This is by Viet Thanh Nguyen; it was published in 2021; and it's the sequel to The Sympathizer (published in 2015), so it follows the fortunes of the same conflicted narrator.

Half-French, half-Vietnamese, he has served both sides in Viet Nam's war with America, and lives permanently in a state of two minds. We never know his real name (his passport is issued in the name of Vo Danh -- which means "nameless"...). And he's a three-times refugee. In The Sympathizer, we learn how he and his Vietnamese mother flee the communists in North Viet Nam in 1954; in 1975, under the auspices of CIA agent Claude (remember the double-agent thing?), he flees Saigon when the communists arrive. Then, he returns to Viet Nam as part of a scheme to organize a counter-revolution (it's also a handy opportunity to escape the consequences of a couple of murders he has been involved with in the US). In Viet Nam he is held for a year in a reeducation camp (where he is tortured by Man, one of the erstwhile blood brotherhood that includes not only the narrator but Bon). When The Committed opens, in the early 1980s, we find "Vo Danh" on a boat, heading away from what is now Ho Chi Minh City.

It's a pretty terrible journey, reflecting the experiences of many "boat people" -- but the narrator consistently rejects that label, because it smacks of victimhood and pity: "I was not a boat person unless the English Pilgrims who fled religious persecution to come to America on the Mayflower were also boat people. Those refugees just happened to be fortunate that the soon-to-be-hapless natives did not have a camera to record them as the foul-smelling, half-starved, unshaven, and lice-ridden lot that they were."

After a spell in the camp on Galang Island, the narrator and Bon end up in Paris, offering Nguyen -- through the mouth of Vo Danh -- to skewer French colonialism and racism in exactly the way he exposed the American version in the previous book. As Lorentzen points out, there's an elegant symmetry between the two books. Both begin and end in detention (in the reeducation camp, and now in some kind of mental hospital that Vo Danh finds himself in); the narratives are both written as confessions.


Pulau Galang, Batam, Indonesia, 2017

The Committed involves the narrator in a wild ride. He stumbles almost immediately into the drug trade, with all its associated illicit ways of making money. In one of Nguyen's clever swipes, his narrator comments: "In seeking my revenge on the socialist, was I actually becoming that most horrid of criminals? No, not a drug dealer, which was a matter of bad taste. I mean was I becoming a capitalist, which was a matter of bad morals, especially as the capitalist, unlike the drug dealer, would never recognize his bad morality, or at least admit to it. A drug dealer was just a petty criminal who targeted individuals, and while he may or may not be ashamed of it, he usually recognized the illegality of his trade. But a capitalist was a legalized criminal who targeted thousands, if not millions, and felt no shame for his plunder."

Meanwhile, he's still caught up with the ramifications of the Vietnamese conflict. Bon has spotted the man (faceless because of a napalm attack) who supervised their reeducation. What he doesn't know is that it's Man... Bon is "maniacally anticommunist", so there's no way he won't want to kill Man if he finds out, and the narrator feels he will be next on the list if the truth emerges. Because of all these nefarious involvements, there are scenes of violence and torture that turned my stomach a little, despite the detached tone adopted by the "crazy bastard" narrator. And a couple of times we're unsure of his status: Alive or dead?



***

While appreciating the message of The Sympathizer, I had three issues with it. I found the confession mode a bit contrived; I didn't like the author's trick of giving characters designations rather than names ("the crapulent major", for example, who is one of the ghosts who has accompanied the narrator to Paris), and found myself gagging occasionally on the slightly overblown prose; and I hankered for a little more subtlety ("I felt I was being beaten over the head and megaphoned all at the same time").

Well, all these things are here in The Committed, too. And they're even bigger. The confession is even more outrageously unlikely; epithets and acronyms constantly replace names ("the Maoist PhD", "the eschatalogical muscle", "BFD" -- they have recognizable inspirations, if you're in the know); the cleverness sometimes teeters on the edge of the gratuitously smartarse (eg, "an undoubtedly canned speech that threatened to poison me with the botulism of botched ideas", or "we navigated through a quarter whose streets were narrower than the average French mind"); and the megaphone has been turned up to max, and attached to a thunderous sound system...


