"The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Reading is often an exploration into "historical events I don't know much about," and The Sympathizer adds the Vietnam War to that category. However, appropriately for our times perhaps, The Sympathizer is much less about the war and more about the immigration experience. That the story takes place decades ago does little to change its message about the pull and push of assimilation and nationalism.

The narrator is a communist sleeper agent "hidden" in South Vietnam's special forces. He immigrates to America with the General and other South Vietnamese military, though he continues to act as a spy, sending intelligence back to his communist contact back home.

The novel is first and foremost a story of duality, of split loyalty (always a "sympathizer" with both sides). Beyond his communist/South Vietnamese split, the narrator (the Captain) is the son of a Vietnamese woman and a French Catholic priest. The pairing makes him a bastard, an outsider. Secondly, he's a Vietnamese man who went to college in America before immigrating with the army. In that way, he's also split between cultures, able to understand and communicate in both but rejected by each as being "too much" the other. Such "outsider-ness" wherever he goes makes the Captain a keen observer, less biased by personal loyalties. In that way he's able to criticize American culture, particularly its treatment of immigrants, but he also sees the failings of the Vietnamese (both the communists and South Vietnamese).

Anyone expecting a spy thriller will be disappointed, as there are a few deaths but relatively little daring action. Instead, we see a man at war with himself, pledging loyalty to the communists but spending most of his life with the South Vietnamese army. Ultimately, his only real loyalty appears to be to his childhood friends, Bon and Man, who themselves are on opposite sides.

I enjoyed The Sympathizer, though it was a slow read that took me several weeks. At times I could have used less introspection, especially because so much time was spent in the Captain's head that I began to have a hard time believing his continual commitment to the communist cause. He just didn't seem to have a fervent political ideology.

The ending was also somewhat disappointing. From the beginning, we know the Captain is retelling his story from a prison cell where he is being held by the communists, accused of betraying the cause. At the end of the novel, he is tortured into revealing a dark suppressed secret. It all felt very 1984--aiming for a similar gut-impact "truth"--but the message felt less sincere here.

In the end, I'd still recommend the novel, though both 1984 and the more recent Orphan Master's Son do some of the same things (and do them better, in my opinion). But its insight into the immigrant experience separates it from the other novels, and the beautiful prose makes reading worthwhile.