Viet Thanh Nguyen, _The Sympathizer_ (2)

ANOTHER LIKENESS TO Ellison's Invisible Man is the unmappability of the novel's take on the historical topic it addresses. On the question of the African-American in the U.S., the novel suggests, everyone--the Communist Party, the "race men," Tuskegee, obviously the whites--is wrong. (Petey Wheatstraw perhaps excepted.) So with the war in Viet Nam in The Sympathizer.

The French, whose main representative in the novel is the multiply-transgressing priest who is the narrator's father, were wrong.

The Americans, especially the intellectuals concocting the ideology behind the intervention, are wrong, as are their efforts to understand or represent the war, such as the film for which the narrator serves as a consultant, The Hamlet (which, by the way, does not seem all that much like Apocalypse Now, to me).  

The South Vietnamese, especially the corrupt general to whose staff the narrator is attached, seem obviously wrong, wrong in their loyalty to the French and then to the Americans, wrong in the corruption by which they enriched themselves, wrong in their brutality towards their own citizens, wrong in their clinging to fantasies of resuming power.

But the victorious Communist Vietnamese--it seems to me--also seem wrong. Do they have the right to subject the narrator to the interrogation and humiliation he undergoes in the novel's closing episodes? I don't know. Call me a liberal wuss unaware of how omelets are made by breaking eggs, but these pages were too reminiscent of Koestler-Solzhenitsyn-Kundera et al. for the new Viet Nam to seem like a victory for the people (cf. Novel Without a Name by Duong Thu Huong and The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh).

The authorities that break down the narrator are the same authorities, after all, whom Nguyen's parents felt they had to get away from, and presumably he grew up in a community for whom the Communists were the despised enemy. In "War Years," one of the most intriguing stories in The Refugees, we meet Mrs. Hoa, who seems at first to be a bullying, opportunistic scam artist, but by story's end seems a genuine, though obsessed, patriotic loyalist, for whom the cause is still not yet lost. She's wrong, too, but more sympathetic than the interrogators who grill The Sympathizer's narrator.