BOOK REVIEW
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer
Grove Press: 2015
Don’t bother reading all the
blurbs that go with the paperback edition of this book. Just read the first
page; already you know you are in the presence of a talented writer. Here’s how
we begin:
“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook,
a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds. I
am not some misunderstood mutant from a comic book or a horror movie, although
some have treated me as such. I am simply able to see any issue from both
sides” (1).
We are not surprised later to
learn that the narrator—never named, known only as the Captain—loves Russian
novels, for this first paragraph recalls the beginning of Dostoevsky’s “Notes
from the Underground,” featuring one of the most perverse split-personality ironist
narrators in the history of world literature: “I’m a sick man . . . I’m a
spiteful man. Unpleasant is what I am as a man. I think my liver is diseased.
But then, I don’t know jack squat about my illness, and probably don’t even know
what hurts where. I don’t seek treatment, and never have, although I respect
medicine and doctors.”
Although he is not up in your
face as forcefully as is Dostoevsky’s narrator, the Captain is in a similar
limbo, living the life of in-between—neither fish nor fowl. Early in his career
Dostoevsky wrote “The Double,” featuring a man who literally splits into two, and
he was by far not the first European writer to air out the theme of the
bifurcated psyche. So here we are, in a novel of the twenty-first century,
reaching back into a grand tradition in Western literary art: the theme of the
split, the two in one. This is the major theme of The Sympathizer.
The Captain was born split in
two, and nobody among the Vietnamese who surround him has ever let him forget
it. He is “the bastard,” illegitimate son of a Vietnamese mother and a French
father, who is a Catholic priest to boot. He is a mixture of the Occident and
the Orient. He has lived and studied in the U.S., has an excellent grasp of
English and vast insights into American culture. Throughout the novel he seeks
a resolution to his bifurcation. He never finds it, and at the end he is just
as mixed up and split as he was at the beginning.
The theme is not all-inclusive,
but, nonetheless, quite broad. Take Abe, the uncle of the Captain’s
Japanese-American mistress (another character living, in her own unique way,
with the split). Abe was born Japanese in the U.S., put in an interment camp
during W.W. II. After the war, seeking his true identity, he went back to live
in Japan, where no one accepted him as Japanese. Neither fish nor fowl.
As the action of the novel
begins, we learn that the bi-racial Captain has made one big decision for
political oneness. He does not waver between backing the South Vietnamese
government, with its American ally, in the war against communism, or backing
the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese communists. He has chosen communism, and he
works to further the cause of communism throughout the whole novel. But the job
he has chosen—sleeper agent—forces him to lead a double life, be an actor
perpetually playing a role: “sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off
my face, only to realize that the mask was my face” (136). Now he knows how
Vladimir Putin must feel. As we shall see, he also shares with Putin some views
on American foreign policy.
The Captain’s story is
intertwined with that of his two blood brothers, fast friends since childhood.
One of them, Bon, whose father was murdered by the communists, is a staunch
supporter of the South Vietnamese government. The other, Man, like The Captain,
fights to liberate the country from the Americans and South Vietnamese. As the
action begins, in 1975, Saigon is about to fall to the North Vietnamese troops,
while the Americans and their allies—including Bon, The Captain, and The
General, the man whom The Captain works for, and spies against—are in full flight
back to the U.S.
A large part of the novel’s
action is set in California in the seventies, where the expatriate Vietnamese
military men end up, and where they plot to return home and overthrow the
communists. The Captain goes on ostensibly working as aide to The General,
while sending back coded messages to his handler Man in Vietnam. As the title
tells us, he is a communist sympathizer. Then again, he professes sympathy as
well for “the enemy”: “I confess that after having spent my whole life in their
company I cannot help but sympathize with them, as I do with many others. My
weakness for sympathizing with others has much to do with my status as bastard”
(36). Later the General asks him, “Do you know what your problem is?” Like all
people who ask that question, he answers it himself: “You’re too sympathetic”
(231). As we learn in the final part of the book, the communists who have taken
over Vietnam will tell him exactly the same thing.
