The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Published by Grove Press on April 2, 2015

A central theme of The Sympathizer is betrayal. From one perspective, the Communists betrayed the Vietnamese by promising independence and delivering poverty. From another perspective, the Americans betrayed the Vietnamese by promising liberation and delivering abandonment. Various characters in The Sympathizer betray their countries, their causes, their friends, and their selves. Some betrayals are political, others involve love, but all are betrayals of the heart and soul.

The Sympathizer tells a riveting story in elegant, clever prose. The novel begins at the end of the Vietnam War. Saigon will soon fall. The South Vietnamese president has fled to Taiwan. Americans have tired of supporting a war that cannot be won. The American government botched the final days of the war as badly as it botched the war itself, leaving behind thousands to whom transportation out of the country had been promised.

The Captain arranges an evacuation for the General he serves and some other lucky officers. Unbeknownst to the General, the Captain also serves as a Communist spy. He narrates the story from a prison cell, some years after the war's end. His narrative is his confession of guilt, but only near the novel's end do we learn why he is writing it.

After a harrowing evacuation to a refugee camp in Guam, the Captain is sent to America. As a beneficiary of American "aid" that cost him his country and nearly his life, he is understandably suspicious of the Amerasian life he is expected to live. Eschewing fish sauce in an effort to blend in, the refugees are divided and flung across the American map, the better to prevent them from organizing or benefitting from mutual support. The General's task in the United States is to assemble a ragtag Army that will renew the Vietnamese battle against Communism with the unspoken support and secret funding of certain American politicians and organizations.

Drawing upon sources as diverse as Ben Franklin and Mao, the Captain contrasts American and Vietnamese politics and culture. A job in the movie industry, where he makes futile efforts to educate filmmakers about the reality of life in Vietnam, gives the Captain a chance to reflect upon western stereotypes of Southeast Asians and the Americanization of the world.

While the Captain contemplates America's substitution of image for reality, he struggles to come to term with his own identity crisis. Thinking back to the life he left behind -- a life in which he pretended to serve one cause while aiding another -- the Captain wrestles with the clash between East and West and, in Vietnam, between North and South. He is torn between his longing for Vietnamese village life and his appreciation of flush toilets, TV dinners, and obedience to traffic lights.

In a life that is characterized by betrayal, one in which he has been the betrayer and the betrayed, the Captain's most difficult moments come when he is asked to betray his friends in order to maintain his anti-communist cover. The Sympathizer is not meant to be a thriller, but it creates dramatic tension in the moral dilemmas that the Captain repeatedly confronts. A plausible surprise near the end underlines the story's key theme. Much of the tone is light but powerful moments that reveal the horror of war from the Vietnamese perspective (North or South being irrelevant to horror) give the story its moral force.

While The Sympathizer is about betrayal, it is also about the corruption of ideals -- American ideals, French ideals, communist ideals, all extolling freedom and independence while denying those gifts to Vietnamese villagers who are never free to think and act in ways that offend their "protectors." While the novel is tangentially about the aftermath of the Vietnam War, its strength lies in its honest and complex examination of human nature, its recognition that people, regardless of national origin, are at once cruel and compassionate, cynical and hopeful, weak and strong, guilty and exonerated. Written in perfectly pitched prose, The Sympathizer works on every level: the story is fascinating, the characters are multidimensional, and the themes are profound.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

War Against the Mafia by Don Pendleton

First published in 1969; published digitally by Open Road Media on December 16, 2014

When Mack Bolan's father goes nuts and shoots Mack's sister, brother, and mother after learning that Mack's sister was turning tricks to pay off the father's mob debt, Mack decides that the police are too hampered by quaint notions like due process and proof of guilt to obtain justice. Trained as an Army sniper, Mack decides to use his skills to start his own war against the Mafia. Just like Vietnam, it's an unwinnable war, but The Executioner intends to fight it anyway. What follows is a series of 37 or 38 novels written by Don Pendleton and hundreds more stories by other authors in which Mack Bolan advances his war by taking "direct action, strategically planned, and to hell with the rules."

