Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American novelist whose debut The Sympathizer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning spy novel that recasts the Vietnam War through the eyes of a communist double agent.

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and came to the United States as a child refugee after the fall of Saigon in 1975. The Sympathizer, his debut novel published in 2015, is one of the most politically and formally sophisticated American novels of the past decade: a confessional memoir written under duress by an unnamed North Vietnamese spy who has been embedded in the South Vietnamese military during the final days of the war and its chaotic aftermath in Los Angeles. The narrator is defined by his double consciousness — he is the son of a French priest and Vietnamese woman, a communist who loves capitalism, a spy who has genuine loyalty in both directions — and this irresolvable doubleness is the novel’s central subject and formal principle.

Nguyen writes with a furious, satirical intelligence. The novel takes direct aim at American representations of the Vietnam War — its Hollywood versions, its political mythologies — and dissects them from the perspective of the “other side,” the people who exist in those films as background figures or enemies. It is angry and funny and structurally ambitious, and its account of the re-education camps in which the narrator eventually finds himself is the novel’s darkest and most powerful section.

The Sympathizer demands an engaged reader, and its political density can be overwhelming at moments. But as a corrective to American amnesia about the Vietnam War and as a formal achievement in its own right, it is essential.