[Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer
for his debut, “The Sympathizer,” recognition that was great for his career and
bad for his writing. Now he’s back with its subversive sequel, “The
Committed.”]
It was 1975, and he and his family
had been turned away from the airport and the American embassy but eventually
got on a barge, then a ship. He can’t remember anything about the escape, other
than soldiers on their ship firing at refugees who were approaching in a
smaller boat.
It is Nguyen’s only childhood
memory from Vietnam, and he isn’t sure if it really happened or if it came from
something he read in a history book. To him, whether he personally witnessed
the shooting doesn’t matter.
“I have a memory that I can’t rely
on, but all the historical information points to the fact that all this stuff
happened, if not to us, then to other people,” he said in a video interview
earlier this month.
Real or imagined, the image and
feeling stayed with him and shaped his new novel, “The Committed,” a sequel to
his Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, “The
Sympathizer.”
Like “The
Sympathizer,” “The Committed,” which Grove Press will publish on March 2,
hinges on questions about individual and collective identity and memory, how
wars are memorialized, whose war stories get told and what happens when
abstract political ideologies are clumsily deployed in the real world. It is
packed with gunfights, kidnappings, sex and drugs but delivered in dense prose
that refers to obscure scholarly texts and name-checks philosophers like
Sartre, Voltaire, de Beauvoir, Fanon and Rousseau.
“The Committed” opens with a scene
that feels Homeric, as a group of refugees make a treacherous journey in the
belly of a fishing boat. As a refugee — and as someone who often points out
that he is a refugee, not an immigrant — Nguyen wanted to use epic imagery to
describe the voyage, to counter the stereotype of refugees as pitiful and weak.
“From the perspective of the West
and people who are not refugees, boat people — people who flee by the sea — are
pathetic. They’re desperate, they’re frightened, and they’re just objects of
pity. I wanted to refute that,” he said. “You’ve got to think of them as
heroic.”
In “The Sympathizer,” an unnamed
Communist spy goes undercover as a refugee in Southern California after the
fall of Saigon. When a reconnaissance mission goes awry, he finds himself in a
Communist re-education camp, where he is tortured by his best friend and former
handler.
In “The Committed,” the narrator —
who calls himself Vo Danh, or “Nameless” — has escaped his Communist
interrogators. He heads to Paris and joins a gang of drug dealers, the ultimate
act of capitalist rebellion. He’s no longer sure who he is or what he believes
in. His identity, mission and even his consciousness — he sometimes refers to
himself in the second person — have been fractured by displacement,
disillusionment and torture.
To the French natives he meets, he
is among “les boat-people,” a label he rejects. “I was not a boat person unless
the English Pilgrims who fled religious persecution to come to America on
the Mayflower were also boat people,” the narrator thinks.
Nguyen, who is 49 and teaches at
the University of Southern California, now lives in Pasadena with his wife, Lan
Duong, and their two children, Ellison, 7, and Simone, 1. Though he’s lived in
California for most of his life — he was 4 when his family left Vietnam — he is
still unsettled by the feeling that he would have become a very different
person if his family hadn’t escaped.
“That idea of an alternative life,
parallel life, alternate universes, has always haunted me,” he said. “It haunts
a lot of us who are refugees from Vietnam, what our lives could’ve been, and so
I think that sense saturates my fiction and my nonfiction.”
After they fled Vietnam, Nguyen and
his family ended up in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. Nguyen was separated
from his parents and brother for several months and placed with an American
family. He remembers screaming when his host family took him to visit his
parents, then took him away again.
A few years later, his family moved
to San Jose, Calif., where his parents opened a Vietnamese grocery store. One
Christmas Eve, when Nguyen and his brother were home watching “Scooby-Doo,” his
parents were shot during a robbery. When he was 16, an armed intruder tried to
rob their home.
Nguyen began writing fiction in
high school (he got an early taste of literary fame in the third grade, when he
wrote a book called “Lester the Cat” that received a prize from the San Jose
Public Library). At the University of California, Berkeley, where he got
degrees in English and ethnic studies, he devoured literature by Asian-American
and Black writers, developing a particular affinity for Ralph Ellison’s
“Invisible Man.”
