No-NoMan : Viet Thanh Nguyen’s nihilist masterpiece

In the essay “commitment,” first published in 1962, Theodor Adorno asserts, “It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” Adorno is making the point here, somewhat dramatically—though not, in light of the Holocaust informing it, hyperbolically—that the true measure of any work’s resistance to the everyday brutality of politics lies not in its content but rather in its form, since it is only through form that art can genuinely express human freedom. In his new novel The Committed, the Vietnamese American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen dramatizes Adorno’s thesis, offering readers a work of postcolonial theory in the guise of a crime novel, a book that resists the annihilating violence of our world with the power of what we might call its nihilist form.

Nguyen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and MacArthur “genius grant” awardee, has built a body of sophisticated, learned, and wickedly ironic work, including his monograph on Asian Americanliterature,Race and Resistance; his study of the cultural memory of what Vietnamese call the American War, Nothing Ever Dies; his short story collection, The Refugees; and his expansive and satirical war novel, The Sympathizer. That novel transformed Nguyen from a successful academic into a literary celebrity and brought him numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

The Sympathizer’s dynamic mélange of satire, pastiche, historical drama, suspense, and violence has received voluminous critical attention, with many readers remarking especially on Nguyen’s knowing references to and reworkings of passages from canonical works such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Part of what astonishes about the novel is the way its heterogeneous sources and complex, polyvalent shifts in tone and register are forged into a single, compelling narrative through the voice of its highly self-conscious, sometimes unhinged, and often quite funny narrator, who introduces himself (and the book’s central dilemma) in the novel’s often-quoted opening lines: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”

The narrator is a captain in the South Vietnamese secret police, but that role is a cover for his deeper identity as a Communist spy. This doubleness is not only internal but also structural, figured through the narrator’s relationship to two blood brothers: Bon, the soul of goodness, a loyal, down-to-earth, true-hearted tough guy and like our hero a soldier of the Republic; and Man, the thinker, the conniver, and like our hero a Communist spy. Over the course of the novel, which adroitly inverts the archetypal plot of the war novel, the narrator and Bon flee the fall of Saigon for Los Angeles, only to return to Vietnam as part of a quixotic anti-Communist infiltration. The infiltration goes awry: their team is ambushed and killed, and the two men are captured, then tortured in a reeducation camp on the orders of a figure called the Commissar, who turns out to be the narrator’s old comrade, Man. (Along the way, the narrator also works as an adviser on location in the Philippines for a film satirically resembling Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.)

The Committed is written in the same voice as The Sympathizer, and it picks up where that novel left off. But The Committed is more than a sequel: it is a continuation, completion, and refraction of the earlier novel’s themes, a masked and polyglot confession, an attempt to express the impossibility of living ethically in a society that persists only through the suffering of fellow human beings. A novel of ideas in the tradition of Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey and Ellison’s Invisible Man, The Committed dramatizes the situation faced by anyone on the American left today, particularly those who insist, “Something must be done!”

More specifically, The Committed explores the paradoxical role of identity in revolutionary politics—how identity is necessary yet limiting, and always a...