Duncan White reviews The Committed for The Daily Telegraph.
When Viet Thanh Nguyen published his debut novel, The Sympathizer, in 2015, it was so good it immediately made him a major literary force, winning the Pulitzer Prize (among a litany of other awards) and a place on university syllabi across America. Narrated by a communist spy embedded in the Vietnamese exile community in California in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, The Sympathizer was a story of loyalty and betrayal, by turns comic and brutal, that subverted all expectations. Now, with The Committed, Nguyen delivers the much-anticipated sequel – and cements his reputation as one of America’s most important novelists.
Once again, he messes inventively with genre. If The Sympathizer was ostensibly a spy novel, then The Committed is a gangland thriller. Set in Paris in the 1980s, it features a turf war between Vietnamese and Algerian outfits, replete with knife fights, gun battles, kidnaps and much snorting of “the remedy”. Yet ideas are never far from the surface, and in fact breach frequently and spectacularly in extended riffs on the postcolonial condition, the bien pensant racism of the French elite, American Cold War imperialism and philosophical questions of when and how violence might be justified.
As you might expect from the title, there is much rumination on what it might mean – and cost – to be committed to something: a friend, a country, an idea. It’s the kind of novel where the bouncer guarding a brothel whiles away his boredom by reading Frantz Fanon.
That Nguyen can pull off this audacious marriage between gang violence and novel of ideas is down to the brilliance of his nameless narrator, a spy and a killer, the orphan son of a French priest (sacré bleu!) and a Vietnamese mother. He is strident, self-pitying, contradictory, perceptive, sentimental, unashamedly intellectual and furiously funny, a kind of post-colonial Portnoy. (He might not, like Portnoy, have interfered with a piece of liver, but he has had his way with a “lascivious squid”.) The closest we come to finding out his name is in the first chapter, when he arrives at Charles de Gaulle airport after escaping a refugee camp where he has been held for two years. His passport identifies him as Vo Danh, but that, it transpires, simply means “unnamed” in Vietnamese. He is a literary cousin of the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, refusing to be pinned down.
Like The Sympathizer, this novel takes the form of a written confession. “I may no longer be a spy or a sleeper, but I am most definitely a spook,” the narrator tells us. “How can I not be, with two holes in my head from which leaks the black ink in which I am writing these words.”
Is he really dead? If so, why is he bleeding ink? He implies that he has been shot by Bon, the blood brother with whom he arrived destitute in Paris, but from whom he has kept his biggest secret: spying for the communists. Bon’s father was executed by communists, and his wife and child died during the fall of Saigon, so his anti-communism is absolute. As both Bon and the narrator are drawn into the Paris underworld, the clock is ticking on the narrator’s hidden past.
If there is one caveat about The Committed, it is that it is very much a sequel. To read this without having first read The Sympathizer is possible, and there are passages in which Nguyen is forced to catch the reader up on events from the earlier novel, but these moments of exposition feel like a weakness, a concession to narratorial compromise on an otherwise uncompromising journey. And even with these explanations, the complexity of the relationships, the echoes of earlier events and the emotional heft of the novel will be watered down for those who have not read The Sympathizer. So, the simple solution is just to read both, back-to-back. Two contemporary classics for your bedside table from one review. Not a bad return.