He studied writing with the
novelist Maxine Hong Kingston and recalls being a “terrible student.” (Kingston
disputes this: “Viet says that he slept through my classes. I always saw him
with his eyes open,” she wrote in an email.) Throughout college and graduate
school, he wrote short stories that featured Vietnamese refugees and victims of
the war. The summer after he finished his doctorate in English, he had enough
for a collection.
“I thought, here it is, I have the
basis for a book,” he said. “I did not realize it would literally take 20 years
before that book would be published.”
Nguyen found an agent, Nat Sobel,
who told him a novel would be an easier sell than a story collection. Over the
next few years, Nguyen wrote “The Sympathizer,” using the form of an espionage
novel to slyly deconstruct the ways the Vietnam War has been depicted
in film and fiction.
“I wrote it optimistically,
thinking there should be hopefully an audience for something like this, and if
not, then I’ll create the audience,” he said. “I deliberately chose a dense,
imagistic style to provoke resistance on the part of readers. I didn’t want the
readers to have a transparent relationship to the story.”
At first, it seemed like he had
been overly optimistic. Thirteen publishers rejected it before Peter
Blackstock, an editor at Grove Atlantic, made an offer. Blackstock said he was
captivated by the “clarity of voice and the metaphorical, rich prose,” and by
Nguyen’s provocative subversion of the spy thriller.
The book received ecstatic reviews
when it was released in 2015, and sales were decent for a literary debut, at
around 30,000 copies. Then Nguyen
won the Pulitzer Prize and later, the Mystery Writers of America’s
Edgar Award for best first novel, a rare instance of a novelist winning
mainstream and genre-specific prizes for a single work. “The Sympathizer” went
on to sell more than 1 million copies worldwide, and Nguyen was suddenly in
demand as a speaker, panelist, late-night TV guest and op-ed writer, speaking
up for refugees and immigrants at a time when both groups were being demonized.
The accolades and attention were
great for his career and terrible for his work. For the next year, he barely
wrote a word of fiction. “After the Pulitzer Prize I turned into a — please put
this in quotes — ‘public intellectual,’” he said. “Maybe I just handled it
badly.”
Luckily, he had two decades of
unpublished writing to draw from. He quickly followed “The Sympathizer” with
his story collection, “The
Refugees,” and a work of nonfiction, “Nothing Ever Dies.”
Initially, Nguyen didn’t set out to
write a series about a disillusioned spy. But when he finished “The
Sympathizer,” he had grown attached to his sardonic narrator, whose voice came
to him so naturally that it feels like his alter ego.
“I cannot say as an academic the
things that I say in ‘The Sympathizer,’ so writing it really freed me,” he
said. “I could take all these ideas and arguments I already had and put them
into the mouth of this guy who could express it in the most, you know, obnoxious
way possible.”
Nguyen is now planning the third
and final book in the series, which will follow his narrator as he returns to
the United States to “tie up loose ends.” He’s also working on a memoir, titled
“Seek, Memory,” in
a nod to Vladimir Nabokov, that exhumes memories he has repressed for most
of his adult life.
As he excavates his past, Nguyen
has had to confront the fallibility of his recollections.
“The book is partly about memory,
but of course the issue about memory is, my memory is not reliable, I think
things happened that didn’t happen, and vice versa,” he said.
In his fiction, Nguyen has
described the porous nature of memory in evocative ways, comparing it to stains
left behind by lime deposits, a laminated floor that can be hosed off, the bone
marrow that flavors broth. When the narrator of “The Sympathizer” laments that
he can’t recreate the dishes he craves from home, it reminds him of everything
he’s lost and forgotten. What he’s left with is a disappointing aftertaste:
“the sweet-and-sour taste of unreliable memories, just correct enough to evoke
the past, just wrong enough to remind us that the past was forever gone.”
