Editors Reads Verdict
The Committed is a darker, more sardonic sequel that transplants Nguyen's narrator to Paris and turns its satirical eye on French colonialism and intellectual hypocrisy. Less tightly constructed than The Sympathizer, it compensates with some of the most savagely funny passages Nguyen has written.
What We Loved
- The satirical treatment of French postcolonial intellectual culture is savagely effective
- The narrator's voice retains all of its darkly comic double-consciousness from the first novel
- Nguyen's engagement with Fanon and the theory of colonial violence gives the novel genuine intellectual weight
Minor Drawbacks
- The crime-thriller plot mechanics are less compelling than the political and psychological material
- Readers unfamiliar with The Sympathizer will find the sequel difficult to enter
Key Takeaways
- → The committed are those who cannot escape their ideological formation even when they recognize its contradictions
- → French colonialism produced a particular kind of intellectual bad faith that persists in postcolonial theory
- → Violence, once absorbed, becomes a tool that can be turned in any direction — including against those who taught it
| Author | Viet Thanh Nguyen |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Grove Press |
| Pages | 384 |
| Published | March 2, 2021 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Spy Fiction |
The Committed Review
Six years after The Sympathizer — both in publication time and in the narrator’s experience — Viet Thanh Nguyen’s unnamed double agent resurfaces in 1980s Paris. He arrives with his blood brother Bon, traumatized from the reeducation camp, carrying the manuscript that was The Sympathizer and almost nothing else. What follows is a novel of drug dealing, violence, and intellectual combat in the Vietnamese diaspora and the Algerian underworld of the French capital.
The Committed is a darker, more deliberately excessive book than its predecessor. Where The Sympathizer had the structural engine of the confession to drive it, the sequel sprawls and digresses more freely, and the crime-thriller plot is clearly a vehicle for Nguyen’s real interests: the intellectual history of French colonialism, the bad faith of Parisian radicals who theorize liberation while maintaining its structures, and the persistent condition of the man who can see every side but commit to none. The novel’s engagement with Frantz Fanon and the literature of decolonization is serious and often bracingly sardonic.
The Paris of the novel is rendered with a cold eye. The Vietnamese exile community is riven by the same political divisions that destroyed the country. The French intellectual left, which might be expected to offer solidarity to refugees from a US-backed war, offers instead condescension and theoretical containment. The narrator moves through these worlds with the same ironic double-consciousness as before, but here it curdles further into something closer to nihilism — a recognition that the committed, whatever they are committed to, are often most committed to their own contradictions.
Measured against The Sympathizer, the sequel shows its seams more. The crime plot requires more suspension of disbelief than the espionage mechanics of the first novel, and the ending feels more willed. But the best passages — the narrator’s internal dialogues with his two selves, his savage dissection of French cultural self-congratulation, his encounters with the Parisian Vietnamese community — are among the most piercingly funny and politically acute writing in recent American fiction.
Our rating: 4/5
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Committed" about?
The nameless narrator of The Sympathizer arrives in 1980s Paris with his blood brother Bon, navigating the Vietnamese exile community, Algerian drug networks, and French intellectual life while still haunted by his double-consciousness and the interrogations he survived.
What are the key takeaways from "The Committed"?
The committed are those who cannot escape their ideological formation even when they recognize its contradictions French colonialism produced a particular kind of intellectual bad faith that persists in postcolonial theory Violence, once absorbed, becomes a tool that can be turned in any direction — including against those who taught it
Is "The Committed" worth reading?
The Committed is a darker, more sardonic sequel that transplants Nguyen's narrator to Paris and turns its satirical eye on French colonialism and intellectual hypocrisy. Less tightly constructed than The Sympathizer, it compensates with some of the most savagely funny passages Nguyen has written.
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