The Committed

Starred review from January 25, 2021
The sequel to Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sympathizer is an exhilarating roller-coaster ride filled with violence, hidden identity, and meditations on whether the colonized can ever be free. The fractured, guilt-ridden narrator, a veteran of the South Vietnamese Army, where he was a mole for the communists, goes by his assumed name Vo Danh, which means “nameless.” He has survived reeducation and a refugee camp and is now living in early 1980s Paris, along with his devoutly anti-communist “blood brother,” Bon, who doesn’t know he was a double agent. Vo Danh starts selling hashish for a Viet-Chinese drug lord called the Boss, whom he and Bon met in their refugee camp. The gig has him more vexed about the crime of capitalism than that of drug dealing, and he’s not expecting a turf war. Indeed, he’s chagrined to discover his rivals, French Arabs who share with him a legacy of colonization, want him dead. Meanwhile, there are opportunity for socializing, revenge, and reunions at the Vietnamese Union. The book works both as sequel and standalone, with Nguyen careful to fold in needed backstory, and the author’s wordplay continues to scratch at the narrator’s fractured sense of self (“I am not just one but two. Not just I but you. Not just me but we”). Pleasures abound, such as the narrator’s hair-raising escapes, descriptions of the Boss’s hokey bar (“This was the new and modern Orient, where opium was both cool and quaint, chic and cute, addictive and undemanding”), and thoughtful references to Fanon and Césaire. Nguyen continues to delight. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc.

May 1, 2020

In this bated-breath follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, Nguyen's eponymous protagonist lands in France after his unfortunate reeducation by a former best friend. He loves Paris and finds his groove with a bunch of left-wing intellectuals and politicians, but his predominant means of support--dealing drugs--has its drawbacks. And his two closest friends have polar-opposite worldviews.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2020
The conflicted spy of Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer (2015) returns, embroiled in Paris' criminal underworld. Embroiled in a lot of French philosophy too: The novel's unnamed narrator is motivated as much by the works of Sartre, Fanon, Kristeva, and de Beauvoir as by the drug-dealing crime boss he works for in Paris. In the previous novel, the narrator was a communist spy who'd left his native Vietnam and attempted to infiltrate Hollywood. Here it's 1981, and he's made his way to France, his father's homeland, to restart along with his "best friend and blood brother" (but ideological counterweight), Bon. Through a contact from his days as a spy, he starts selling hashish, taking over for a dealer who seems to have gone missing. But this would-be-quiet sideline gets him roped into working for a crime boss managing a drug and prostitution ring. (It's run out of "the worst Asian restaurant in Paris," and he proves his loyalty by cleaning the place's beyond-disgusting toilet.) The pages are rife with prostitutes, drugs (the narrator partakes often of the "remedy," i.e., cocaine), and, in the late pages, gunplay. But, as in The Sympathizer, Nguyen keeps the thriller-ish aspects at a low boil, emphasizing a mood of black comedy driven by the narrator's intellectual crisis. If communists and capitalists alike are responsible for mass cruelty, where should he throw his support? How much does his half-French parentage implicate him in the oppression of his home country? And what's the value of picking a side anyway? "For most of my life, I had constantly and desperately believed in something, only to discover that at the heart of that something was nothing," he writes. Though the storytelling around this gets convoluted (and strange, when a set of henchmen called the Seven Dwarfs enters the plot), Nguyen is deft at balancing his hero's existential despair with the lurid glow of a crime saga. A quirky intellectual crime story that highlights the Vietnam War's complex legacy.

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January 1, 2021
Six years since his first novel, The Sympathizer, won the Carnegie Medal and the Pulitzer Prize, Nguyễn is back with the much-anticipated second installment in a planned trilogy in which the same unreliable narrator adds another few hundred pages to the already 367-page confession he keeps in the false bottom of his leather duffel. Our anti-hero manages to record his French exploits since living in Paris with his blood-brother Bon, convincing whoever asks that he's in France to experience his (priest-who-impregnated-his-teen-housekeeper) father's homeland. At 37, he has survived senseless war, double spying for both the Communists and the CIA, tortuous reeducation, and refugee camps, to land on the couch of an aunt who isn't his relative, while working in an Asian restaurant with less-than-toothsome fare and supplying intellectuals with mind-altering substances. Working for the Boss almost gets him killed, but the retaliatory violence just leaves him feeling highly conflicted. Undeniably erudite and culturally fluent as ever--interweaving history, philosophy, political treatise, theology, even literary criticism--Nguyễn effortlessly enhances the story with snarky commentary, sly judgments, and plenty of wink-wink-nod-nod posturing to entertain committed readers.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Fans of The Sympathizer will appreciate the many delight-inducing connections embedded here, but The Committed also works as a strong stand-alone.

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