The long-awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, which has sold more than one million copies worldwide, The Committed follows the man of two minds as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. Traumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend, Man, and struggling to assimilate into French culture, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt,” he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen, whether the self-torture of addiction, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. The Sympathizer will need all his wits, resourcefulness, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail. Both highly suspenseful and existential, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.

We had a really good discussion of about Nguyen's sequel to The Sympathizer, and the lowest marks we gave the book were above-average. Some of us loved it, and what we loved about it was the voice of the narrator. We didn't think this book was as strong stylistically as the previous one, but there were still a lot of beautiful, cutting, and frankly laugh-out-loud funny moments of the narrator meditating on life in France, capitalism, and the Vietnamese diaspora. Sometimes this got bogged down in a repetition that was wearying (there are only so many times you want to hear someone talk about have two minds), but for the most part, the observations of the narrator were both entertaining and cutting, even as we recognized many of them as biased and incorrect. At moments, the style was electrifying; we particularly noted the chapter were the narrator is mugged in a park as having an intensity and flow that matched the surreal sense of adrenaline that the character felt, and there were just so many great settings and characters, from the worst ethnic restaurant in Paris to the weird Fantasia performance in the novel's close. What made the book interesting was the strong exploration of colonization and identity of immigrants, and Nguyen does a wonderful job of critiquing all sides of the relationship without letting you forget the power imbalance or the tragedies of the past. Having a narrator who can merciless skewer both France and the United States gives Nguyen a chance to play with a number of critical perspectives on the Vietnam War and the subsequent Cold War, and the triangle of the narrator, Bon, and Man as embodiments of capitalism, communism, and the split identity of the Vietnamese people provides endless fodder for conversation about the justice and truth of the ideologies. These issues are just so dense in the stories, from the names of the characters to the look at drug dealing as a market and competition space for immigrant communities to the constant reflections on power in the relationships of mob bosses and underlings, politicians and servants, prostitutes and clients, and the Vietnamese and French. Nguyen's choice to be funny about all of this really works, because his message about these systems is quite dark, and the novel is great when you can laugh along at how messed up everything is. Overall, it stands with The Sympathizer as a very well-written and challenging book about interesting takes on power and belief. Again, you have to like the narrator to enjoy the ride, but if you do, it's a very dark and very funny one.