This he considers a downfall, not because of the drugs, but because he worries he’s “becoming a capitalist, which is 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.” This work leads him into violent encounters with a rival French–Algerian gang and a convalescence in a brothel where the Senegalese bodyguard reads Frantz Fanon and watches intellectual talk shows all day.

The Captain pitches his “aunt’s” friends to the Boss as a potentially lucrative market, and in no time he’s selling drugs to professors and politicians. The Captain gets a job in “the worst Asian restaurant in Paris,” a front used by a gangster known only as the Boss, a Vietnamese of Chinese descent.

What exactly this means, and how it’s possible to live by such a philosophy while psychologically fractured, is the subject of The Committed. The American Dream, the narrator opines, is “as shallow, boring, and sentimental as a bad television show that had somehow become a hit.” But oh, France! America simply isn’t where the action is. With The Committed, Nguyen takes those Vietnamese to the dark heart of their postcolonial turmoil-and at the same time again denies Americans the spotlight we so love to hog. The Sympathizer, as Philip Caputo noted in his review for the New York Times, is one of only a handful of American novels about the Vietnam War and its aftermath that puts Vietnamese characters at center stage. There’s a deliciously complex irony to this development, as there is in so much of Nguyen’s fiction. In The Committed, Nguyen’s new novel, he finally washes up in France in the 1980s.

The last time readers saw the nameless narrator of The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, he had survived a psychically obliterating reeducation at the hands of the communist regime he had long served as a spy and was packed into a boat full of refugees, headed toward fresh hells. Slate has relationships with various online retailers.īut note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change.Īll prices were up to date at the time of publication.

The sympathizer by viet thanh nguyen