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.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
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.