Paris, 2024

In fact, The Committed is altogether more OTT than The Sympathizer. We have shootouts, and games of Russian roulette, and tit-for-tat actions in the turf war with the Algerians; we have wild parties where people turn up in outrageous and/or incongruous costumes; we have the preparations for a variety show that aims "to present our authentic Vietnamese culture" (but not -- says the narrator, drily -- things like gambling, or smoking, or "making the women stay in the kitchen").

But somehow, BECAUSE it was all so uproariously ludicrous, BECAUSE it's clearer that we're operating in a huge theatre of the absurd, I found myself less distracted. I wasn't looking for realism or restraint any longer. I was content to sink back into slapstick and thriller-style action on the one hand, and big, big themes on the other -- because it's true (Lorentzen again) that it's hard to think of any other author who "is didactic with such comic flair". A good illustration of this pairing is "the muscle", who is a bouncer in a brothel, but talks knowledgeably about Frantz Fanon and Aime Cesaire, and is spotted at various times reading Voltaire's Candide and Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit.

The author has interesting things to say about this hard-to-bring-off combo: "What’s considered contemporary, legitimate literary fiction in this country [the United States] tends to lean toward the middle brow. By that I mean, it’s dominated by realism. It’s dominated by not being very intellectually challenging and not very formally challenging either as if modernism never happened. In modernism people were doing very serious, complicated stuff in the 1920s and 1930s and it’s as if for most American fiction writers of the contemporary period, it never happened. It’s weird... My desire in writing these novels was to write novels that were very serious, that would be very challenging formally, and could be very entertaining at the same time... I have trust that there’s a large number of readers out there that can handle this kind of combination. That want to be entertained and that want to be challenged and elevated at the same time."

So, The Committed duly brings us all the elements of the thriller (somewhat too many for my taste), while also introducing us to figures like Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, Theodor Adorno, and Helene Cixous. That's quite a coup.



Which brings us to the title. There are various ways in which it can be understood: The narrator has been committed to an asylum on the grounds of mental breakdown; he has committed his thoughts to writing (which his American handler, Claude, always told him not to); he gradually finds that he is committed to a non-violent "nothing".

But the dominant meaning -- committed in the sense of engaged and active, the Sartrean sense of the committed writer -- is the one that Nguyen expounds in this interview: "My ideal writer was always the committed writer, the writers that I looked up to, like... Edward Said or James Baldwin or Tony Morrison, or Frantz Fanon, who appears in this novel, this idea that the writer is engaged both at the level of the art -- so I’m committed to the art, but also committed to the political and social issues from which the art can’t be extricated."

And I guess this is a stance that I appreciate and applaud more now than when I read The Sympathizer. Then, I thought: I know this; I don't need to have it shouted at me. Now, I think: It doesn't matter if I know this. People like Nguyen need to keep shouting it -- BELLOWING IT -- and we need to keep sharing what they're bellowing, until something actually changes.



Post-Trump (Phase I), Nguyen published a Times op-ed urging writers not to give up on political engagement. And in The Committed, he demonstrates what it means to give a novel a voice that reverberates with anger, accusation, and cynicism: "[Nguyen] is driven to raptures of expression by the obliviousness of the self-satisfied; he relentlessly punctures the self-image of French and American colonizers, of white people generally, of true believers and fanatics of every stripe. This mission drives the rhetorical intensity that makes his novels so electric. It has nothing to do with plot or theme or character. Those years of disciplined work have enabled the reverberant howl evoked by 'the parting gift of the colonizer, the venereal disease of hatred.'..."

Aminatta Forna expands on this need for writers to be angry: "Writing in the New Yorker in 2013, Tim Kreider remarked: 'If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal relationships were issues with our parents, bad relationships and death.' The year before, writing in this newspaper, Pankaj Mishra asked how many authors in the UK and US 'have actually made use of their privileges during the last decades of violence and mayhem unleashed by their governments?' Since 2016, of course, there has been a reckoning in the US. Much soul searching has followed. Literary writers have found themselves accused of what has amounted to nothing less than a dereliction of duty. And so here it is, with perfect timing, a political novel that anyone who is part of a colonising or colonised nation -- and that includes, of course, America -- should read. It is an invitation to the reader to think, not just to feel: to think deeply about political systems and ideologies, whose interests they serve and what, if any, answers they can provide."


