you yourself and all white people routinely say of someone “an Asiatic woman” or “a black man,” as if a black man were not just a man as you are just a man. So what if I noticed your whiteness—how unforgivable!"
Ouch...yes.

STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA, an edge I can see from my home, and wonder what's over it

STORIES FROM THE EDGE OF THE SEA
ANDREW LAM
Red Hen Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Andrew Lam returns with a literary exploration of love, lust, and loss among Vietnamese immigrants in America.

At times humorous and ecstatic, other times poetic and elegiac, the fourteen pieces in Stories from the Edge of the Sea explore love and loss, lust and grief, longing and heartbreaks through the lives of Vietnamese immigrants and their children in California. A younger dancer is haunted by memories of almost dying on a boat when they escaped from Vietnam, a widow processes her husband’s death through frantic Facebook postings, a writer enters an old lover’s home and sees a ghost at twilight. If the human heart is a vast, open-ended terrain, then Andrew Lam’s short stories are its mountains, valleys, and lakes. Together they seek to chart barely explored country.

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My Review: How to go on, when you honestly think your world is ending, is at the heart of any immigrant's story. Your world is ending, are you going to end with it?

Not while someone is cold and hungry, I'm not. I immigrated from my happy world to this ugly, mean-spirited one entirely against my will. But here I am. My kettle's got words, but heads need filling...feeding...too.

In accordance with the Prophecy, the fourteen stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method.


She in a Dance of Frenzy suffers. Beautiful faces and empty hearts so often go together. Why some people are gifted with looks but left, like all of us, without a single clue as to how to be truly happy.

Because, girl of great beauty, woman of the thousand broken hearts, empty vessel hollow drum moon void of course: Your value of face has no depth of learning, and only learning fills you up. 3.5*

Agape at the Guggenheim takes a solid look at how love, lust, longing, and the essentially fruitless effort of making sense of your own inner workings all walk around, sloshing and thumping into over and around one pretentious little culture queen's head.

Quit worrying about it, said old-man me to this youthful Asian version of me. Get up and find him or stay sitting and watch him go, either way chasing a fantasy won't explain you to yourself. But when your façade is as brittle and shiny as the lacquer on your umbrella handle, you won't listen, or hear when you do.

Told in a slightly annoying ever-so ever-so tone that will really rub the rust scales of some, that amused me no end. 4*

This Isle is Full of Noises provides the required amount of New Weid as vampires and werewolves crash a frat party where a Vietnamese immigrant lad, on the way to a glittering career as a doctor...he thinks...is apparently trippin' balls and working through some very, very serious PTSD.

Not my personal favorite, but it sure as hell twists its twist with absolute conviction! 3.5*

October Laments follows a woman who processes her grief in real time posts on Facebook, in a foreign language, for the hushand she shared twenty-five years of life with. As her teenaged daughter comments on some posts, the awful truth of marrying someone a lot older than you, marrying someone who becomes ill, withers and dies by choice, to end suffering, is caustically real.

The grief of being left behind, feeling greedy for wanting more, the resposibility of living on...well, social media is good for something after all. 5*

A Good Broth Takes Its Time "I insure people against tragedy, in a country built on it," says Toan, survivor and thriver on pho's magically Proustian-madeleine insubstantial waft. A solid thing, love, and it sloshes in the transparent magis of water, heat, and time that transmutes grossly physical things...nothing on Earth is more grossly physical than oxtail...into wafts of delightful odor.

Tragedy plus time equals comedy, said the long-forgotten hilarious inventor of The Tonight Show, Steve Allen. He specifically meant ha-ha comedy. I'd be amazed if Allen, and Author Lam, didn't also mean that tragedy turns its other mask to the reveling, partying eater of the divine pho. Savoring the tough bits, eating the insubstantial essence of things whose flavoring we call "herbs and spices" but whose bodies (leaves, fruits, seeds) we use up and discard. The broth that takes its time? Rich in the essences of things we can't see. Replete with the powerfully sensed, unseen, untouchable, enfolding vapor of the dead.

