The Sympathizer

I feel bad saying this, but I found this book kind of a slog.

The good
The plot is brilliantly structured: our (first person) narrator is a secret agent of the Communist northern Vietnamese forces, embedded with a general in the southern army, during the last days of the Vietnam War. We open with the fall of Saigon, follow the fleeing southern forces to LA, where they continue fighting the war in the diaspora, assisted (and manipulated?) by American CIA operatives, with assassinations, plots and guerilla intrigues.

There's a clever meta-commentary woven throughout the book: the duplicity and dualism of Orientalism's take on “the East” vs. “the West”, of subjugation and racism and power, of capitalism vs. communism, coupled with a mixed race protagonist who's playing both sides. At the same time, as this book makes points about the lack of Vietnamese representation in the narrative of the Vietnam War (e.g. in a brilliant sequence when the protagonist assists a Francis Ford Coppola-stand-in directing his Apocalypse Now), this book itself is one of the few (only?) books about the Vietnam War written by a Vietnamese-American author for an American audience. Just like the protagonist tries (and fails) to shape the narrative to include more Vietnamese voices in the fictional film, so is Viet Thanh Nguyen clearly writing with that in mind with this book.

There's even more duality and layers which I admired: when the play-within-the-play film features (further) meta-meditations on duality and representation (with surviving southern soldiers, now refugees, are cast as extras portraying dying Viet Cong), we have the same events happening later in the ‘real life' of the book (and our fiction). There's even a bit towards the end, when the narrator has fully embraced his split/dual nature, when the writing becomes full of groan-inducing double entendres: so meta!

So why slog?

The bad
Alas, I just found the writing really ugh. Using ‘voiceover narration'-style storytelling, whether in movies or in books, always risks becoming just one long exposition, where the narrator explains the story, rather than letting it happen. Here I felt like I was told, rather than shown, things and the voice was often over-written, even purple at times, with a snarky, overly self-aware quality. I never, ever forgot about the author, and that meant I never really suspended my disbelief.