I was young when The Executioner books came out. Whenever I saw an Executioner novel on the supermarket paperback rack, which was pretty often, I bought it. I didn't read all of the Pendleton-penned Executioner novels but I read quite a few of them. I remember that there was a certain sameness to the stories after a time, but the series as a whole is fun, if a little trashy.

Rereading War Against the Mafia, I was surprised by the prose, which is of a higher quality than I remembered. When I first read the novel, I was probably more interested in the sex scenes and the mayhem, both of which are plentiful (but not so plentiful as to make the novel lurid or distasteful, at least by my admittedly relaxed standards). This isn't great literature but the writing is of a reasonably high caliber when compared to current action novels.

Mack Bolan regards his war against the mafia as a holy war, a war of "ultimate good versus ultimate evil." Like any holy warrior, he is not subtle. The novel is at its weakest when Pendleton introduces philosophical discussions (as when Mack argues about the righteousness of his cause with the virgin he has just deflowered). The inability to recognize shades of gray in the good vs. evil perspective bothers me when I encounter it in modern vigilante justice novels, but Mack makes a more eloquent attempt at justifying his savagery than most vigilantes manage, and that counts for something.

The women in this novel are either whores or desperately in love with Mack or both. The ex-virgin's attitude ("I don't care if you're a killer, just come back to me, you've ruined me for other men") is ridiculously unrealistic. The misogyny I failed to recognize when I was a kid in 1969 stands out now, but the macho attitude is a product of the novel's time. For that reason (and because the novel really isn't meant to be taken seriously), I'm willing to cut it some politically incorrect slack. Readers who are tired of current vigilante novels might want to look at War Against the Mafia to gain perspective on one of the originators of the subgenre.

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The Dead Lands by Benjamin Percy

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 14, 2015

In style and content, The Dead Lands strikes me as something Robert Jackson Bennett might have written. It is a mixture of science fiction and fantasy and steampunk and horror. It combines action and philosophy. It gives attention to character development without sacrificing plot. The prose reaches a level that is a notch or two above typical genre fiction. While the novel is not quite up to Bennett's level, it is considerably better than most of the abysmal writing that characterizes the current craze of post-apocalyptic fiction.

The world has changed since a pandemic combined with nuclear meltdowns to wipe out pretty much everyone before producing mutated species. The Mississippi riverbed is dry. Spiders and bats are even creepier than they used to be. The last human survivors (or so they believe) live in the Sanctuary, formerly known as St. Louis. It is an ordered society, with laws and farms and hospitals. Ordered but despotic; the mayor has made it a capital offense to criticize the mayor. Outside the walls, in the Dead Lands, there are only nightmares. Simon, a young thief who lives in the streets, watches as his father is marched beyond the walls and chained to a stone altar. Simon knows how to leave the walls but he is too late to save his father from the creatures that live in the woods.

In addition to Simon, the residents of the Sanctuary we meet include Lewis Meriwether, a cranky old guy who curates a museum and keeps track of other people's business with his mechanical owl. Mina Clark is among the few residents who thinks it would be better to die free, beyond the walls, than to die in service of the Sanctuary (although voicing that opinion would be to invite chaining to the altar). Her half-brother York is a juggler. When a little girl named Gawea rides up to the gate on a horse, the residents of Sanctuary know they are not alone.

Mysteriously, Gawea is bearing a letter for Lewis, telling him that he is not the only gifted person in the world. His gift is a form of telekinesis. Gawea's power has something to do with the birds and the bees, but not in a romantic sense. Anyway, Lewis and Clark go on a journey across America, chased by a man named Colter, heading toward a man named Aran Burr. Lewis leaves behind a teenage girl named Ella, charging her with taking care of the museum, one of many subversive tasks she undertakes with Simon's help.

Stories within stories unfold as Lewis and Clark make their journey -- their own stories, those of people they meet, and those of the people left behind in Sanctuary. Stories of adventure, enslavement, and survival. Humans are capable of wonderful things, Lewis opines, but more often they excel at ruin. The reader encounters plenty of that in The Dead Lands. Still, the story conveys a message of hope.