Heady. 5*

Bleak Houses are more than structures, they're memory palaces of lives unlived. Visiting someone you once loved deeply, were passionately entwined with, in his home now shared with a wife who knows who you were, with kids who know little enough about the world (such a kid thing) to Make Judgments, is...awkward. Seeing a ghost is the least of it. 4*

To Keep from Drowning tells us how lives end, how hard it is to live one, how much it costs in blood and treasure is only the beginning. Never tell all you know and it goes into the Void with you. And how that is okay.

Living each life is hard work, dying each death, moments you don't know what what's coming are the ones you should treasure because they are the ones that let you rest before the next bend on the hill. A family of origin takes shape on this trip to Land's End. And it is at the end your beginnings fall into focus. Rose's pain, Ben's work, Lou's seeking, all of them launch their family from the end of the land, from the muddy border of dirt and water and the air so redolent of rot. 4.5*

The Shard, The Tissue, An Affair said something deep, something profound, after smacking me in the teeth with some very self-indulgent poetry:

To fall in love is to have one's sense of geography grafted onto another's, no matter how tenuous, so as to form a new country. I saw Houston in my mind, a city of strip malls, grand old homes and gleaming glass-and-steel skyscrapers that coexist cheek by jowl. He, in turn, imagined San Francisco with its Transamerica Pyramid poking the blue sky, windblown hills the color of embers at twilight, sailboats gliding on the bay like white butterflies; he imagined—and I could tell this from his voice—that there was freedom somewhere in the next valley.

It's true. You see their world with your own. You do not know, then, what that moment of vision will cost...sometimes a lot, others it pays you. A fleeting moment or a painting on the wall of your shared home.

A short work, a love song to the departed. 4*

Love in the Time of the Beer Bug gives me the heebiejeebies. COVID killed people still walking. It ruined so many lives. It put the stake in the heart of many a vampiric relationship, like Jan and Stan's.

It was a very annoying style to read it in but a story I thought I wouldn't see in here...the ending, and even then, a beginning as the narrator accepts a place in Yale's English department. 3.5*

Swimming from the Mekong Delta is proof that the old adage about lemons becoming lemonade only works if the lemonchucker gets a full, even overflowing, glass. And you get to watch as they have to drink it.

A standup routine I'd actually resubscribe to Netflix to see. 4*

What We Talk About When We Can't Talk About Love is dark. What talking does, in this immigrant's world, is fill the hot-air balloon that wafts him above the heads of the struggling so he won't see how hard it was for him in their sweaty. soot-streaked faces. The fire's coming, blow it out with words. Blow up into the ballon. Blow harder, blowhard.4.5*

5A, 5B, DEST: SGN gives someone ordinary a second chance. It's a beautiful dream, the second chance so deeply desired it connects your past self to a present you just...don't love, care about so little that you're ready to jump into the past without hesitation.

The "Canterbury Tales" format works well enough, but honestly it's so self-indulgent and sentimental I need insulin. 3*

Muni Diaries collects the vignettes a writer, a real dyed-in-the-wool wordhammerer, never leaves behind. The smallest moment stays in the filter like a random whole bean. It blocks the flow of coffee until you take it out and grind it just to get it out of the way.

The resulting liquid isn't quite coffee; it's not strong enough. Drop it into steamed milk? it's barely a macchiato. Slosh it into the instant oatmeal? Palatable, but after it gets cold waiting for you to finish your call, it's stodgy and there's no good way towards finishing it that won't result in gagging.

So blow the dust onto a napkin and draw faces with the dregs in the cup. 3.5*

The Tree of Life Elegy to a mother's love:

Fitst of all, when things get tough, remember to make soup. And, if you can, feed the hungry. More importantly, open your heart, stand with all your strength, with all your courage for life and living, even in the face of darkness and despair. Despite all your sadness and tears, stand steadfast under that tree and tend to it and watch its branches blossom and bear fruit. Stand until the very last light.

