The Sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Summary
The narrator is a captain in the South Vietnamese secret police, the illegitimate son of a French priest and a Vietnamese teenager, educated in America, and a communist agent. He evacuates from Saigon in April 1975 with the general he serves, settles in Los Angeles among the refugee community, and continues reporting to Hanoi in invisible ink.
The whole novel is his confession, written under duress in a cell, addressed to an unnamed Commandant, and the reader is placed in the position of an interrogator being told what someone wants you to hear.
The comedy is bleak and constant. He is hired as a consultant on a Hollywood epic about the war, filmed in the Philippines by a monstrous auteur, and watches Vietnamese characters being given screams instead of lines. He carries out an assassination he does not believe in. He is, as he says on the first page, a man of two minds, sympathetic to everyone and therefore useful to no one.
Holding it together are Bon and Man, his blood brothers since school, one a fanatical anticommunist assassin and the other his own handler in Hanoi. Bon never learns what his blood brother is, even as Man runs him from Hanoi. Everything the narrator does to protect one betrays the other.
The last eighty pages turn very dark indeed and contain sustained torture, so go in prepared for that. The sentences are long, funny and furious throughout, closer to a monologue than a plot.
It is the rare war novel written from the losing side of the losing side. Best for readers who found American accounts of Vietnam one sided and want a book that is savage about every party including its own.
Historical Context & Significance
The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was Viet Thanh Nguyen's first novel, and it also took the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award among others, an unusually complete sweep for a debut.
Nguyen came to the United States as a child refugee in 1975 and has written extensively about how the war has been remembered, particularly in his study Nothing Ever Dies, which argues that the American memory of Vietnam has crowded out every other.
The novel's satire of Hollywood's Vietnam is pointed and specific, and the film being made within it is a thinly disguised Apocalypse Now. Park Chan wook adapted it for television in 2024 with Robert Downey Jr playing several of the American characters.