The Committed

 

This 2021 sequel to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 debut novel The Sympathizer picks up where the previous book left off. The unnamed protagonist (“Vo Danh” on paper and Crazy Bastard to his friends) is a “man of two minds,” the son of a French priest and a Vietnamese mother, a Communist agent recruited to infiltrate anticommunist expats. His ability to sympathize with his supposed enemies won him a trip to a Vietnamese reeducation camp where he was tortured at the behest of a masked commissar, secretly his blood brother Man. Now exiled to Paris, he meets up with his other blood brother Bon, a hardened yet grief-stricken anticommunist who has vowed revenge on the commissar, unaware that it is Man behind the mask. Together, they fall in with a criminal syndicate whose drug trafficking operation has put them in the crosshairs of an Algerian gang. Meanwhile, he is watched over by a Vietnamese agent posing as his aunt, and her leftist intellectual friends regard him with a combination of fascination and contempt. A revolutionary without a revolution, the protagonist must keep Bon from killing man, the Algerians from killing or being killed by his new friends, and his true allegiances – at times, a secret even to himself – well-hidden.

 

The Committed is a messy, ambitious, wildly uneven book, at times brilliant and at times almost painful to read. At its best, it operates in the tradition of Graham Greene, using political intrigue and a crime plot as the backdrop for a deeply personal crisis of faith and a dose of moral introspection. Nguyen does an excellent job of fleshing out the protagonist, a man wracked by guilt (he imagines the voices of those he killed chiding him) and loathing (both internal and external) who is also hilariously irreverent. This latter quality leads to many fitfully funny moments, such as the protagonist trolling his would-be captors over their failures as tortures or drinking a cocktail that “look(s) like holy water and taste(s) like Hell” as a form of penance.

 

At its worst, however, The Committed is offputtingly self-indulgent. Some of the typographical choices come across as needlessly dramatic, and not since Atlas Shrugged has a novel torpedoed its own momentum by spiraling into unnecessarily digressive declarations of political principle. A lesser annoyance is Nguyen’s aversion to names. One of the aunt’s set is The Maoist PhD, a bouncer at a brothel is the eschatological muscle, and the Algerian gangsters are introduced to us as Beatles, Rolling Stones, and the Mona Lisa. Much as Thomas Pynchon’s ridiculous character names serve to distract and lower the stakes, so too does Nguyen’s serial nicknaming.

 

Those who enjoyed The Sympathizer may find The Committed a bit of a let-down, but its frustrations are still worth enduring for its skillfully complex characterization and at-times captivating prose.