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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The Girl Who Died by Ragnar Jónasson

Published in Iceland in 2018; published in translation by Minotaur Books on May 4, 2021

Multiple mysteries intersect in The Girl Who Died. What happened to the little girl who seems to be haunting the house where Una is staying? What caused the death of another little girl decades later? Why is Thór, despite his obvious attraction to Una, resisting any kind of relationship with her? Why is a woman serving time in prison for a murder she didn’t commit? Why is an entire village lying about seeing a man who appeared in the village after he vanished from Reykjavik? Why does nearly everyone in the village want Una to leave?

Una begins the novel in Reykjavik, where circumstances have conspired to make her unhappy. A friend shows her a notice for a teaching position in the remote fishing village of Skálar. Una applies and, by virtue of being the only applicant, is hired. The village only has two children, two girls who are not far apart in age. As part of Una’s compensation, she’s given an attic room in the house where one of the girls lives with her mother.

Arriving at the village after a long day of driving, Una finds the place where she’ll be staying. (It’s the first house she sees, but there aren’t many houses in a village that only has about ten residents.) As she approaches the front door, Una sees a child dressed in white peering at her from the window. She assumes the child is Edda, the child who lives in the house, but when she introduces herself, Edda denies having seen her from the window. We later learn that the villagers regard the house as haunted by the spirit of a girl who died decades earlier under circumstances that nobody wants to share with Una.

Much of the story develops Una’s sense of being an outsider. Apart from Edda’s mother, who insisted that the two village children needed a proper education, nobody wants Una to stay. Una reacts to her ostracization by drinking a bottle of wine most nights, which the village gossips — meaning nearly every villager — soon notice. One of the few villagers who is friendly to Una is Thór, a single man who lives in a platonic relationship with a woman. He makes Una feel even more lonely by politely resisting her advances for reasons he refuses to disclose.

Against that background, a plot gains ground when a man appears in the village. He tells Una he is looking for a particular residence where he heard he might be able to rent a room for the night. Days later, after Una learns that someone resembling the man has been reported missing from Reykjavik, she wonders why everyone in the village is denying knowledge of the man’s existence.

Compounding the mystery are chapters told from the perspective of a young woman in prison. She and two other people were convicted of murdering two victims whose bodies were never found. She confessed to the crime after the police convinced her of her guilt, but she has no memory of committing the murder. The book is nearing its end before we learn how the apparently innocent woman fits in with the other plot elements.

The notice for the teaching job describes the village’s location as “the end of the world.” It seems that way to Una. Her sense of isolation, loneliness, and self-doubt is amplified by the bleakness of the landscape in which Ragnar Jónasson set the story. The atmosphere gives the novel an eerie feeling, while Una’s reaction to living at the end of the world makes her a sympathetic character.

The Girl Who Died blends a multifaceted mystery plot with elements of the supernatural. I’m not a big fan of the supernatural, but whether the ghost is real or the byproduct of Una’s anxiety, perhaps combined with her alcohol consumption, is ambiguous for much of the novel. The sense of living in a haunted place does add to Una’s distress, so the ghost, real or imagined, contributes to the story. A reader may need to suspend belief in the supernatural to appreciate the last brief chapters.

The story raises intriguing moral issues that I can’t discuss without revealing the novel’s secrets. Doing the right thing for one person will harm another person, creating the kind of a moral dilemma that makes the reader think about how the reader might respond to the same situation. Whether Una makes the right choice is certainly open to debate, but I regard that as a good thing. A surprising conclusion resolves the story elements in way that is true to the novel’s macabre tone. I’ve only read a few of Jónasson’s novels, but I’ve read enough to know that he’s a skilled mystery writer.

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Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Published by Ballantine Books on May 4, 2021

I enjoyed the story told in Project Hail Mary. I would have enjoyed it more if not for sentences like “The force you feel in a centrifuge is inverse to the square of the radius.” Unfortunately, rules of science appear with exhausting regularity.

Andy Weir apparently decided he stumbled upon a successful formula with The Martian. In Project Hail Mary, he doubles down. Weir’s protagonist in The Martian famously decides to “science the shit out of” each problem he encounters. In Project Hail Mary, Weir’s protagonist scienced the shit out my patience. Weir rarely makes it through two pages before he finds some new principle of science that he absolutely must explain to the reader. Few of the principles do anything to advance the plot. Many of them are only marginally relevant to the story, meaning they could have been excised from the text without harming the plot, producing a much tighter story. Thanks to all the pauses to explain science, Project Hail Mary takes about 500 pages to tell a 200-page story.

Science lectures are not good science fiction. Explanations have their place, judiciously used. The reader needs to be served enough science to provide a context for what’s happening and why. But the science shouldn’t get in the way of moving the story forward. The giants who originated hard science fiction knew that. Isaac Asimov knew that. Arthur C. Clarke knew that. Robert Heinlein knew that. Most of their contemporaries knew that. Andy Weir doesn’t get it. Science lectures are not science fiction. Full stop.

Remove the incessant science lectures, including every sentence that follows “Hang on, let me do the math,” and what remains is a reasonably interesting plot. The sun is slowly dimming, a phenomenon that will lead to a new Ice Age in another few decades. The dimming is caused by an alien organism that the protagonist, Ryland Grace, dubs an astrophage. Grace discovers the organism after he’s drafted to join a science team that is focused on saving the Earth. Grace teaches junior high school science but he wrote a widely-ridiculed dissertation explaining that alien life forms might not require water to evolve or survive. He responded to the ridicule by abandoning his studies and taking a junior high teaching job, which makes him a bit of a weenie. We learn, if fact, that Grace is risk-averse to the point of cowardice. But he’s found the perfect job because lecturing a captive audience about science is what he does best.

The story begins with Grace waking up from a coma suffering from a selective memory loss. He doesn’t remember that he’s on a spaceship. He doesn’t know its mission. As time passes, he recovers his memories in linear fashion, from oldest to newest, which allows Weir to tell Grace’s backstory through Grace’s recovered memory while the story in the present moves forward. Weir offers a contrived explanation at the end for the memory loss and its slow recovery, although he doesn’t explain why the memories are so conveniently recovered in order from the earliest to the most recent.

Grace eventually figures out that he’s on his way to a star that stopped dimming. Great minds decided that the star might reveal an antidote to the astrophage. The odds that he can find the antidote are slim, which explains the novel’s title.

When Grace’s ship arrives in the right neighborhood, he encounters an alien who is on a similar mission. Grace calls the alien Rocky. This happy encounter gives Grace a fresh audience for his science lectures.

The story has a few credibility problems. Grace is a general-purpose scientist who seems to be adept at physics and math but is valued for his knowledge of cellular biology, which allows him to understand the workings of the mitochondria found within the astrophage. Since he wrote his doctoral thesis on a relevant subject, it makes sense that the project manager in charge of saving the Earth would consult him. But the decision to turn a junior high teacher into the manager’s personal science advisor — she even has him testing the glove that will be used to grasp small objects during extra-vehicular activity — seems unlikely. Her decision to draft him as an administrator when he has no particular management experience also struck me as implausible. Weir concocts a reason for turning him into an astronaut that depends on an unlikely coincidence. I’ll cut Weir some slack for all that because Grace is the protagonist and he needs to be immersed in all phases of the project for the story to work. However, science fiction is all about the willingness to suspend disbelief. Weir tested my capacity to do so.

The ease with which Grace and Rocky learn each other’s languages is impossible to believe. Words that signify numbers and computation are easy to translate, as is the periodic table if the two species both understand it. Nouns or verbs that can be demonstrated might be easy to approximate, but it isn’t easy to grasp abstract concepts like “pretty” and “friend” without a common language. Grace and Rocky manage to achieve complete fluency in weeks when linguists would need years.

And then there’s Rocky’s personality. He shares Grace’s sarcastic sense of humor. He shares Grace’s general attitude about most things. Considering that Rocky is an alien, there doesn’t seem to be much about him that’s alien. He’s like a mirror image of Grace, apart from his resemblance to a spider and his need to breathe ammonia.

Setting aside the novel’s flaws, the plot is engaging. Grace has an opportunity to grow by overcoming his cowardice and selfish nature. The ending is much better than I expected it to be. Whittle down the science lectures, keep the meaningful content, and this would be a decent novel. As it stands, Project Hail Mary too often made my eyes glaze over. Young science geeks who feel validated when novels reinforce their belief that “scientists are really smart” might view the book differently.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

A Lonely Man by Chris Power

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 4, 2021

Novelists often base characters on people they know. They sometimes go so far as to tell another person’s story in the form of a novel. Is it a form of theft to use a real person’s life as the basis for a fictional story? Should the author obtain consent before incorporating details of a person’s life into a novel? Chris Power explores the ethics of creating fiction in A Lonely Man.

Robert Prowe is a British novelist. He irritated his mother by basing an early story on a childhood vacation in Greece. Now he is tempted to repeat that potential sin by writing about a mysterious man who may or may not be involved in Russian political intrigue.

Robert is living in Berlin and struggling to find a story worth telling. He’s under a contract deadline to produce a new book. During a chance meeting in a bookstore, Robert learns that Patrick Unsworth is also a British writer, but one whose domain is nonfiction. Patrick ghostwrites biographies for celebrities and politicians.

Patrick seems a bit drunk and disagreeable. He clearly has no friends in Berlin. As an act of charity, Robert agrees to meet Patrick for a drink. When the meeting finally occurs, Patrick explains that he had to cancel or no-show earlier meetings because he was being followed. Robert believes that Patrick is imagining things but listens to Patrick’s story.

Patrick explains that he was hired to ghostwrite a tell-all book for a Russian oligarch who had the goods on Putin. After the project was underway, the oligarch was found dead, having apparently hanged himself. Patrick is certain that the oligarch was murdered and that Russians in the service of Putin are coming for him too.

Robert doesn’t believe Patrick is in danger. He nevertheless believes that Patrick’s story would be a good plot for a novel. As Robert begins to work on the novel, he even includes himself as a character, the writer who listens to Patrick’s story. The story of the oligarch’s suicide resonates with Robert when he learns that an old friend has hung himself in a closet, a strange place to take one’s life.

A Lonely Man follows the two men as they walk the thin line between paranoia and danger. As events unfold, the reader wonders whether Patrick is delusional or the actual target of Putin’s thugs. Robert asks those same questions. Someone indeed seems to be following them when Patrick is with Robert. Someone then seems to be following Robert, who may have placed himself in danger by listening to Patrick’s storis about Putin and the oligarch. Robert even receives a phone call that might be perceived as a threat to harm his wife.

Whether Robert or his family are actually in danger is ambiguous for much of the novel. That ambiguity contributes to the novel’s evolving tension, as the reader wonders whether branding Patrick’s fears as paranoia will be a fatal mistake.

Robert arguably invites trouble by befriending Patrick. He does so in part because he feels an affinity with Patrick, but Robert also believes Patrick’s story might be what he needs to overcome writer’s block. Karijn, Robert’s wife, does not approve of Robert’s appropriation of Patrick’s story without Patrick’s consent. Robert argues that writers steal life stories all the time. He is troubled, however, by his developing sense that “another person had grown up inside him, a shadow-self whose existence she knew nothing about.” Robert is becoming like Patrick, but is he becoming paranoid or is really facing a threat?

Chris Power sets the tone by building distractions into the story that seem vaguely menacing. Robert and Karijn own a cabin on wooded property near a lake in Sweden. When Robert visits the property with a plumber to repair a pump, the trip seems ominous for no obvious reason. When he later takes his daughters to inspect a fort they built in the woods a year earlier, the presence of beer cans suggests intrusion into the family’s privacy. Yet until the final pages, it isn’t clear whether Robert or his family are at any risk of harm at all.

The last few pages provide an anticlimactic answer to that question. They force Robert to make a choice between loyalty or betrayal, the kind of moral choice that makes spy fiction so fascinating. Yet the ending seems abrupt. It is foreshadowed by all that comes before, but it leaves the reader hanging. Novels often challenge a reader to imagine what will come next. This one leaves the feeling that the story is unfinished, that the reader will need to do all the important work.

Still, Power proves his ability to set a scene and to create characters in depth. At first blush, the title seems to refer to Patrick, who has no friend but Robert. Upon reflection, the reader might wonder whether Robert is the lonely one. Perhaps Robert reached out to Patrick not just for story material but to make a connection to someone from his homeland, a connection he can’t easily find in Berlin, one that his Swedish wife cannot provide. That might be why Patrick travels back to London for the suicide victim’s wake, despite not having kept in touch with the man during their years apart. A Lonely Man demonstrates Chris Power’s writing skill and offers the reader an intriguing story on multiple levels, even if the ending is a bit disappointing.

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Basil's War by Stephen Hunter

Published by Mysterious Press on May 4, 2021

Basil’s War is an expanded version of the short story “Citadel.” That story is fun. The novel, with the addition of new adventures as Basil carries out his mission, is even more fun.

Basil St. Florian is a spy, but he’s not a James Bond clone. He combines the wit and charm of Bertie Wooster with the sly intelligence of Jeeves. Basil is a captain in the British Army during World War II. He has a fondness for cocktails and actresses.

The British believe that a German spy is using a book code to transmit secrets. The book is actually a manuscript, The Path to Jesus, published in 1767. To break the code, the Brits need the manuscript, but there are only two copies in existence. They can’t access the one in the Oxford Library because the German spy would learn that they have tumbled to the source of the code. Hence, Basil is to make his way into France and photograph relevant pages of the second manuscript, where it is housed in a rare document collection at the Institut de France in Paris.

Basil changes the mission plan while entering France for reasons that are revealed in the end. He uses his wits and pickpocketing talents to avoid the Germans who are searching for him. More Germans need to be foiled to complete his mission. All the while, Basil’s attitude is one of breezy self-confidence. In the British tradition, he is self-effacing rather than cocky, but he brings a “nothing ventured” philosophy to the more dangerous aspects of his mission. For example, he decides to steal an airplane, and having watched pilots fly them in the past, he thinks it really can’t be that hard. Landing turns out to be trickier than he anticipated.

The light tone distinguishes Basil’s War from a James Bond or George Smiley novel. Since the story isn’t meant to be taken seriously, it would be easy to forgive improbabilities. Yet Stephen Hunter tells a credible story, avoiding the outrageous while spicing the plot with believable action scenes. Well, maybe sleeping with Vivian Leigh and working with Alan Turing is a stretch, but it all adds to the fun. Basil’s War is easy to read and easy to enjoy.

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