You can do no better than to live by these words. 5*

KEVIN NGUYEN's latest, MỸ DOCUMENTS, a near-future I do not want

MỸ DOCUMENTS
KEVIN NGUYEN
One World (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about growing up at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.

Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As young adults, they're on the precipice of new ventures—Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naive freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.

Cut off entirely from the outside world, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long dusty days in camp, forced to work jobs they hate and acclimate to life without the internet. That is until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this as an opportunity to tell the world about the horrors of detention—and bolster her own reporting career in the process.

Informed by real-life events from Japanese incarceration, the Vietnam War, and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own—much too close for comfort. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism in America, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to each other, and to ourselves, after tragedy.

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My Review: How awful for Author Nguyen to publish this trenchant story at exactly the moment it becomes predictive. He didn't tell it with that in mind (it's not a paywall yet, you can dismiss it), saying in the article linked above that "...I worried that in all of the conversation around Mỹ Documents being timely, that its actual conflicts and themes had been obfuscated by the emphasis on the news cycle".

Steamrolled by events you thought you were extrapolating? It has to be the ultimate first sex in your stateroom on the Titanic feeling: Will I get to do this again? He's done it before. His first novel, New Waves, came out in March...of TWENTY-TWENTY. Melpomene seems to have it in for this poor author.

All that out of the way, let's have a look at the storyverse Author Nguyen's made for us. An absent father unites Ursula and Jen, half-sisters born to white and ethnically Vietnamese mothers respectively. Each woman has a full brother. Their appearance mirrors their mothers' features, so the elder appears white. She is a journalist, exempted from being incarcerated because of her less-visible paternal heritage. She is also not interested in exposing herself to difficulties by claiming kin with her incarcerated half-sibs...a continuation of her uninterest in becoming close to these people...until their connection can be useful

As the internment camp's realities begin to bite her, no internet, limited contact outside the confines of the camp or even within it, no access to any communication technology. Jen becomes part of an in-camp samizdat operation called Korematsu. Ow, my nose. That gives her something Ursula the journalist needs: reliable intel from the inside of a buttoned-up space. The sisters, with poor grace on both sides, cooperate to tell The Truth About It. How that pans out, well...white people, even half-white people prosper in correlation to their willingness to become exploiters, says Author Nguyen of Ursula; glittering kudos, lucrative contracts rain on her. Jen, her source, is traumatized by hellish deprivation and the loss of the brother she loved and Ursula did not care a fig about.

And here is where I talk about the characters, not their arcs. The absent father was a rolling stone who was too damaged...by what?...to contemplate settling down. Why the hell he didn't use a condom instead of fathering kids he wasn't around to raise remains unaddressed. (Selfishness, of course, but it's unaddressed.) Ursula and her full sib are All American White People, Jen and her full sib are not. My, that's tidy. The mothers barely registered on me. That's why there's no part of a fifth star.

The ending of the story finds Jen and Ursula...Ursula's sib vanishes somewhere along the line...completing their trajectories as set. It's all pretty pat. What it isn't is poorly told. I'm not saying "described" here by considered usage. We are not centered in a physical locale. That is not the story being told. There's little scene-setting beyond what is needed to get the immediate point across. This is, for some readers, a huge flaw. To my read of the book it is the way to immerse you in (mostly Ursula's) development, and by extension, the entire exercise's purpose of indicting our culture for simply accepting injustice, for treating injustice as infotainment, and criticizing the people seduced by empty plaudits into betrayals of human bonds that are, by rights, sacred and cherished.

Pay attention to the people who wander, all unmoored. Ask yourself why that is the choice they made for a life spent among other humans. Is it a choice you can understand?

Listening to Ursula, I can do so better than before I read this book.