Author Viet Thanh Nguyen, special guests Don McKellar and Rumaan Alam, and host John Freeman engaged in a rousing discussion of The Sympathizer, voice, adaptation, and belonging.
You will never forget it. It will mess with the way you think in the best possible ways,” California Book Club host John Freeman said in praise of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer, the CBC January selection, which takes on the Vietnam War (called the American War by the Vietnamese). After Nguyen joined him on Zoom, Freeman commented that the narrator of the novel, a Communist double agent who is telling his story in the form of a confession, is “always making judgments about what’s possible, who’s doing what, what’s at risk for him, but he is, as the book goes along—he has this sort of tidal wave of regret and guilt to some degree.” Freeman asked Nguyen to talk a little about his own background, his “moral upbringing” and what instilled that in him, and what gave him the ability “to feel those complexities,” explaining, “Just because you can tell a story doesn’t mean you can set a moral sphere and orbit the way that you have here.”
Nguyen credited the public library for the opportunity to be “steeped in stories and in feelings in that way,” which taught him intuitively the “demands of empathizing with characters.” But another important part of his life, he said, was his parents, refugees who were devout Catholics; they sent him to Catholic school almost his entire childhood and made him go to a Catholic church and Sunday school. While Nguyen emerged an atheist, he said he came out of that upbringing with a sincere conviction in the idea of social justice that biblical narratives taught: “That sense of justice, of the necessity for taking care of the weaker, of empathizing with the losers and so on.” He believes that this sense of justice became embedded in him and that UC Berkeley, where he studied as an undergraduate, offered a secular version of this kind of social justice, which “instantly allowed me to take the religious part of my upbringing and turn it into a more secular, materialist, literary, cultural version of it.”
Nguyen explained that he wanted to write The Sympathizer because he’d grown up thinking that his life had taken a particular direction because of his parents and their ability to escape from Vietnam. “But what if I’d been born earlier?” he said. “What if we had not been able to leave Vietnam? How would I confront the political, moral choices that an earlier generation had to confront, as Vietnamese people had dealt with colonialism and the presence of the French and the Americans and had to make difficult, terrible choices? Would I have been capable of making those choices, and if I had made those choices, what kinds of ambivalences and regrets would I have had, even if I felt I had done the right thing? So the novel is really born from that, from my trying to answer those sets of questions for myself.”
Don McKellar, the co-showrunner of the HBO adaptation of The Sympathizer, joined Nguyen in conversation. He said that his biggest concern in adapting the book was the “voice of the book, which is so distinctive…. It’s essential to the seductive power of the book.” He pointed out that the narrator “draws you in; he’s a bit of a raconteur.” Nguyen said that his biggest concern in adaptation was working within the big machinery of Hollywood. McKellar noted that those making the show wanted to keep the Vietnamese language alive and present, and they knew that would be a challenge, in addition to challenges they’d face at the diplomatic level. They had tried to shoot in Vietnam but were disappointed to find that they couldn’t, and they weren’t sure whether they were being strung along by the Vietnamese government. The team adapting the work also couldn’t officially broadcast the show in Vietnam.
Still, one of the chief aims, McKellar said, was to “show Americans the side of the [Vietnam] war they haven’t seen.” Nguyen questioned whether Americans want to see it and noted that it’s still challenging as a work of entertainment for those who don’t want entertainment to be provocative. McKellar said, “That edge is what makes it relevant, and that is, on one hand, what makes it interesting and, I think, provocative for people to take the challenge, but that’s also off-putting for people who don’t. It’s a double-edged sword.”
Novelist and critic Rumaan Alam, who’d written an excellent review of The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer, joined the conversation. Alam commented that it was daunting to write about those two books, given that they are in conversation with some of the biggest texts in the American canon (Catch-22, Invisible Man, The Crying of Lot 49). He also noted the sense of play in both novels. “It struck me as one of the funny ironies of colonialism itself as a project…you mastering a form inherited from Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth…as your tool to talk about the nation that is your home.”
Nguyen responded, “I thought that literature was my way of belonging to the United States.” He pointed out that many of the canonical writers had used the novel as a way of exploring themselves and their personas as well as the very idea of belonging, whether to the nation, to the culture, or to literature as a whole.
“The older I get, and the more kinds of crimes that I see the United States has committed, both in the past but in the present,” Nguyen explained, “the less enthused I am about this whole idea of nation-state, belonging to citizenship. But belonging to literature, belonging to art, belonging to my community of fellow writers and readers—that, to me, is enormously powerful, and that can never be a bad relationship.”