The underlying basis for all of this (the pandemic and the effects of untended nuclear plants) is explained only in a cursory fashion, which might be the novel's biggest fault. The cause of the apocalypse and the mutations are not very convincing, but that's common in post-apocalyptic fiction. At least, to my great relief, there are no zombies in this world.

The novel is self-contained but revelations at the end imply that further adventures are forthcoming. I suspect they will be worth reading. The Dead Lands will probably be too slow for readers addicted to zombie fiction, but readers who appreciate literary value should give it a try.

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Housebreaking by Dan Pope

Published by Simon & Schuster on May 12, 2015

A troubled marriage, a rebellious child, extramarital sex, a workplace fling. All of those are ingredients of a standard domestic drama, but Housebreaking is more inventive than the norm. It spins off in directions I did not anticipate. The title has a couple of distinct meanings but the book is largely about a family that, while intact, is clearly broken.

The story introduces Andrew and Audrey Martin-Murray as they are house shopping in Wintonbury, a Hartford suburb. While Andrew can't understand how their family of three could possibly live in a 2,000 square foot home, Audrey is charmed by a dilapidated old house that has yet to be torn down in a neighborhood of McMansions. She is less charmed by a husband who is rarely home and with whom she has little in common. Her daughter Emily might be even harder to deal with than her husband. Their ways of coping with the loss of Emily's brother (a death that precedes the opening of the novel) are quite different.

Down the street, Benjamin Mandelbaum is, at the age of 44, back in the house where he grew up, having moved in with Leonard, his father, after separating from his wife in their 24th year of marriage. Benjamin, who spends most of his time trying to figure out what he wants, is linked to Audrey by the high school crush he once had on her.

The first section of the novel focuses on the Mandelbaums. The rest of the story provides an x-ray view of the interiors of Audrey, Andrew, and Emily. Each section of the novel reveals certain pivotal moments from the perspective of each family member. There is little overlap, however, since each character has his or her own story -- stories that are vastly different, reflecting lives lived apart from the family unit. Each family member has an ugly secret and each lives in fear that the other family members will discover that secret. They all have reason to feel guilty but they are all too self-absorbed to notice the guilty feelings that the other family members manifest. This is ultimately a story about family members who create tragedy by never being there for each other.

I love the life that Dan Pope breathes into his characters. The genius of this novel is its ability to create sympathy for badly behaving characters who aren't at all sympathetic. Small sections of the novel (primarily Emily's conversations with her dead brother) seem obvious and manipulative compared to the rest and I was disappointed that more was not made of Benjamin's father, given his early prominence. The story leaves much unresolved, but life is always unresolved until we die, so -- despite my curiosity about the outcome of Andrew's life -- the story's unfinished nature did not trouble me greatly.

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Archie in the Crosshairs by Robert Goldsborough

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media on March 10, 2015

Archie in the Crosshairs is a Nero Wolfe novel. Someone is threatening to kill Archie (and even fired an errant shot in his direction) which puts a crimp in Archie's nightlife. More bullets are fired at Archie when he isn't busy flirting with every attractive female who enters the story. Meanwhile, Nero Wolfe takes on the case of a young woman who is being blackmailed over a dalliance she had during a trip to Florence -- one she would prefer to keep a secret from her fiancé and family.

Of course, Nero's job is to do the thinking, puzzling out the mystery of Archie's assailant and a couple of murders that occur during the course of the novel while unmasking the blackmailer. Archie does the legwork, interviews the woman's family members and a friend, then reports his findings to Wolfe, who (in classic detective fashion) calls for everyone to be assembled at his home so he can reveal the answer to the mystery. The time he spends dealing with those issues only mildly intrudes upon his orchid tending, gourmet dining, and beer guzzling, but any intrusion on those life-pursuits makes Nero unhappy.

I liked the complex entwined mysteries (some characters aptly call the blackmail plot convoluted). The novel is a worthy emulation of Rex Stout. That's both good and bad. The formality of the characters' dialog and what passes for banter strikes me as artificial (as it did in the Rex Stout books), even given the era in which the novel is set. All of the minor characters make their routine appearances and play their routine parts in ways that seem formulaic. Still, the story is good, even if it doesn't hit the heights of the best Rex Stout novels.

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