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The plot whirrs and clicks like a Rube Goldberg contraption.
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The book is so intellectually rigorous I wanted a syllabus (in truth, as above, the author provides one). The Committed does not ask for our credulity, but our attention. But Nguyen seems more comfortable, now, with the artifice of his project. Yes, there’s the big boss, banally evil in his polo shirts, and the rival gangs from the former colonies at war in the seedier of Paris’s arrondissements. Its sequel is more ironic about the conventions of crime fiction.
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The Sympathizer could conceivably be enjoyed by an aficionado of the spy novel. May that voice keep running like a purifying venom through the mainstream of our self-regard-through the American dream of distancing ourselves from what we continue to show ourselves to be. It’s a voice that shakes the walls of the old literary comfort zone wherein the narratives of nonwhite 'immigrants' were tasked with proving their shared humanity to a white audience. That voice has made Nguyen a standard-bearer in what seems to be a transformational moment in the history of American literature, a perspectival shift. It has nothing to do with plot or theme or character. This mission drives the rhetorical intensity that makes his novels so electric. Nguyen is driven to raptures of expression by the obliviousness of the self-satisfied he relentlessly punctures the self-image of French and American colonizers, of white people generally, of true believers and fanatics of every stripe. The novel is a homecoming of a particularly volatile sort, a tale of chickens returning to roost, and of a narrator not yet done with the world.