![]() You thought he wouldn’t?Ī narrator this good can take a novel anywhere. Oh, and he brings up the thing with the squid again. All these details are deftly recalled in the dazzlingly clever voice that distinguished the first book – one you can’t forget, even if you want to. exile the series of cruelties and betrayals that reunite the friends, then leave the narrator and Bon to become refugees a second time over. The Committed carefully recaps its plot points: the pact of brotherhood that the nameless Vietnamese narrator swears with his friends, Bon and Man, who would take opposite sides in their country’s war his experiences as a double agent, serving and spying on an anticommunist general in U.S. If you haven’t read The Sympathizer, don’t worry. Today is for the middle child, in his glory. But ranking favorites is an exercise for those too stingy with their love. And with a third coming, it’s not supposed to outshine the others. Let’s get this out of the way: Is it good? Yes, it’s good! Sure, it can’t compete with the splash of his first book. So Nguyen tripled down, making his new book, The Committed, part of a trilogy. When there’s an exception, that rare “better-than-the-original,” everyone secretly resents those, too. ![]() Yet six years later, after publishing a critical study on the cultural afterlife of war, a quietly impressive short-story collection, and a children’s book cowritten with his son, Nguyen has chosen to tempt fate, and the haters, with a sequel.Įveryone asks for a sequel, but no one loves it. He modeled The Sympathizer on Invisible Man, and named his son after its author, Ralph Ellison, whose struggle to complete a second novel is legend. He’s leaned into that dubious role with admirable self-awareness and political edge, but the twin burdens of success and racial representation have brought down many talented artists. Both literary thriller and novel of ideas,The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen's position in the firmament of American letters.When your debut conquers the world, how do you top it?įew writers have experienced the overwhelming acclaim that greeted Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel, The Sympathizer, which made him the go-to Asian American voice for elite cultural institutions. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. ![]() As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese "aunt," he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. The long-awaited new novel from one of America's most highly regarded contemporary writers,The Committed follows the unnamed Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The sequel toThe Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and went on to sell over a million copies worldwide,The Committed tells the story of "the man of two minds" as he comes as a refugee to France and turns his hand to capitalism.
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