“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both sides.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen

A couple of weeks ago I sat in front of my fireplace eating s’mores. The fixings lay out on the mantel, the chocolate glistening from the heat, the marshmallows roasting on their spits. My partner and I hunkered down next to the fire and after we’d eaten our fill, sat to bask in the warmth of the open flame. It was the perfect evening to relax and wind down, so I picked up The Sympathizer to read a few chapters. A page went by. Another. And another. A resounding crack startled me so hard that I jumped up, dropping the book and losing my place. My partner laughed as I stared at the fire, which was sputtering and dying. An hour had gone by without me noticing. I’d been so immersed in the book I’d thought the log splitting in the heat had been a gunshot. 

I’d said I wanted something scary, right? Well, unintentionally, I’d gotten it. 

No matter where I was this month, The Sympathizer managed to suck me in. I found myself immersed on lunch breaks, in the car, at the pharmacy waiting for my booster and flu shots. Every single time I experienced that same timelessness, the unintentional holding of tension in my body. It’s not often we find books that can suck us in so absolutely; even rarer when we don’t even know the main character’s name. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is written in the form of a confession from an unnamed North Vietnamese spy. It opens on the fall of Saigon as the narrator leaves with the Americans under orders to continue living and spying on the important players abroad. The rest of the book meanders through the spy’s time in America, tackling everything from cultural commentary to assassination. The ever-looming threat of who this confession is for sneaks through the prose, heightening the sense of dread as the pages turn and the narrator plays for time. Altogether, The Sympathizer balances the mundane with the frightening by weaving and bobbing through intellectualism, unreality, and frankness. The high honors it’s received don’t do justice to the way this book swallows you, leaving you to stew inside its belly long after you’ve turned the last page. 

One way The Sympathizer grabs you is through its style. By framing the narrative as a confession, the author has immediately provided stakes: he is a captive and forced to admit his crimes. No matter how many tangents the narrator goes on, no matter how much he admits, the threat of his entrapment and the possibility of worse to come tinges each page with tension and unreliability. The train-of-thought writing style only enhances this feeling. Even when you think you know where a thought is going, you’ll find yourself knee-deep in a misadventure with a squid instead. You also learn a lot about the narrator– his education, his thought processes, his feelings– by how he writes about different subjects. It’s a captivating (heh) style that lends itself perfectly to the subject matter. 

That said, I have one gripe with the style, and that’s its accessibility. My brain doesn’t like audiobooks, so trudging through the pages with few or no paragraph breaks took real effort. There were times I had to resort to the old finger-on-the-page trick to keep my place, as there are no paragraph breaks for dialogue or changing action. The paragraph breaks happen when a thought has changed or when something significant enough has forced a new break, no sooner, no later. Those long paragraphs slowed down my reading speed, for better or worse. 

Difficulty aside, the density of the book allowed the ideas within to flourish. As the first few sentences indicate, The Sympathizer is a book of doubles. Double agents, double murders, double politics, double identities. The narrator, pulled apart by his love for his friends and country, wonders whether his ability to see things from both sides should even be considered a talent. “After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you– that is a hazard, I must confess.” The push and pull of opposing forces is constant, whether cultural or political, but instead of making the narrative divided, it instead creates something whole. By illuminating ideas and people on all sides and all manner of politics, it forms a coherent picture of humanity and our susceptibility to black-and-white thinking. 

The good/bad, right/wrong, left/right ideology that characters in the book swear by is one of the most interesting aspects of the novel. Underneath the obvious criticism of the Us vs. Them mentality is a nuanced take on the cognitive dissonance that extreme politics can lead to. As the narrator spends more time among the disgraced General and South Vietnamese veterans, these ex-military men who fought for the idea of freedom and democracy begin espousing harsh, nearly dictatorial politics. At one point, the General, annoyed by a reporter expressing a contrarian opinion, talks about how there should be no more than two opinions on a subject: “Even two choices may be one too many. One choice is enough, and no choice may be even better. Less is more, isn’t it?” He’s so desperate to see his ideology win in theory that he can’t see what he’s stooping to in practice. It’s an incredibly human trait, one we rarely see done well in novels, that Nguyen manages to pull off the entire book.

