I am old enough that the Vietnam war was intellectually defining for me, yet privileged enough that it did not touch my life and my family even to the extent that it did many Americans. My brother was older and because of the after-effects of an earlier tragic car accident, not fit to serve. But he likely could have been deferred or excused in some other way.
Not so the energetic and skillful writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. His novel is deeply plotted through the perspective of the divided self, a hero/anti-hero, American/refugee, apparent supporter of the corrupt and autocratic South Vietnamese regime to which the U.S. clung as anti-communist, but a double agent as well for a communist regime that shared all the ruthlessness necessary to be conventionally revolutionary.
The comic satire of the book, especially around the racism of Hollywood and its hypocrisy about a war that for us was a "cause" but that for a whole people was utter destruction- well, it's brilliant.
The unnamed narrator, the General, the Auteur, are all like masked archetypes yet all too real.
The center of the book spiral down into the fateful duality of loyalty/betrayal, friend and enemy together going back to the ravaged country, and so the torture of "re-education" resonates deeply and cuts away the arrogance and cynicism that the narrator has used to escape from his own idealism and refusal to feel the sadness of loss. The narrator finds he had to continue to kill, not only in the U.S. to keep his cover and pretend to fight communism, but also to protect a friend. His confession- this book- is thus in the end about human rights and the right to be human, a right that neither capitalist nor communist flavors of authoritarianism can tolerate. The ability to kill and to suffer: this is what the narrator's divided self is left with. At the end he understands, too late perhaps, the value of life and knows at last why he must say "we will live."
Among the many literary echoes and allusions included by this English professor, what I found most frequently coming into mind was Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. This neglected work, overshadowed by the writer's famous Moby -Dick and Billy Budd, is about the divided America that the narrator of The Sympathizer embodies. The spook-narrator of the latter is very different from the American con-artist or huckster in that he emerges in tragedy and has few choices about how to confront a ruthless materialism. We are now living in another age of the "con," and governed by fraud. Our destruction of Vietnam ended up as a weird "con" as well- raising up hopes and patriotism even while going down in humiliating defeat.
What we arrive at in The Sympathizer is a recognition of the sanctity of living free, and here is where I find there is an outcome Nguyen alludes to but could not develop: healing. Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn has begun a spiritual and environmental movement that tries to be a powerful voice for such healing and wholeness and an antidote to racism (he was a peace colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr.), destruction, political hypocrisy, and torture: simple compassion. Viet Thanh Nguyen showed the need for this healing in his talk at Georgetown when he described the experience of his parents having to give up their store in L.A. to eminent domain- this outrage coming after surviving burnt villages and a horrific escape. Nguyen choked up at the podium, nearly crying publicly at the thought that his parents had to suffer more even after they achieved some peace and success.
Simple compassion. Even democracies don't cherish it. We have to hope that this can change. It was good to hear that Viet Thanh Nguyen now has a little boy.
Not so the energetic and skillful writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. His novel is deeply plotted through the perspective of the divided self, a hero/anti-hero, American/refugee, apparent supporter of the corrupt and autocratic South Vietnamese regime to which the U.S. clung as anti-communist, but a double agent as well for a communist regime that shared all the ruthlessness necessary to be conventionally revolutionary.
The comic satire of the book, especially around the racism of Hollywood and its hypocrisy about a war that for us was a "cause" but that for a whole people was utter destruction- well, it's brilliant.
The unnamed narrator, the General, the Auteur, are all like masked archetypes yet all too real.
The center of the book spiral down into the fateful duality of loyalty/betrayal, friend and enemy together going back to the ravaged country, and so the torture of "re-education" resonates deeply and cuts away the arrogance and cynicism that the narrator has used to escape from his own idealism and refusal to feel the sadness of loss. The narrator finds he had to continue to kill, not only in the U.S. to keep his cover and pretend to fight communism, but also to protect a friend. His confession- this book- is thus in the end about human rights and the right to be human, a right that neither capitalist nor communist flavors of authoritarianism can tolerate. The ability to kill and to suffer: this is what the narrator's divided self is left with. At the end he understands, too late perhaps, the value of life and knows at last why he must say "we will live."
Among the many literary echoes and allusions included by this English professor, what I found most frequently coming into mind was Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. This neglected work, overshadowed by the writer's famous Moby -Dick and Billy Budd, is about the divided America that the narrator of The Sympathizer embodies. The spook-narrator of the latter is very different from the American con-artist or huckster in that he emerges in tragedy and has few choices about how to confront a ruthless materialism. We are now living in another age of the "con," and governed by fraud. Our destruction of Vietnam ended up as a weird "con" as well- raising up hopes and patriotism even while going down in humiliating defeat.
What we arrive at in The Sympathizer is a recognition of the sanctity of living free, and here is where I find there is an outcome Nguyen alludes to but could not develop: healing. Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn has begun a spiritual and environmental movement that tries to be a powerful voice for such healing and wholeness and an antidote to racism (he was a peace colleague of Martin Luther King, Jr.), destruction, political hypocrisy, and torture: simple compassion. Viet Thanh Nguyen showed the need for this healing in his talk at Georgetown when he described the experience of his parents having to give up their store in L.A. to eminent domain- this outrage coming after surviving burnt villages and a horrific escape. Nguyen choked up at the podium, nearly crying publicly at the thought that his parents had to suffer more even after they achieved some peace and success.
Simple compassion. Even democracies don't cherish it. We have to hope that this can change. It was good to hear that Viet Thanh Nguyen now has a little boy.