Then again, the sympathizer is,
at many points in the book, not very sympathetic at all. He is personally
responsible for the murder of two innocent men in America, and later we learn
that he is obliquely responsible for the murder of his own father. As in The Brothers Karamazov—mentioned by name
in The Sympathizer—we have the theme
of parricide. But even more to the point, Dostoevsky’s final novel airs out the
theme of bifurcation and the theme of guilt. It turns out that we are all, to
one degree or another, guilty, and that’s what Viet Thanh Nguyen is telling us
as well. In the words of Claude, the CIA agent who trains the narrator in
interrogation techniques, “Innocence and guilt. These are cosmic issues. We’re
all innocent on one level and guilty on another. Isn’t that what Original Sin
is all about? (103). The Captain’s blood brother Man, handler of his
sleeper/spy activities, makes exactly the same point: “Of course men will die .
. . . . But they aren’t innocent. Neither are we, my friend. We’re
revolutionaries, and revolutionaries can never be innocent. We know too much
and have done too much” (111).
This is a book about Original
Sin, which receives frequent mention by the narrator, who is laden in his own
mind with sin: “I was impure, and impurity was all I wanted and all I deserved”
(124). Brought up as a Catholic, with his father, the priest, force-feeding him
in the dogma of Catholicism as a boy, the Captain—now a professed atheist and
communist—can’t totally shuck off his Catholic guilt. The two men he has
murdered in the U.S. return to him as ghosts and haunt him on a daily basis.
For a book professing to be about
Vietnam the theme of America is dominant. The Captain appears to both love and
hate the U.S. simultaneously, and here we have another bifurcation. The whole
book reeks with Anti-American thoughts and sentiments.
“America, land of supermarkets
and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of supercarriers and the
Super Bowl! America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its
bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a
mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the
quartet of the USSR. Although every country thought itself superior in its own
way, was there ever a country that coined so many ‘super’ terms from the
federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly
superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the
world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?” (29).
Understandably, The Captain cannot
forgive the U.S. for coming to Vietnam to, ostensibly, save the country and
then killing three million people and leaving, having saved nothing and nobody.
Furthermore, he is rankled by the narrative of the war, perpetuated by
Hollywood, which tells only of American glory. This is “the first war where the
losers would write history instead of the victors, courtesy of the most
efficient propaganda machine ever created” (Hollywood; 134).
“Nothing was more American than
wielding a gun and committing oneself to die for freedom and independence,
unless it was wielding that gun to take away someone else’s freedom and
independence” (218). Here we get into the issue of American exceptionalism and
the self-appointed role of America as policeman of the world, which is Vladimir
Putin’s primary beef with the U.S. today.
Resident in America, the
General’s wife makes clear her opinion of the country that has given her
shelter, stressing “the lewdness and
the shallowness and the tawdriness Americans love so much” (122).
After being given a hero’s welcome in the U.S.A. upon his expulsion from the
Soviet Union, the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn made a series of such remarks
in his speeches, and I have frequently heard Russian immigrants speaking in the
same vein. American the Beautiful is often American the Ugly to them. Or
America the Stupid. Looking for more endearments? Here are two others (in a
book teeming with them): (1) “the Disneyland ideology followed by most
Americans, that theirs was the happiest place on earth” (255); (2) “As the crapulent
major said, A man doesn’t need balls in this country, Captain. The women all
have their own” (91). As a life-long American, I read the plethora of criticisms
in The Sympathizer and must admit,
alas, their credibility. Even when The Captain asserts that it’s against the
law to be unhappy in America. “If I was unhappy, it would reflect badly on me,
for Americans saw unhappiness as a moral failure and thought crime” (254). Too
true.
Finally, on page 280, the
Captain—on his way out of the country and back to Vietnam—gets around to saying
a few good things about the U.S.A. “I thought with regret about all the things
I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air-conditioning; a well-regulated
traffic system that people actually followed; a relatively low rate of death by
gunfire, at least compared with our homeland; the modernist novel; freedom of
speech, which, if not as absolute as Americans liked to believe, was still
greater in degree than in our homeland; sexual liberation; and, perhaps most of
all, that omnipresent American narcotic, optimism, the unending flow of which
poured through the American mind continuously, whitewashing the graffiti of
despair, rage, hatred, and nihilism scrawled there nightly by the black
hoodlums of the unconscious” (280). Good writing there, but the whole book has
sentences like that. Nice.
Then again, the novel is about
human bifurcation, so it is only natural that the narrator who hates America
also to some degree loves America. In the latter part of the book he arrives
back in his homeland, in the company of a group of former South Vietnamese
soldiers trying to establish a foothold for a new anti-communist revolution.
They are captured by the communists, and now comes the greatest irony in the
novel. The sleeper agent, who has worked tirelessly in aid of communism, is not
received with open arms. He is stuck into a re-education labor camp, where he
is given the opportunity to write a confession, in an effort to purify his soul—badly
tainted by Western culture. To do, in effect, the impossible: re-educate
himself out of his double nature.
That confession, prepared for the
commandant of the camp, comprises the first 307 pages of the book. In the eyes
of the communist true believers the Captain’s manuscript is blasphemy. Too many
good things, it seems, have been said about the West, too much complexity
pervades the pages, no revolutionary slogans have been voiced, even beloved Uncle
Ho Chi Minh is mentioned but once. The Captain, so it turns out, is too
complicated to be a true revolutionary. True revolutionaries oversimply life’s
realities—wiping out all the grays and making them into blacks and whites. But
the Captain in his bifurcation is the epitome of gray. Here’s a hypothetical
dialogue between him and the commandant.
--Okay,
who are you?
--Me,
myself, and I.
--Right.
You are you yourself and you, but you’re not allowed to be all those. Choose
one.
--But
how can I choose between me, myself, and me? If I do that, I won’t be truly me,
myself, and I anymore.
--Choose!
(Actually, it’s somewhat easier
for the Captain—but still impossible—he has to choose only between me and
myself.)
What is the first thing that the
Grand Socialist Revolution always has to do? Kill off the intellectuals, for
the Revolution wants people chanting slogans, but certainly not thinking. “I believed in these slogans,”
says the Captain, “but I could not bring myself to write them”(318). Not really
true. He does not believe in the simpleminded slogans of Socialism. He is too
intelligent to be a believer in the revolution, and deep down he senses why the
Socialist Revolution never works. Revolutionaries think they know something
that is really unknowable: who “the people” are for whom they fight. “Like
salmon that instinctively knew when to swim upstream, we all knew who the
people were and who were not the people. Anyone who had to be told who the
people were was not [could not be] one of the people” (220). The Captain, deep
down, is an intellectual, one of those stubborn, reactionary types who will
tell you the truth: the whole idea of “the people” is a vast oversimplification
and a fraud. Nothing on earth is really black or white; everything is gray. And
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” as Emerson is quoted as saying
(12).
At the end of the book the
Captain is put through the same torture methods that the CIA once taught him
way back when: sensory deprivation and sleep deprivation. He must learn the
error of his ways and be, finally, re-educated to become a true Socialist
believer. Of course, the bifurcated man cannot be put back together; he will
always be what Dostoevsky’s hero is in “Notes from the Underground”: the man with
the disease of hyper-consciousness, he who sees the many sides of any issue, too
intelligent for his own good. The main thing he has learned through a lifetime
of experience as a sleeper agent is that when the French left, and then when
the Americans left, the Vietnamese were not finished with being given the
shaft; they began “fucking themselves now,” as the book tells us. Even the
narrator’s blood brother Man, the most intelligent character and, at one time,
a true believer, ultimately comes to the conclusion that the revolution has
failed.
Like Dostoevsky’s Underground
Man, The Captain, for all of his apparent efforts to work his way out of his
bifurcation, is the eternal rebel, whose allegations that his doubleness dooms
him to an alien life are not that believable. He assumes that, as half breed,
marriage has been denied to him for all time. But certainly in America—with his
excellent knowledge of English and American mores—he could make a marriage if
he wished. Bastardy hardly limits one in the U.S., where huge numbers of
children are born out of wedlock, and where The Captain could function well in
a miscegenated society. Why does he not consider such a move? Because he loves his loneliness, he adores his status as misfit, he revels in the alienation. Incapable of
love for anyone but his now dead mother and his three blood brothers, he has no
desire to make any accommodation with a woman.