To say much more would end up spoiling something, and trust me when I say this book is better when gone in blind. I can’t recommend this book enough. If I had to give one warning, it’s to say that sometimes the density and the style can be tough to get through. Still, I’d say it’s worth it. If you’d like to hop into the spoiler section, now is the time to do so. If not, I hope you’ll join me next week as I introduce our penultimate book of 2022. While I have trouble believing that either of the books left for the year can top The Sympathizer, I suppose we’ll just have to read them together and see. Until then, happy reading and happy sipping!

The reflection above is intended for people who have not read or completed the book. For that reason, it is spoiler-free. The following section will discuss plot points and themes in the book not otherwise described in the summary or book blurb. That means there are SPOILERS BELOW. This is your warning.

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DOn’t like spoilers? turn around! last chance!

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The entire time I read The Sympathizer, a little voice nagged in the back of my head. “This is a confession,” it said, “What on Earth is he confessing?” The voice only grew louder as the book went on, the use of the title “Commandant” and other little clues letting me know he was captive in Vietnam. But he had been their spy; why would he be held prisoner there? Why would he not have been welcomed back with open arms?

It was only after the filming of the movie and the organization of the General’s small militia did I start to piece it together. Years of the narrator spying, watching, and waiting had amounted to, well, very little. What use did the Vietnamese government have for information about one ex-military General and his liquor store? What use would changing, even slightly, an American movie be to a still-new political regime organizing its country? Nothing the narrator provided, even the plan for the small militia to invade Vietnam, mattered to the heads of state. A small militia would have been destroyed regardless of their prior knowledge. The movie he helped make wouldn’t be shown in Vietnam. The people he killed weren’t people the Vietnam government cared about. All these events, as hard as the narrator tried, couldn’t matter in the long run. Thus, his confession was not about what he did but about what he didn’t. 

By the end of the book, when the dual feelings that have plagued the narrator are finally resolved from “I” to “We”, there is an understanding that revolutions are a constant effort and that power vacuums and systems create corruption regardless of ideology. The people trapped in those systems have limited mobility to actually create change and Nguyen highlights that struggle throughout the book. The General, unable to find a way back to Vietnam, does everything he can to launder money, gain political favor, and find willing soldiers, only to send a few men with a bottle of whiskey on a suicide mission. The narrator, sending thoughtful notes to the Auteur, fighting for the Vietnamese actors’ pay, and managing to gain speaking parts for the actors representing his country, still only makes a racist movie a little less racist and remains uncredited. Man, his face disfigured by napalm and put within a system that restricts his every movement, is unable to entirely save his friend who did nothing but serve him for years. Every individual stuck in a system tries to affect substantial change and fails, and the narrator’s espionage work was no different. 

That said, it’s not as if the book says there’s no point in trying. On an individual level, there is change. When the narrator kills the Crapulent Major, that sends ripples of change in his community. The same can be said for Sonny. That change is reflected in their ghosts who follow him, commentating on every move he makes. When he is leaving Vietnam again at the end of the book, he recognizes that individual change is what it takes to fight for freedom and life. The world and its systems are inescapable, but people aren’t. Everyone’s inherent, complex humanity isn’t. The question of what to do about that isn’t one the book is trying to answer but leaves for you to ponder. 

I may be a sucker for open-ended books that kick you in the pants and say, “Alright, this sucks, so what’re you going to do about it?” Even if the answer is, “I don’t know”, it can change the way you view things. Remembering that every person around me is a complicated mess of conflicting thoughts, feelings, and ideas and that our greatest responsibility is to each other? That’s why I read books. 

In closing: Damn. That was great. See y’all next week for hopefully another awesome book.