Spying with Sympathy and Love

I have a confession of my own to make about Viet Thanh Nguyen’s intriguing confessional, The Sympathizer. Tour de force that the novel is, its convoluted but compelling plot and my own animated desire to unravel its mysteries sent me on a spellbound chase, yearning for resolution and relief. In haste I raced past many of the book’s haunting images, failing even to absorb the full force of Nguyen’s biting critiques of American and Vietnamese cultures—images and critiques that leave us not only informed but also disturbed by his revelation of national blunders, ethnic shortsightedness, and, what seems to him, the inevitable, unchanging course of human history.

I intend, here at the outset, to call attention to the novel’s narrative power rather than my own initial, hasty reading. So taken was I by the first quarter of the book that I believed myself to be reading an actual confession, not of a fictive character but of Nguyen himself. I had begun the book, as I always try to do with new books, free of the cant of commercial criticism, the hype of blurb, and my own inherent preconceptions about literature—in what Gaston Bachelard calls a state of “non-knowing.” He reminds us in The Poetics of Space that for the serious reader “knowing must … be accompanied by an equal capacity for forgetting.” Acquiring this “phenomenological attitude” allows us, during our first reading, to be caught up in the movement of a book—passively participating and being entertained as a child might be. But Bachelard also reminds us that “after the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading.”

When I began the book, I did not know, had not bothered to see, that I had a novel in hand rather than a memoir. So the character himself, the unnamed narrator of a compelling spy tale, and the quality of the narration seized me, leaving me almost breathless in my pursuit of an ending—hooked as I was on verisimilitude and the thrill of the chase.

Eventually my pleasure was interrupted by a labored account of the filming of a war movie the narrator had been called on to advise, and I paused for awhile to begin the “creative work of reading.” But the tale itself, despite occasional extravagances and convolutions of plot, called me back into the chase. The fictive character, distinguished from his creator, still carried the day, still compelled me to care what became of him—and to care as well about what Nguyen would make of him for the novel’s sake. Across the novel Nguyen creates a dramatic sweep of human history grounded in a highly particularized tale of male camaraderie. The novel’s epic aspirations ride confidently atop the revelatory emotional currents generated by this unlikely male brotherhood.

A bastard born of the union of a French priest and a Vietnamese domestic, the narrator is, as the novel’s first sentence tells us, “a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” We learn quickly that he can see at least two sides to every issue, and we begin to know from his experiences that such a capacity complicates both his personal and his professional life. He lives and works among the sectarian, straddling, as he must, two cultures whose ideas have become blindingly dogmatic.

But trouble and complication are the narrator’s birthright. Educated in America before the fall of Saigon, he returns to Vietnam to serve eventually in the Army of South Vietnam where his western education, his sharp but subtle mind, and his capacity to accommodate stand him in good stead with the general he serves as advisor and confidant. Those qualities also help him fashion the mask of the subversive that he must inhabit to survive.

The tale proper begins in the midst of Saigon’s fall and takes the narrator, selected members of the general’s staff, and the general’s immediate family to America by way of Guam. They settle in California, into...