The Sympathizer

Let me start by summarizing—with some creative license—conversations I had with a friend before and after I read this book. Reading Asian-American writers as an Asian-American reader is tricky because there are so few of them and the burden of representation so great. When you have spent your whole life knowing that you both are and are not, how do you create without stepping outside your art, weighing it from the perspective of someone understands neither? How do you do justice to your roots (no less beloved despite existing worlds and generations away) and to your country (no less a home despite the antagonism, occasionally mutual) without steamrolling altogether the story you are trying to tell? There is so much I could say about “The Sympathizer,” which, about two chapters in, cemented itself as one of my favorite novels ever, so let me leave it at this: it uses the humanity of its characters as a starting point, not a case to be proved, and everything that followed is all I have ever wanted from fiction.