What I’m Reading: ‘The Sympathizer’

Gonzaga U.

In his opinion piece “Starving for Wisdom,” Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times presents yet another spirited defense of an education in the humanities. Literature, he writes, “builds bridges of understanding. Toni Morrison has helped all America understand African-American life.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday, does much the same work for another group. The narrator, a divided self (he is the illegitimate, American-educated son of a French Catholic priest and a Vietnamese woman) from a divided country, is forced to write a confession about his failings as a Communist spy who was embedded with the South Vietnamese national police force. Acknowledging these multiple divisions, the narrator describes himself as “a man of two faces” who can “see any issue from both sides.”

But there are always more than two sides, and his loyalties are conflicted as he sympathizes in turn with each person who tries to influence him. His body is the bridge connecting the self with the other.

Add this novel to the literature that disavows Orientalist depictions of Asia. The author, an associate professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, gives voice to the Vietnamese, who have had no speaking parts in countless movies and war narratives. It also points to the multifarious consequences of global engagements. As college campuses seek to become more inclusive, we can take many lessons from The Sympathizer, which helps American readers understand, and sympathize with, the complexities of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American life.

Update (4/18/2016, 6:30 p.m.): This article was updated to note that The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and to mention Mr. Nguyen’s academic affiliation.