Viet Thanh Nguyen, _The Sympathizer_ (1)

THIS BEING A novel about Viet Nam and spies, Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke are the inevitable comparisons, but I found myself thinking of Jennifer Egan's Look at Me, because that novel too managed to present itself convincingly  as literary fiction while delivering some of the juiciness of genre fiction. Look at Me juggled a variety of points of view   and raised sophisticated questions about identity, but it also had a terrorist, a glimpse of the high fashion world, and mystery and suspense elements. The Sympathizer incorporates a wealth of allusions to American lit (Asian-American in particular) and rigorous thinking about empire and representation, but it also has assassinations, ghosts, and Chandleresque metaphorical flights. Like Look at Me, it's an intellectual ride you can take to the beach.

A similar doubleness haunts the narrator. He is a trusted insider in the South Vietnamese government, but he is really working for the North. He is American-educated, mistakable for a native speaker of English over the phone, but thought of as an alien by the Americans he lives with (the novel begins with the fall of Saigon, and for most of it the narrator is living in Southern California). But the Vietnamese exiles do not see him as Vietnamese; his mother was Vietnamese, but his father was a French priest, and the exiled general whom he serves (and spies on) berates him for his interest in the general's daughter--he's a bastard and a métis, after all. Like Ellison's Invisible Man, to whom the novel's opening alludes, the narrator both is and is not what he seems to be.

A reader might also recall Humbert Humbert, for the (unnamed) narrator's text is a confession written in captivity--but perhaps he is really more like Rubashev in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, for he is writing his confession because ordered to by his fellow-revolutionaries, who have imprisoned him. He joined (still as a double agent) a commando group of South Vietnamese veterans who have landed in Laos to launch the counter-revolution, and when they are captured after a brief interlude of nearly comic ineptitude, the narrator, rather than being feted as an undercover hero, has to submit to the rigors of re-education--hence his confession. Like Rubashev, he has to understand, or pretend to understand, how he, a revolutionary, has failed the revolution.

Here too was a doubleness. Is Nguyen depicting another case of a revolution devouring its children? Is the interrogation and discipline the new Communist government subjects the narrator to totalitarian persecution or justice?