Write politically!

***

Nguyen is in a good position to shoot at the pretensions of almost anyone. He is a child of migrants, as he explains in an interview with Laila Lalami in 2021. He was four when he arrived in the US. His parents were mostly hard at work, so he took refuge in the library, and learned to love books. But he constantly carries the duality that comes with colonization: "As I’ve said over and over again, I am a mentally colonized person, so I just admit it. I come from Vietnam. My parents actually were born under French colonization. My 86 year old father still sings songs that he remembers from his French education... So, I wanted to be able to interrogate my own mental colonization." He wants to move away from the romantic French colonial vision of lawns and white linen suits and pliant servants: "The present [of the novel] is set in this crime and gangsters narrative in 1982 Paris, but the backdrop is this history of French colonization of Indo China, that the French have pretty much, I think, totally forgotten about."

(As part of his research for The Committed, he talks to the Vietnamese community in Paris. Because it's not large, it's not nearly so culturally assertive as its American equivalent, and there's considerable pressure to assimilate -- a situation reminiscent of Khue Pham's Wherever You May Be, set in Germany. The drive for assimilation is expressed by Man's aunt, who takes the narrator in when he arrives in Paris: "Here, anyone can be French. But you must want to be French. You must look in the mirror and see a French person, not an Asian person or some kind of color.")

Nguyen also explains how he, too, experiences his narrator's double mind: "In my entire life, I have felt unsettled. I have felt always out of place... When I was little, in my parents’ Vietnamese household, I felt like an American spying on them. Then when I stepped out, I felt like I was a Vietnamese person spying on Americans. That sense of being ill at ease has filtered into every aspect of my life. Among writers, I feel like I’m out of place, because I’m a scholar. Amongst scholars, I feel I am out of place because I’m a writer, and so on... I’m saying to you I feel at home [in Pasadena]. But my personal circumstance is set in this larger social circumstance that we’re in of anti-Asian violence... My wife says she got flashed the white power sign down the street from our house." Can he ever really "belong" then? He thinks not.



From this position of not belonging, however, he can have his narrator fire off salvos at the unthinking societies around him while also expressing the agonies of duality. Examples:

-- "Some of us loved the French, our patrons, and some hated the French, our colonizers, but all of us had been seduced by them. It is difficult to be loved by someone, as the French imagined their relationship with us, or to be abused by someone, though the French pretended otherwise, without being shaped by their hand and touched by their tongue... And some of us -- me and myself most of all -- loved and hated our masters at the same time."

-- "[Americans] sincerely believe, as all imperialists do, that they have taken over the world for its own good, as if imperialism were a kind of penicillin (for the natives), with power, profit, and pleasure merely being surprising side effects (for the doctors)."


The lighter that Claude (CIA) gives the narrator. Nguyen: "I don’t know if that’s the real motto of the CIA, but it should be. The UK publisher is brave enough to put that on the cover of their book." US covers look rather different...

-- "Three million dead for a revolution was, arguably, worth it, although that was always easier to say for the living! But three million people dead for THIS revolution? We had simply traded one Repressive State Apparatus for another one, and the only difference was that it was our own."

-- "Calling a comedy black is kind of, sort of, maybe, perhaps, residually racist, although if you suggested that to a Frenchman, or even to an American, and most probably to a Vietnamese, he would indignantly denounce you as racist for seeing something racial in an innocent use of the word 'black.' Just a coincidence! ... -- if words are just words, then let’s call it a white comedy, shall we? It’s just a joke, take it easy, a bad joke, sure, but so was the Unholy Trinity of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, not to mention the Dynamic Duo of capitalism and communism, both of which white people invented and which were contagious, like smallpox and syphilis."

***

You know from the ending that there's room for a reappearance of our cipher-like narrator... Nguyen promises that the third part will have eighties music as well...

Despite some lingering reservations, I'll be waiting for it.


The narrator's ghosts: "Paris is a great city. So much history! So many catacombs to explore! So many ghosts to meet! Anybody who's anybody is at Pere Lachaise!"