“What a luminous, near future would be visible to us if two, three, or many Vietnams flourished throughout the world with their share of death and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism.”
Che Guevara’s fighting words from the Bolivian maquis to delegates gathered at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana find an unsettling echo in the novels of Viet Thanh Nguyen. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer (2015), he traces the exiled afterlife of Vietnamese refugees in the United States, and in his latest novel, The Committed, he charts the fortunes of Vietnamese expatriates in 1980s Paris.
The foreign countries are not the “two, three, or many Vietnams” that Guevara envisaged, less the sites of revolutionary example and heroic flourishing than the settings for the troubled legacy of death and displacement. The Sympathizer – a double agent born of a French father and a Vietnamese mother – is again the central figure in The Committed, and his rivalrous blood brothers Bon and Man feature as prominently in Nguyen’s second novel as they did in his first.
The Sympathizer, named as Vo Danh, teams up with Bon in the French capital to become engaged in drug-dealing; eventually they will fall foul of Algerian competitors. New pursuits do not cancel out old resentments, and Bon, a fervent anti-communist, is determined to hunt down his communist blood brother Man, now working in the Vietnamese embassy in Paris.
Vo Danh, who is generally referred to as “Crazy Bastard”, sees involvement in the drug trade in France, a former colonial power in Vietnam, as poetic revenge for the deliberate imperialist cultivation of opium dependency in southeast Asia.
Nguyen’s narrator is forensically devastating on the evasiveness of white privilege and the infinitely receding horizon of racial assimilation.
In one scene, Danh moves to speak to a group of African-American musicians who have been hired to play music at a Berlusconi-type sex party. He initially speaks in English and then switches to French, but the musicians immediately stop him by saying that, though they can speak French, they would not: “If we speak good French, they’ll think we’re Africans. They treat us great when they think we’re Americans, but when they think we’re Africans – they treat us like shit, the other three said.”
Nguyen makes much in The Committed of the hierarchy of racial stereotypes in French society. Among the subordinates, the Asians are on top (discreet, hard-working) and the Arabs at the bottom (feckless, dangerous).
Unvarnished vividness
The criminal underworld of 1980s Paris provides the backdrop for a number of brilliant set-pieces in this metaphysical thriller in which Nguyen both feeds off and subverts received images of violence. One extended passage involving a deadly game of Russian roulette is a clear nod to a similar scene in the 1978 Vietnam vet classic The Deer Hunter, but Nguyen’s is told with an unvarnished vividness that makes the camera feel like a cop-out.
The satire throughout is abrasive and unrelenting. The sympathiser as well-schooled gangster is witheringly funny on the disdainful self-importance of the entitled and the cartoonish binaries of second-string hoodlums. He is also deeply attentive to the jittery self-regard of formerly colonised small nations.
Reflecting on the various epithets for the capital of the former South Vietnam, the narrator exclaims: “Oh Saigon, pearl of the Orient! Or so it was called, presumably by the French, using a term of endearment we ourselves had adopted, for there was nothing the people of a small country liked better than to be flattered, so rarely did it happen.”
The ferocity of the critique of former colonial powers is not matched by a fawning idealisation of Vietnamese society or culture. The narrator, a Franco-Vietnamese double, can take no consolation from a Punch and Judy knockabout of good guys and bad guys with the oppressed cast as eternally sanctified victims.
Vo Danh, through a highly cultivated and well-placed Vietnamese woman known only as Aunt, gains access to more privileged political and intellectual circles in Paris. The access is good for his business – drug-dealing – as well as for the narrator to exercise his well-honed ironies at the expense of what the French call the Caviar Left.
The narrator is formidably well-read and his extensive gleanings from French literature and theory fill out his long, impassioned reflections on revolution, empire, exile and race.
Nguyen does not always avoid the pitfalls of a certain didacticism in these moments, the telling badgering the showing, and The Committed occasionally falls victim to Tripadvisor truisms about French culture (hygiene, taxes) that can feel tired. But these are minor faults in the context of a novel that is conclusive evidence of Nguyen’s standing as one of the most distinctive and committed voices writing in English today.
Michael Cronin is director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation
