April Book Report: The Sympathizer

Last month’s book report was a novel I read with a group of teachers considering a collection of books for an English course on identity in the United States.  I read this month’s book report novel for the same potential course and, like last month’s book, it was a simply splendid read.

The Sympathizer, written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, opens in Vietnam in April 1975, as Saigon is about to fall to the Viet Minh.  Our nameless narrator lives in Saigon, serving as the aid to a Viet Cong general.  He is arranging flights for the general and his allies on American transport out of Saigon in advance of the fall to the communists.  But things aren’t quite what they seem and our nameless narrator is a double agent, reporting to Viet Minh intelligence even as he works with the Viet Cong.

The narrator successfully escapes Saigon and finds himself in southern California, part of a refugee diaspora who’ve lost not only their home country but also their identity.  As the group transitions from the lives of prosperous senior leaders in once-sovereign south Vietnam to the lives of poor Vietnamese refugees in America, the narrator’s observations are cogent and critical, but also amusing.  The narrator speaks English well, having studied at an American college in the 1960s.  Mixed race himself (the son of French priest and a Vietnamese mother) he is somewhat comfortable as an American, though still an outsider.   But that is an identity with which he is familiar, having grown up in a Vietnamese society uncomfortable with his mixed-race status.

Large portions of the book feel like something of a jaunt through 1970s southern California, as our narrator lives an existence without making a life for himself.  Still in communication with his Viet Minh commander, he seeks a greater meaning for himself even as he becomes increasingly angry with the American understanding of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese people.  Holding on to the comforting notion that communist rule in his home country must be good for people, the novel races to a conclusion that will challenge that assumption.

Like Adichie’s Americanah, The Sympathizer provides the reader with critical observations of American life that are at-once amusing, pointed, and often quite uncomfortable.  Both narrators understand the United States and have a certain fondness for it, but neither has an unvarnished view.  Whereas both Adichie and the protagonist of her novel can travel back and forth between Nigeria and the United States, Nguyen does not enjoy that luxury.  A refugee who came to the United States at age 4, the author no longer has a home in his birth country.  He is American, for better or worse, and writes of that as an experience of feeling somewhat adrift from a home.  

As a writer, Nguyen seems to have talent to spare and the novel has his faculty with words and descriptions on full display.  The pages flow one into another and despite the difficult topics being explored, it reads easy.  The book is brilliant and as I read it, I found myself looking up essays, interview, and editorials with Nguyen.  He’s an author I’ll recommend to others and read again and again.