The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Published by Grove Press on April 2, 2015

A central theme of The Sympathizer is betrayal. From one perspective, the Communists betrayed the Vietnamese by promising independence and delivering poverty. From another perspective, the Americans betrayed the Vietnamese by promising liberation and delivering abandonment. Various characters in The Sympathizer betray their countries, their causes, their friends, and their selves. Some betrayals are political, others involve love, but all are betrayals of the heart and soul.

The Sympathizer tells a riveting story in elegant, clever prose. The novel begins at the end of the Vietnam War. Saigon will soon fall. The South Vietnamese president has fled to Taiwan. Americans have tired of supporting a war that cannot be won. The American government botched the final days of the war as badly as it botched the war itself, leaving behind thousands to whom transportation out of the country had been promised.

The Captain arranges an evacuation for the General he serves and some other lucky officers. Unbeknownst to the General, the Captain also serves as a Communist spy. He narrates the story from a prison cell, some years after the war's end. His narrative is his confession of guilt, but only near the novel's end do we learn why he is writing it.

After a harrowing evacuation to a refugee camp in Guam, the Captain is sent to America. As a beneficiary of American "aid" that cost him his country and nearly his life, he is understandably suspicious of the Amerasian life he is expected to live. Eschewing fish sauce in an effort to blend in, the refugees are divided and flung across the American map, the better to prevent them from organizing or benefitting from mutual support. The General's task in the United States is to assemble a ragtag Army that will renew the Vietnamese battle against Communism with the unspoken support and secret funding of certain American politicians and organizations.

Drawing upon sources as diverse as Ben Franklin and Mao, the Captain contrasts American and Vietnamese politics and culture. A job in the movie industry, where he makes futile efforts to educate filmmakers about the reality of life in Vietnam, gives the Captain a chance to reflect upon western stereotypes of Southeast Asians and the Americanization of the world.

While the Captain contemplates America's substitution of image for reality, he struggles to come to term with his own identity crisis. Thinking back to the life he left behind -- a life in which he pretended to serve one cause while aiding another -- the Captain wrestles with the clash between East and West and, in Vietnam, between North and South. He is torn between his longing for Vietnamese village life and his appreciation of flush toilets, TV dinners, and obedience to traffic lights.

In a life that is characterized by betrayal, one in which he has been the betrayer and the betrayed, the Captain's most difficult moments come when he is asked to betray his friends in order to maintain his anti-communist cover. The Sympathizer is not meant to be a thriller, but it creates dramatic tension in the moral dilemmas that the Captain repeatedly confronts. A plausible surprise near the end underlines the story's key theme. Much of the tone is light but powerful moments that reveal the horror of war from the Vietnamese perspective (North or South being irrelevant to horror) give the story its moral force.

While The Sympathizer is about betrayal, it is also about the corruption of ideals -- American ideals, French ideals, communist ideals, all extolling freedom and independence while denying those gifts to Vietnamese villagers who are never free to think and act in ways that offend their "protectors." While the novel is tangentially about the aftermath of the Vietnam War, its strength lies in its honest and complex examination of human nature, its recognition that people, regardless of national origin, are at once cruel and compassionate, cynical and hopeful, weak and strong, guilty and exonerated. Written in perfectly pitched prose, The Sympathizer works on every level: the story is fascinating, the characters are multidimensional, and the themes are profound.

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