Such a dialectic remains at the heart of contemporary culture wars consider the attempted erasure of Black Lives Matter with the slogan All Lives Matter.ĭespite its abundance of critical theory, The Committed is anything but didactic. “You like to think of yourself as just a man, not a white man…for me to call you a white man is unacceptable, downright racist,” the narrator shoots back, taking aim at France’s attempts at color-blind, secular “universalism.” One of the narrator’s customers, the socialist politician BFD, accuses him of being a “communitarian”-that is, in the grip of identity politics. Her lovers spout revolutionary theory and condescendingly tell the narrator, “You have been through a great deal.” Considering what he has suffered-and the suffering he has inflicted on three continents-it’s a darkly funny understatement. To what was I committed?”Īccidentally-and then completely-he commits himself to capitalism in its purest white powder form, as he deals drugs in the leftist intellectual and political circles of his glamorous “aunt,” although their relationship is not one of blood but of association. “Was I a revolutionary or a reactionary?” he wonders. The former Communist sleeper agent is a man of “two faces and two minds,” he tells us repeatedly, with a screw loose after the strain of trying to keep his sanity intact for so many years. Previously unnamed, Nguyen’s narrator now calls himself VO DANH, or “anonymous” in Vietnamese, as a “little joke on French bureaucracy.” The bastard son of a French priest and a Vietnamese mother, he comes to Paris with Bon, his best friend and blood brother-both of them displaced and dispossessed again, after stints in the United States as well as Vietnamese reeducation and Indonesian refugee camps. In this sequel to The Sympathizer-his cerebral Pulitzer Prize–winning thriller-Nguyen turns his exacting eye and wit toward 1980s France, critiquing the ways the nation fails to grapple with its colonial past and struggles to integrate minorities.
“No, you would say that a white person who is hard to read has a poker face, which has a positive connotation, a strategic one, suggesting a careful withholding of information, whereas we are just inscrutable because you white people believe that we always have something to hide.” Are white people ever referred to as inscrutable?” asks the narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new novel, The Committed.
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