Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is the California Book Club’s January 2025 selection.
By David L. Ulin and Photo by Dustin Snipes. Published: Dec 12, 2024
Dustin Snipes
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 debut novel, The Sympathizer, is groundbreaking in all sorts of ways. Opening in Saigon in 1975, and narrated by an unnamed North Vietnamese double agent, it is a book of diaspora, tracing the character’s refugee experience in the United States. It is also a necessary reimagining of the literature of the Vietnam War. To make that work, Nguyen adapts the mechanics of genre to his own ends. The Sympathizer won not only the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction but also the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. It is, in other words, a mash-up in the finest sense.
Nguyen and I met via Zoom. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You were trained as an academic. How did you come to write The Sympathizer?
I grew up in a household where my brother was the first to go to college and I was the second. The word professor never came up. I fell into that because I found I was good at being a scholar, and I imagined being a professor as my day job. As for The Sympathizer, it’s not a novel I could have written when I was 20 or 30, so it came along at the right time, when I had acquired enough fictional tools and maturity and political or theoretical knowledge to write the kind of novel I wanted to write. The Sympathizer is hopefully an entertaining spy and war novel. But underneath, there’s all this other machinery.
In the United States, there’s a cultural resistance to art that aspires to the political.
I cared about the technical and narrative aspects of writing. But I also cared about politics and history and theory and philosophy. My question was: Why are these not considered? I had to figure that out on my own. In order for the novel to be entertaining and also to have commentary about racism and refugees and war and imperialism, I had to create a character who was capable of talking about those things. That’s actually a theoretical move, because how you make your character provides the worldview for your fiction. It was crucial to have a character who had ideological thinking.
Prior to The Sympathizer, you spent 20 years working on the stories that would appear in your collection The Refugees.
Even as a younger writer, I understood my ambitions and what I wanted to accomplish, but I did not have the artistic capacity. I had to find my way through. Even though I knew realism was a limited mode for me, it’s still hard to write a realistic story. So I had to learn how to do that. I had to learn the rules.
Can you elaborate on the limitations of realism?
The Sympathizer has many realistic elements, but I always thought of it as modernist. If it was a realistic novel, the ending would not look the way it does. For three-quarters of the novel, you have a first-person narrative. Then, you’re immersed in the character’s subjectivity as he is tortured. That’s where realism becomes insufficient. Modernism means you describe the sensations of being tortured. You make the character and the reader inhabit that experience. The Sympathizer evokes the tropes of realism, including those of genre, to trap readers in their own expectations.
Let’s talk about genre. What does it offer?
The basic answer is that genre is entertaining. I grew up reading lots of genre. Literary fiction, at least in the United States, tends to be shy of talking about power, whereas fantasy, science fiction, spy novels, war novels—they’re all about power. This shows readers are capable of dealing with these subjects, but they like the insulation of entertainment. I find that separation interesting.
Why do you write?
My origin story is my refugee experience and surviving a war I don’t remember but nevertheless was present for, and then growing up as a refugee in the United States and watching what my parents went through as survivors and refugees trying to make a living and literally save their families. My solace was the library. What this provided was not simply an escape from reality but the possibility of thinking about the imagination as a way of creating a new reality that would transform me as well. Writing has been my way of grieving for everything that has happened to my family, to my parents, to all the people I claim kinship and affiliation with.•
Join us on January 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Nguyen will sit down with CBC host John Freeman to discuss The Sympathizer. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
Alta | Issue 30 | Q&A: A Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen
