The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Published by Grove Press on March 2, 2021

The Committed is a sequel to the The Sympathizer, a novel Tzer Island highly recommends. The narrator of The Sympathizer is half French, half Vietnamese. He was a communist spy in South Vietnam who fled to the United States during the fall of Saigon. He survived a Vietnamese re-education camp after returning to Vietnam, where he wrote the confession that is The Sympathizer. He ends that novel as a refugee.

In The Committed, the narrator — still nameless but known to most as “the crazy bastard,” although he reinvented himself as Vo Danh and later as Joseph Nguyen, joining his baptismal name with the most common surname in Vietnam — has made his way to France with his friend and blood brother Bon, a committed anti-communist who does not know that the narrator betrayed their pact by becoming a communist. When Bon and a third blood brother, Man, reunite with the protagonist at the novel’s end, their discussion of Vietnamese communism and American or French imperialism makes clear that ideology makes little most difference to people who are dodging bullets and napalm, as important as it might be the ideologically committed.

The reeducation camp taught the narrator that “dedicated communists were like dedicated capitalists, incapable of nuance.” Conflicting ideology is one of the many forces that drive The Committed. The narrator tells us that his greatest talent is the ability to see every issue from both sides, to appreciate the contradictions that are fundamental to ideology and to life itself. He accepts that Bon can be both “a devout Catholic and a calm killer,” a slayer of communists. The title suggests this ambiguity: a crime can be committed and confessed; you can be committed to a cause or to an asylum. The narrator is a communist who lives as a capitalist, selling hash and later a harder drug he calls “the remedy.” He speaks fluent French and, although he is not accepted as a Frenchman, he is admired by the French for his fluency, proof that their imperialism in Vietnam paid dividends. Imperialism is a political theme that surfaces again and again as the narrator contemplates the fate of Vietnam and its people.

The second novel, like the first, is written as a confession. The narrator has a lot to confess, despite being “a nobody who believes in nothing.” The Committed, however, begins with the news that the narrator is dead, killed by Bon, the inevitable outcome of the protagonist’s ideological betrayal of his blood brother.  

Given the protagonist’s ability to write a second confession after his death, it is no surprise that the death is metaphysical. Late in the novel, the narrator describes himself as “a dead man whom others seem to think is still alive.” Perhaps he describes himself as dead because he believes he should be dead, that his life has no worth. The novel’s penultimate chapter arrives at a climactic moment that explains why the narrator might have concluded that he is dead at Bon’s hands.

While the plot ultimately surrounds the narrator’s fragile relationship with his blood brothers, it begins by describing his relationship with his aunt, a fellow communist who sponsored the narrator’s departure from a refugee camp. The aunt is a devoted communist and thus despised by Bon, but when the narrator begins to sell hash, she is enough of a capitalist to demand a cut of the profits.

His drug dealing serves another refugee, a Vietnamese of ethnic Chinese ancestry who is known as the Boss. The Boss was a black-market profiteer in Vietnam who reestablished himself as a shady businessman in France. The Boss operates from an Asian restaurant that is a front for his criminal enterprise. He uses the restaurant employees, Le Cao Boi and the Seven Dwarves, to expand his business from the Asian ghetto to the whiteness of central Paris. The narrator uses the Boss to advance the theme that “Asian” is a complex mixture of ethnicity and culture, despite the French and American tendency to see Asians as a single blended product. The narrator's relationship with the Boss, like many of his relationships, will end violently.

Viet Thanh Nguyen is among the greatest prose stylists in modern American literature. He rivals Nabokov in his mastery of English as a second language. His juxtaposition of highbrow language with slang creates a lyricism that is all his own. The Committed continues the acute observation of detail that made The Sympathizer so memorable. Here is his description of the Boss: “Now he was clad in loafers, creased slacks, and a polo shirt, the casual wear of the urban, Western branch of homo sapiens, his trimmed hair parted so neatly one could have laid a pencil in the groove.”

The story occasionally devolves into rants and lectures about the narrator’s grievances. The grievances are justified, but there is a certain degree of redundancy in their telling. The plot breaks down from time to time when grievances are aired, but this isn’t the kind of book that depends on a conventional plot for its value. It is instead a book worth reading for its truth.

The narrator’s ultimate realization after exposure to a lifetime of violence, after considering that “history’s wheels are oiled by blood,” is that violence makes us “feel like men but behave like devils” while nonviolence “instead of making us mirror images of our colonizers . . . could break the mirror altogether and liberate us from the need to see ourselves in the eyes of our oppressors.” The novel’s ending might be seen as ironic in light of that belated epiphany.

The boldness of Nguyen’s prose and the themes of his narrative are less startling after reading The Sympathizer. Had I read The Committed without reading The Sympathizer, I would have again been struck by its freshness. Viewing the novel as a continuation of The Sympathizer seems like the fairest way to rate it, but since the novel stands alone, and since I did read it as a sequel, I think it deserves a rave Recommended but doesn’t quite earn the Highly Recommended I gave to The Sympathizer.

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