In his new novel, The Committed, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen returns to his nameless narrator from his 2015 Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer. Fresh from his adventures abroad as a Viet Cong spy, our narrator is now going by the name Vo Danh (“Nameless”), and has travelled to Paris from Indonesia with his blood brother, Bon. Vo Danh, “a man of two faces and two minds”, is himself half Vietnamese and half French, and although the reader knows he is a communist spy, he spent time in a communist reeducation camp where he masqueraded as an anticommunist with Bon, an ardent anticommunist. Thus, when he arrives in Paris, these multiple layers of Vo’s identity are once again in play, as he is stuck between ideologies and nationalities. His spy network sets him up to live with one of his associate’s aunt in Paris, whom he tells Bon is his own aunt. This woman is a communist intellectual, frequently hosting prominent guests in her salon with names like “the Maoist PhD” and “the eschatological muscle”.
Through the guests of this salon, Vo enters the world of French communist intellectuals, who pass around the work of Marx, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Césaire, and Fanon, and debate the political revolutions of the day. Through these intellectuals Vo also gets his client base: he and Bon become involved with an organized crime syndicate, and Vo sells hashish to his aunt’s associates and others. In his new life of crime, Vo comes across other victims of French colonialism, a group of Algerians, whom Vo tries to convince of their common cause. Vo is hyperconscious of the way he is perceived walking around the streets of Paris, and he begins dressing like a goofy Japanese tourist to avoid any untoward attention, leaning into the prejudiced tendencies of the French population to see all Asian people as the same. By entering the criminal underworld, Vo becomes a faceless member of a group of refugees that have been rejected by genteel society.
One cannot read this novel without thinking of black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness, in which he asserts that oppressed groups have a fractured identity, forced to see themselves as “other” through the eyes of their oppressor, an identity that conflicts with their own conception of self. This double consciousness certainly plagues Vo throughout the novel, he cannot fit in with the French communist intellectuals, even though he is a communist, and even though he is half French he is always regarded as a refugee from some backwards Asian country. The center of this novel is clearly colonization, as Vo realizes the inherent hypocrisy of these French intellectuals who preach communism but have colonized nations all over the globe and extracted their resources and meddled in their government. Vo is not wholly committed to the cause of communism, he seems torn between ideologies, but he is firmly aware of the evils of colonization, which seems to be the one thing that he is not of two minds about. The novel adapts this theory of double consciousness in really fascinating ways, exploring how deeply resonant it is for oppressed refugees.
The novel is also formally complicated, as Nguyen writes with signature wit and humor about violence, sexuality, and philosophy, digging into the excess in fascinating ways. Many characters have humorous names (my personal favorite is the crime boss names “Le Cao Boi”) and the novel is filled with clever word play and humorous but cutting quips. Our narrator remarks that French intellectuals love jazz “partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism…”, and describes the streets in France as “narrower than the average French mind”. In the second half of the novel, we witness the narrator begin to unravel under the yoke of oppression and the stress of his work, and the writing becomes more and more loose and free flowing. The novel itself seems to be of two minds, beginning as a slick narrative of the Paris underworld, the evolving into a roving inquiry into the evils of colonialism and its deleterious effects on the psyche of the colonized. The novel is ambitious, and Nguyen packs a ton into this narrative, and a lesser writer would struggle to balance everything on the novel’s mind. But Nguyen manages to make it work, the novel is a really strong follow up to The Sympathizer, and it seems that he’s left room for a third installment as well. The Committed is a unique and brilliantly chaotic exploration of globalization and colonization, with fascinating philosophical and political implications.