The Sympathizer

Plot

Set as the flashback in a coerced confession of a political prisoner, the narrator describes the South Vietnamese Government in 1975 and subsequent events in American exile in Los Angeles through the eyes of a half-Vietnamese, half-French undercover communist agent. The spy remains unnamed throughout the novel from the fall of Saigon, to refugee camps and relocation in Los Angeles, to his time as a film consultant in the Philippines, and finally to his return and subsequent imprisonment in Vietnam.

The narrator lives in a series of dualities, at times contradictions: he is of mixed blood descent (Vietnamese mother, and French Catholic priest father), raised in Vietnam but attended college in the U.S., and a North Vietnamese mole yet a friend to South Vietnamese military officials and soldiers and a United States CIA agent. When the narrator is fourteen, he swears a blood oath with his friends Bon and Man, cutting their palms and becoming blood brothers. During the imminent fall of Saigon, he, as an aide-de-camp, arranges for a last minute flight as part of Operation Frequent Wind, to secure the safety of himself, his best friend Bon, and the General he advises. While they are being evacuated, the group is fired upon while boarding; during the escape, Bon's wife and child are killed along with many others.

In Los Angeles, the General and his former officers become disillusioned by a foreign culture and their rapid decline in status. The General attempts to reclaim some semblance of honor by opening his own business, a liquor store. The continuous emasculation and dehumanization within American society prompts the General to draft plans for assembling an army of South Vietnamese expatriates to return as rebels to Vietnam. While participating in the expatriate unit, the narrator takes a clerical position at Occidental College, begins having an affair with Ms. Mori, his Japanese-American colleague, and then the General's eldest daughter, Lana. While living in the United States, the narrator sends letters to Man, a North Vietnamese revolutionary and handler, providing intelligence about the General's attempts at raising a commando army. In order to mislead the General's suspicions of a mole among the South Vietnamese immigrants, the narrator frames another military officer nicknamed by the narrator as "the crapulent major". The General orders his murder which Bon and the narrator carry out.

When he receives an offer to consult for a Hollywood film on the Vietnam War called The Hamlet, he sees it as an opportunity to give the Vietnamese a voice in their historical portrayal. However, working on set in the Philippines, he not only fails to complicate the misleading, romantically American representation of the war, but almost dies when explosives detonate before they should. He is skeptical as to whether this is a mistake, as the director greatly dislikes him.

Characters

The narrator: a half-Vietnamese half-French man who is an undercover communist agent in the South Vietnamese army

Bon: a militant anticommunist soldier for the South Vietnamese army

Man: a North Vietnamese revolutionary who later becomes the Commissar of the re-education camp

Claude: a CIA agent who trained the narrator and other South Vietnamese intelligence officers

The General: the former South Vietnamese general who flees Vietnam with his family to live in the United States

The Department Chair: an old Orientalist professor who the narrator works for at Occidental College

Sofia Mori: the Japanese-American secretary of the Department Chair

Lana: the General's daughter, a fun-loving, independent young university student

The Auteur: a famed Western film director who directs The Hamlet

Style

Almost every review comments on the most distinctive stylistic feature: the anonymous narrator who provides continuous commentary. The narrator has an "acrobatic ability" that guides the reader through the contradictions of the war and American identity. The first person narration derives from the frame context for the book: a confession by the narrator to communist captors trying to make him account for his exile. The communist captors force him to write and rewrite the narrative, in an attempt to correct his ideological lens on America and the South Vietnamese enemies.

Many critiques compare the narrator's style to other authors, typically American authors. Randy Boyagoda, writing for The Guardian, describes the initial passage of the novel as a "showy riff on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man". For Boyagoda, the anonymity and doubled life reflection of the narrator closely parallel the African American narrator of Invisible Man's commentary from the perspective of concealment. Ron Charles describes the narrative voice as close to both "Roth-inspired comic scene[s] of self-abuse" and "gorgeous Whitmanian catalogue of suffering".

Themes

Most reviews of the novel describe it as a literary response to the typically American-centric worldview of the Vietnam War in works like Apocalypse Now and Platoon. In particular, the section of the novel where the narrator advises on The Hamlet helps critically examine this worldview. Ron Charles describes this section as "As funny as it is tragic", able to "carry the whole novel". The New York Times' book review describes the war as a "literary war", and says that Nguyen's The Sympathizer is "giving voice to the previously voiceless [Vietnamese perspective] while it compels the rest of us to look at the events of 40 years ago in a new light". In part, the novel is a response to Nguyen's own admiration of, but difficult relationship with, works like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and Rambo and the slaughter of Vietnamese in the films.

The narrator's duality of race, caste, education, and loyalties drive much of the novels' activities. At first this duality is the strength of the novel's narrator, providing deft critique and investigation into the contradictions of social situations, but eventually, in the last, this duality "becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet".

Reception

Critical response

The New York Times Book Review praised the novel for its place in the broader Vietnam War literature, and for its treatment of dualities in a way that "compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene and le Carré". Writing for The Washington Post, Ron Charles called the novel "surely a new classic of war fiction" which is "startlingly insightful and perilously candid". For Charles, it is less the particulars of the thematic explosion of the response to the Vietnam war that makes the novel relevant, but rather how "Nguyen plumbs the loneliness of human life, the costs of fraternity and the tragic limits of our sympathy". Randy Boyagoda, writing for The Guardian, describes it as a "bold, artful and globally minded reimagining of the Vietnam war and its interwoven private and public legacies".

One of the critiques from reviewers is, at times, the overwritten description in the novel. Though generally supportive of the novel, Boyagoda criticizes it for being explicit and heavy-handed, and argues that the Captain's speeches against east/west stereotypes, the US, and Catholicism become repetitive and rely on familiar clichés rather than fresh insight. He also suggests that the author's academic background makes part of the narration feel more like a lecture.

Several commentators said the book offered a new perspective on the Vietnam War, one that differs from the one provided by Hollywood filmmakers. In contrast, historian Peter Zinoman indicates that the novel closely and repeatedly aligns with the views of the 'orthodox' historiographical school, that is, a portrayal of the Republic of Vietnam as allegiance to foreign influence, corruption, military violence against civilians, the demeaning of Vietnamese women, and its depiction of sexual violence, as in many Hollywood Vietnam films; all of these notions have been challenged by recent scholarship.

Book lists

The Sympathizer was selected for more than 30 best-of-the-year lists, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Globe and Mail. It was on Time magazine's list of "The 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time", Vulture's list of "A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon" and was named one of the best books of the 2010s decade by Esquire, Insider, Literary Hub, and Paste. Pasadena Public Library featured the book in its "One City, One Story" program in 2017. Additionally, Los Angeles Times also selected The Sympathizer as one of the most essential L.A. literary novels.

Adaptation

In April 2021, A24 and Rhombus Media acquired the rights to the novel to adapt it as a television series. In July 2021, it was announced that HBO had given the production a series order. The series would be produced by A24 with Robert Downey Jr. as co-star and executive producer, Park Chan-wook as director and Don McKellar as co-showrunner.

In November 2022, Hoa Xuande, Fred Nguyen Khan, Toan Le, Vy Le, Alan Trong, Sandra Oh, Kiều Chinh, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ Duyên joined the cast. In January 2023, it was announced that Marc Munden and Fernando Meirelles would direct several episodes of the series and also that Duy Nguyen, Kayli Tran and VyVy Nguyen were added to the cast.

The series premiered on HBO's streaming service Max on April 14, 2024.