Critic Anna E. Clark examines Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, dubbing it a thriller of ideas.
Anne E. Clark

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer belongs to a prized little subgenre of fiction: the thriller of ideas. The novel every brainy raconteur and hip ethics professor wishes they could write, the thriller of ideas effortlessly straddles convention and experimentation, suspense and reflection, activity and thought. It embraces all the traditional pleasures of a good yarn—rich characterization, riveting plot—while alchemizing them into the stuff of erudite philosophical treatises. How should we live? What do we owe to others? How do we act when every option seems corrupt? The Sympathizer, like the spy fiction of Graham Greene it liberally references, wrestles with such questions by playing with narrative to exploit its distorting and revelatory capacities. In this novel, discerning how to be, what to believe, means first understanding the stories we tell about ourselves.
To see what makes the thriller of ideas such a peculiar beast, it’s helpful to define some features of the novel of ideas, that unwieldy genus to which it belongs. As novelist and critic Mary McCarthy points out, the category is haunted by its exclusions—after all, what is a novel that is not of ideas? Yet, despite its tautological hazards, the phrase captures the penchant of certain novels for wearing their engagement with the business of thinking on their proverbial sleeves. Recall, for example, three archetypes of the field, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. All demonstrate what literary theorist Sianne Ngai notes as the predisposition of novels of ideas—a knack for seeming less like novels than dialogues, essays, or plays. Filled with direct philosophical speech, they resist the spell of immersiveness, making story second to explication. To function as a novel of ideas, then, a novel has to be, well, less novelly. Its enjoyments tilt intellectual, molded by concepts rather than driven by plot and character.
In contrast, the thriller of ideas—and The Sympathizer in particular—excels not at torquing the novel away from its essence but at repurposing it into the means of moral inquiry. Fittingly, Nguyen accomplishes this feat partly by borrowing the conceit of narrative-as-testimony first used by Enlightenment-era novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. Writing in a period when the realist novel, in its infancy, had to prove its value, these authors playfully framed stories as “real” accounts, tackling theories of truth and agency head-on.
In The Sympathizer, the unnamed narrator, a double agent for the Communist North Vietnamese embedded as a captain in the South Vietnamese National Police, gives a kind of testimony that is half confession, half memoir, a narrative container that excuses some didactic asides while maintaining the illusions of story and character. We wonder about the impetus for this semicoerced tale, but the resulting suspense keeps us within the story rather than distracted by its artifice. “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” the double agent begins. “Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.” Like any good novel of ideas, The Sympathizer isn’t shy about making its intellectual preoccupations known. Conveniently, they are, like our narrator, Janus-faced, as much the raw material of suspense as cerebral puzzle.
Confession, too, is especially helpful for embedding moral ambivalence into a thriller’s inevitable turn toward violence, particularly when it is perpetrated by the protagonist himself. Though The Sympathizer’s narrative fabric is loose, billowed by wry asides and reminiscences, it rests on tent poles of pointed brutality. “Even as a secret policeman…I never used violence insomuch as I allowed others to use it in front of me,” the narrator tells us, a distinction that grows increasingly questionable as his willingness to kill increases.
In flirting with ambivalence and action, Nguyen’s novel recalls another progenitor of the thriller of ideas, Albert Camus’s The Stranger, a work that reads like The Sympathizer’s spiritual prequel (Camus himself gets a shout-out in Nguyen’s pages, though only as a foil to a snifter of brandy—a more expedient way of confronting existential questions, we’re told). Set in French Algeria, a colonialist context that parallels The Sympathizer’s own Vietnam, The Stranger hinges on a murder committed by its narrator, the profoundly disaffected young settler Meursault, who, tangentially ensnared in a companion’s domestic conflict, shoots an Arab man on the beach. Near-delirious from the day’s heat and seeing the flash of a blade, “I squeezed my hand around the revolver,” he tells us. The impetus behind this action is obscure—accident? self-defense?—but the next moment brings a kind of clarity. “I shook off the sweat and sun.… Then I fired four more times at the motionless body.” Meursault’s killing of “the Arab” (the only appellation the novel gives this victim) culminates the protagonist’s knee-jerk participation in almost all the major events of his existence. In his detached account, his four shots read like a succumbing to larger forces, their momentum initiated long ago—and as the only decisive thing he’s ever done.
The Sympathizer’s loquacious narrator may bear little resemblance to the terse Meursault, but The Stranger’s portrayal of the Arab’s murder offers a kind of blueprint for the double agent’s own reflexive initiation into direct violence. He, too, obscures his culpability, trading sweat and sun for the obfuscating abstractions of Marx and Hegel. Mulling an impending crime, he equivocates. Was it “a simple act of barbarism or a complex one that advanced revolutionary civilization? It had to be the latter, a contradictory act that suited our age.” And yet, later in the novel, when such “contradictory act[s]” occur, they are as visceral as those four hard shots from Meursault’s revolver. “I had stopped breathing, my heart had ceased beating,” says the double agent, recalling one of his crimes. “Click, clack went the gun, one bullet behind the ear, another in the skull.” The violence here is as unambiguous as the narration is equivocal. Is it sympathy or self-delusion that makes the double agent ascribe the signs of death—stopped breath, silenced heart—not to his victim but to himself? Is the agential gun a symbol of his own detachment or the systemic forces that have conscripted him? And what does it say about us, the breathless, heart-stopped audience, if, in answer to such questions, we want to say, “All of the above”?
The thriller of ideas is at its best when, having worked its spell, it holds our own reactions up for moral scrutiny. Nguyen’s novel is an exemplar of the genre for its ability to do just this so cannily. We, too, are its sympathizers, charmed by our narrator’s wit and intellect, eager to read in his ironic reportage evidence of his ethical qualms. Thus, when we are finally confronted with his admissions of cruelty and cowardice, we have to wonder whether, under similar circumstances, we would have done otherwise.
It is this capacity of the thriller of ideas to spur us to feel the perilous nature of our own convictions that makes it work as both novel and treatise. The Sympathizer understands this well. In its narrator’s passionate ambivalence, it makes a case that we are our ideas and emotions, instincts and convictions, always trapped and also always capable of choice. In other words, it says, we are all inexorably contradictory but, perhaps, like the thriller of ideas itself, none the poorer for it.