In a kind of deus ex machina
ending, Man, now a communist commissar, arranges for the Captain and Bon to
escape from Vietnam with the boat people. Even if they survive the journey, we
wonder where they will end up. The Captain has burned his bridges in the U.S.,
having committed a murder (of the character Sonny) just before leaving the
country. He will be the prime suspect in that murder, so he cannot return to
the beloved/hated U.S. At the end of the novel the man in limbo finds himself
in even a physical liminality: he is the eternal displaced person, with no
country to call home.
The Sympathizer is full of so many brilliantly written passages
that you feel like quoting everything in full. The author has a way of writing
set scenes with a mass of accumulated detail. Here are selections from a long
passage describing the many fates of the Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S.:
“the naïve girl who flew to Spokane to marry her GI sweetheart and was sold to
a brothel, and the widower with nine children who went out into a Minnesotan
winter and lay down in the snow on his back with mouth open until he was buried
and frozen, and the ex-Ranger who bought a gun and dispatched his wife and two
children before killing himself in Cleveland, . . . . . and the devout Buddhist who spanked his young
son and was arrested for child abuse in Houston, and the proprietor who
accepted food stamps for chopsticks and was fined for breaking the law in San
Jose, and the husband who slapped his wife and was jailed for domestic violence
in Raleigh, . . . . . and the half dozen
who went to sleep in a crowded, freezing room in Terre Haute with a charcoal
brazier for heat and never woke up, borne to permanent darkness on an invisible
cloud of carbon monoxide” (70-71).
The above passage goes on for a
full two pages, and, eventually, grades into the success stories: “the story of
a baby orphan adopted by a Kansas billionaire, or the mechanic who bought a
lottery ticket in Arlington and became a multimillionaire, or the girl elected
president of her high school class in Baton Rouge, or the boy accepted by
Harvard from Fond du Lac” (71). The whole long riff ends as follows: “So it was
that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope, and for
all that we believed almost every rumor we heard, almost all of us refused to
believe that our nation was dead” (71).
Another wonderful passage
describes The Captain’s visit to the home of a Hollywood director, where—after
finally breaking his way through the conceited director’s monologue, he
delivers a forceful lecture on a subject dear to his heart: how the Vietnamese
scream.
“Screams are not universal, I
said. If I took this telephone cord and wrapped it around your neck and pulled
it tight until your eyes bugged out and your tongue turned black, Violet’s
scream [Violet is the director’s assistant] would sound very different from the
scream you would be trying to make. Those are two very different kinds of
terror coming from a man and a woman. The man knows he is dying. The woman
fears she is likely to die soon. Their situations and their bodies produce a
qualitatively different timbre to their voices. One must listen to them
carefully to understand that while pain is universal, it is also utterly
private” (130-31).
The power of the above passage is
reinforced when The Captain tells us what he was thinking as he impressed the
words upon the fatuous director. “I stood up and leaned on the desk to look
right into his eyes. But I didn’t see him. What I saw was the face of the wiry
Montagnard, an elder of the Bru minority who lived in an actual hamlet not far
from the setting of this fiction. Rumor had it that he served as a liaison
agent for the Viet Cong. I was on my first assignment as a lieutenant and could
not figure out a way to save the man from my captain wrapping a strand of
rusted barbed wire around his throat, the necklace tight enough so that each
time he swallowed, the wire tickled his Adam’s apple. That was not what made
the old man scream, however. It was just the appetizer. In my mind, though, as
I watched the scene, I screamed for him.
“Here’s what it sounds like, I
said, reaching across the desk to pick up the Auteur’s Montblanc fountain pen.
I wrote onomatopoeically across the cover page of the screenplay in big black
letters: AIEYAAHHHH!!! Then I capped his pen, put it back on his leather
writing pad, and said, That’s how we scream in my country” (131).
So many good passages, too many
of them to quote in detail. There are, for example, (1) touching passages about
the former South Vietnamese military men, now living emasculated in the U.S.,
working as bus boys and landscapers.
