I Read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ‘The Sympathizer’
When I grabbed this book, I didn’t realize it was a Pulitzer winner. No, I picked it up because I breezed by a post on twitter that said Robert Downey Jr would co-star in the HBO/A24 retelling of the book. With those three entities backing it and a striking red cover, I bought right away and figured I would see how it shook out later.
I loved it.
The book, in its way, tells an urgent story in a strikingly trivial way, rolodexing through the events of the story of the main character as if he was flipping channels on a beat-up couch in a bachelor flat. It’s exactly that beige retelling of a story that has such massive and profound revelations that make it that much more believable. It feels like a young man living his way through gargantuan events, events that define and haunt many Vietnamese refugees to this day, in a starkly American and egotistical way. He sidestepped trauma and he still wants to see what happens if he offers the girl a cigarette. He double agents in a high ranking military official’s cabinet, but he still wants to have just one more beer with his life long friend. There is a connection here that, despite the difference in race and era and generation and scale, I relate to.
As we spiral further into the mind of the character, there are so many observations of America[ns] that hit me directly in the guilt node. Our laziness. Our fear of that which is different. Our stance on all things Other. Most importantly, the fact that we are guilty of standing by and doing nothing. We allow so much. And we deserve what we allow.
From Vietnam to America and back, the places we go feel genuinely ‘of our Earth’, if that makes sense to say. Nothing feels like they are being described with new eyes, but instead as if we are expected to have seen the movies, seen the documentaries, seen our own city streets. Everything is laced with familiarity. It all feels simultaneously like Home and like the place we’re escaping from. Even the Hollywood movie set feels like an experience we’ve all had and an experience we have overstayed.
The sex within is violent. The violence within is numb.
It’s a detachment that continues to feel comfortable, just like the flat, just like home, just like the nothing we try to change. As the events in the book play out, we are a passive observer as our narrator is a passive experiencer. Even while he leaves his fingerprints on everything, he maintains an illusion of all that’s occurring is floating just above the surface. We’re hypnotized enough to bear mute witness, but not quite enough to not feel excitement.
The calm is addictive.
Even while the ghosts of our discretions watch on.
The book splinters at a point, and it’s as if a cloth is pulled from over our heads. We are starkly tossed into a frigid pool of senses and we are forced to cope or subside, to endure torture and to bear witness to more than we had bargained for up to this point. The levy breaks.
In these ‘reviews’, I try not to summarize or describe plot too deeply. I’m asked: “What did you think?” not “What did you read?” So I will leave all of the specifics between the pages I’ve just put down. But I will say that when the book enters a new gear, it is clear that all of the light jazz and subtle composition was as deliberate a choice as any in all of fiction and it reveals the mastery of emotion, pacing and exposition of the author.
This is some heavy content, but I highly recommend it! It’s got a little war story, some sly youthful vigor and at the heart of it, some tightly and intelligently coiled emotional pay off.
