Viet Thanh Nguyen, _The Sympathizer_ (3): PMLA

THE NOVEL GOT a platform-full of prizes, including the Pulitzer, but what tipped me over into finally picking it up was the ten (10!) essays on it (and on Nguyen's other fiction and non-fiction) in the March 2018 issue of PMLA (Publications of the Modern Languages Association). I can't remember PMLA ever before giving this kind of endorsement to any contemporary literary work.

I cannot remember any novel getting so swift an elevation to the canon since Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987). Not even Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) was picked up this fast.

What's going on?

Let's begin by conceding that The Sympathizer and Beloved are excellent novels. But a great many excellent contemporary novels do not get fifty pages in PMLA, so we have reason to look at other factors.

Beloved was squarely in the center of a very hot intersection in academic literary studies (feminism, race, magic realism, re-casting the historical novel) and made a great classroom read (pace Stanley Crouch). It matched its moment, and there we were, instant classic. I taught it several times in the late 80s and early 90s, and it always profoundly affected the students.

It may have made a difference that Morrison was an academic insider and knew exactly where the maximum intellectual energy was circulating in the mid-eighties; given the strength of the book, we'd have to admit that she directed that energy as well as detecting it, had a lot to do with where that energy went.

Is this also true of The Sympathizer? Like Invisible Man, it's an extremely sophisticated take on identity; it is also sophisticated on boundaries, on cultural imperialism, on power, on degrees of complicity. Another hot intersection. That it is a powerful match for its moment is the theme that subtends the whole section in PMLA, though the authors there engage different aspects of the novel and the pieces are...well...not of equal interest.

It all depends, I'd say, on how many syllabuses The Sympathizer lands on. It's a bit longer then Beloved, but at the same time a bit easier to read. There are no leading female characters and relatively little about gender, which diminishes its chances, but there is quite a bit about rape (real and represented) as an instrument of terror and power, which would enhance its classroom impact. There is also, undeniably, a certain beach-read juiciness (guys getting whacked)--higher score on that front than Beloved has, actually--and that can't hurt.

At the same time, the moral ambivalence á la Conrad, Nabokov, and Ellison may be a problem. We like a Strong Clear Message these days.

It will be interesting to see what happens.