They train to go back and fight as guerillas in their home
country—returning through Thailand. They hate America for many reasons, the
main one being that in America they are no longer men, and they are willing to
die in their effort to become men once more (220-222). (2) poetic passages
using the device of accumulating detail, such as all of the things about the
Vietnam that “we could not forget” (238-39).
The author has a wonderful feel
for the way human psychology works. In the scene describing how The Captain
murders the innocent Sonny (274-76), there is a suggestion that deep in the
neurons of his brain Sonny realizes the danger he is in, but the neurons cannot
get the full message to his conscious mind in time. Flustered at the Captain’s
admission that he is a sleeper agent, Sonny suggests that the General has put
him up to coming here—the General has done
so, but he has put out a contract on Sonny’s life. Sonny even once uses the
word “kill”: “I think you’ve come here to trick me. You want me to say I’m a
communist too, so you can kill me or expose me, don’t you?”
The novel is a bit weaker at the
end, where it describes the Captain’s return to Vietnam and his interment in a
labor camp for “re-education.” The author, although by birth Vietnamese, has
barely ever been in his home country and must make up nearly everything in this
part. Consequently, the reader must do a good deal of “suspending disbelief” in
the latter pages of the novel. The business (370-78) about how Man insists on
torturing his friend until The Captain understands the meaning of the word
“Nothing” is much belabored and, ultimately, unconvincing. Then again, we are
expected to believe that by the time we read it, the manuscript (the first 307
pp.) has already been through three drafts, which are redacted by the
commandant of the camp. I see little evidence of the viewpoint of a
true-believing communist in that manuscript part of the book. One more thing:
what language is the ms written in, Vietnamese or English? It is so thoroughly
steeped in the English language that one has trouble imagining it written in
Vietnamese for the eyes of the commandant. More heavy suspension of disbelief.
A few passages would be
wonderful, were they not so suggestive of other Western writers. Take the
masturbation scene: “I committed my first unnatural act at thirteen with a
gutted squid purloined from my mother’s kitchen.” The story of the love affair
with the squid goes on for two pages, and would be more entertaining were not
the whole business purloined from Roth’s Portnoy (78-80). Once in a while a
line sounds like it might have come out of Mickey Spillane, or from Garrison Keillor
in the role of Guy Noir: “Her legs demanded to be looked at, and would not take
no, non, nein, nyet, or even maybe
for an answer” (243). Then again, the Captain can be quite an innocent for a
military man; even though he himself carried a .38 special back in Vietnam, he
is unaware that the weapon accommodates five cartridges, not six (97).
These are mere quibbles, not
meant to detract from the brilliance of the novel on the whole. Although the
writer has a Vietnamese name, he is, essentially an American, having come to
this country at age four. The novel, as well, is set firmly in the tradition of
the Western novel. To what extent it may also be in the tradition of the Asian
novel, I do not know, as I confess my ignorance of Asian literature. It would
be interesting to hear how this book goes over in Vietnam, after it is
translated into Vietnamese and published there. You kind of wonder if the
Vietnamese reaction might be like the commandant’s reaction to The Captain’s
confession: too mired in Western ways, too “American” in its viewpoints. And
that would be still one more grand irony.
To return one last time to
Dostoevsky, the ending of The Sympathizer
reminds me somewhat of the ending of Crime
and Punishment. In that novel we are left with the author’s nudging hard at
his recalcitrant, atheistic Raskolnikov, with the aid of the unbelievably
saintly Sonya, pushing him over into the camp of Russian Orthodox faith, but
not quite getting him pushed there. The split-personality “hero” of C and P—so we are told—has made strides
forward, but has certainly not yet resolved his split or atoned for having
committed murder. It would take another long novel, writes Dostoevsky in the
final pages, to describe Raskolnikov’s true religious transformation and
healing. Of course, that novel was never written. In his turn, the author of The Sympathizer has mentioned in
interviews that he has considered writing a sequel to his novel. He has not
suggested, however, that the bifurcated Captain has a chance to resolve his
split. Not likely.
