The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Easily one of the best books I’ve read this year, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, The Sympathizer, is in a category of its own making.  Written by a Vietnamese-American, the novel provides an insight seldom found in western accounts of the Vietnam War.  As a social critique, the novel shrewdly dissects western notions of the “Orient” without coming across as heavy-handed or preachy, while still allowing itself to be both a moving and entertaining story.  The tale, which reads as a first-person, typed confession, revolves around a Vietnamese double-agent, introduced to the reader as simply the Captain, an operative of the North Vietnamese posing as an aide to a South Vietnamese general.  As the fall of Saigon becomes imminent, he must choose to continue his assignment, maintaining his posting with the general as he is evacuated and settled in California, or stay behind to witness the long-anticipated communist victory.  Torn between his revolutionary fervor, and his secret love of American Literature and academics, the choice is ultimately made for him by his blood-brother and superior operative.  The Captain arrives in California saddled with guilt, homesickness, and not a small amount of relief.  Having earned his degree studying abroad at a small Californian university, and as a lover of American literature, our Captain finds some of the capitalist trappings a tad less repugnant than he should.  In addition to participating in a forced mass assimilation of Vietnamese refugees (the Vietnamese were deliberated settled in disparate communities across the United States to discourage the formation of independent cultural enclaves similar to those developed by the Chinese), he must come to grips with some of his own questionable acts and memories. He also must continue to act at the behest of the general in his plot to reinvigorate an expatriate South Vietnamese army, itself populated by generals and other war heroes, who in their new roles as clerks, manual laborers, and janitors are all too eager to recapture the esteem and status of the their glory days.  In the end, the Captain must decide once again to stay or to go, and his decision and its repercussions are both exhilarating and dreadful.