In this newsletter, we look at Viet Thanh Nguyen’s use of contradiction in pursuit of truth in his powerful first novel, the California Book Club’s January selection
Dustin Snipes
Whether or not you’ve attended one of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book events, his books make clear their author’s personal fascination with words and their layers of meaning. When I met Nguyen at an event at North Figueroa Bookshop last year, this aspect of his personality was first evident to me in the way he signed my copy of The Sympathizer, the California Book Club’s January selection: “For Maisie—My Sympathies!” In this simple, playful inscription, he managed to capture the term sympathy in all its dimensions: solidarity and validation, pity and encouragement, imperfect consolations. But since sympathy refers to sharing another person’s emotions or experience, it also can have more-conspiratorial connotations, depending on whom the concern is extended to. Meanwhile, in the realm of medicine, sympathetic refers to the part of the nervous system known as fight-or-flight. In any case, unlike its sibling empathy, whose prefix, “em,” denotes within, sympathy is one layer removed from the experience it affirms: with the emotion or condition, not within it.
These themes of allegiance and shared suffering—to fight or to flee, to be with or within another’s experience—form the highly charged terrain of Nguyen’s brilliant debut novel. In the book, the unnamed narrator is first a sympathizer insofar as he is a spy for the Communist resistance in Vietnam. But characteristically, Nguyen uses the term to raise an interesting question of where the self ends and the other begins. This is the double-edged connotation of the novel’s title: sympathy as both feeling for (and with) someone who is not yourself but also disguising yourself so as not to betray your covert loyalties.
We see this duality of meaning not only in the novel’s themes but through the structure of Nguyen’s sentences. He frequently upends the primary thought of a sentence with a puzzling clause that leads to a more nuanced understanding. Take this description of the General, the main party to whom the narrator feigns allegiance: “He was a sincere man who believed in everything he said, even if it was a lie, which makes him not so different from most.” Here, the narrator complicates the notion of sincerity, adding that it can include disregard for truth or fact. We find a similar riddle in his description of the mystical trio of prostitutes he encounters at an evacuation center, who promise “another kind of goodness altogether, the bad kind.”
But more than providing amusing insights into his characters and human nature, Nguyen’s play with paradox in the book highlights inherent flaws in the U.S. political system. Nguyen writes of the American college students’ crippling awareness that “they were citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it,” and on the following page, the narrator describes himself as “one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid.” These are the contradictions that the narrator is keen to identify because of his status as a sympathizer; on an existential level, he’s interested in several contrasting things being true at once, as he claims from the very first page of the book, calling himself “a man of two minds.”
Planting feet in more than one world is not only the narrator’s fundamental mode of existence—key to his status as a spy—but also, he claims, a function of his mixed race, as the “love child” of a “Vietnamese girl and a French priest.” Our unnamed narrator is confounded by the overwhelming resistance to contradiction that he finds in both of the worlds he surveils. It’s ultimately the embrace of seemingly incompatible ideas that leads to the book’s resolution: what the narrator calls the “two-faced truth,” described (in one of his quintessential sentences) as “the best kind of truth, the one that meant at least two things.” Nguyen’s language, then, takes up the same project as the narrator’s, to be “able to see any issue from both sides”—the sentences themselves as double-edged swords, opposite claims that amount to a truth. Both in its prose and its subject, The Sympathizer proposes an alternative mode of understanding the world: “But what is more revolutionary,” the narrator speculates, “than helping one’s enemy and his kin? What is more radical than forgiveness?” If the systems around the narrator inquire, How can something be two contrasting things? this book retorts, How can it not be?•
