Viet Thanh Nguyen's sequel to his 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, is a dark and comic investigation of themes that include identity, morality and the clash of civilizations brought about by French and American colonialism. Above all, it is both a striking standalone novel and an impressive successor to Nguyen's earlier work.
Set in Paris in the early 1980s, the novel relies on the beguiling voice of the same unnamed narrator, now in his mid-30s, whose worldview has been shaped by the fact that he's the son of a Vietnamese mother and a French Catholic priest. He's made his way to France from an Indonesian refugee camp after a stint in a communist reeducation program, which followed his service as a murderous double agent in California after the war's end in 1975.
To say that the narrator quickly falls in with an unsavory crowd would be an understatement. The "worst Asian restaurant in Paris" where he works is a front for a ruthless Vietnamese drug and prostitution ring. When he makes the mistake of treading on the turf of a competing Arab gang, he finds himself enmeshed in a violent rivalry. As he fights for survival in this merciless world, he's haunted by the ghosts of his victims in the United States, and desperately hopes to conceal the full knowledge of his past from his blood brother Bon, a rabid anti-communist whose wife and daughter died during the fall of Saigon.
Nguyen (The Refugees) is a literary virtuoso, and The Committed is a multilayered story that will appeal to a wide and varied audience. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer