The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen Pamela J. Rader Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Committed. Grove Atlantic Press, 2021. 345p. A sequel to the Pulitzer-winning The Sympathizer, The Committed picks up with our anonymous narrator who wryly calls himself Vo Danh, punning on Odysseus’s Nobody and commenting on dehumanized, nameless modern refugees. He alerts his readers that he pens this second manuscript in Paradise. After their re-education under the [End Page 125] auspices of the Commissar, the narrator and Bon, his anti-communist “best friend and blood brother,” weather an Indonesian refugee camp for two years before gaining entry to France in the early 1980s. Still a man of two minds and ex-double agent, our narrator earns his existential epithet of Camus, but cannot shake the one suggested by his half-white-French and half-Vietnamese body: a bastard. This slur is metonymic of the novel’s central questions about colonization, its violent legacy, and the identity crisis of the colonial subject, now a refugee. While the term insults its bearer, it raises the question of principles and commitment; white male colonizers and slave owners have left a trail of irresponsibility to their unclaimed sons and daughters. The doubling of father—progenitor and priest—is problematic for this anonymous narrator; with the obvious breach of celibacy, the father fails to name his son, calling him “you,” and represents the colonist who fails to acknowledge (or atone for) the subjugation and othering of Vietnamese people. This novel moves away from the American war in Vietnam and into discourse about colonialism, capitalism, and cultural imperialism as its narrator navigates his Boss’s drug and prostitution spheres, the intellectual and political elite of his faux aunt’s circle, and the Parisian community of Vietnamese-French. For instance, mass-produced commodities, like aviator sunglasses and Italian shoes, become material and ideological sites of conflict for the narrator. While the sunglasses serve as a mask, the shoes ironically save his life. A VIP neo-colonial orgy arranged by the Boss provides another stage for interrogating the white overculture’s fantasy of controlling the master narrative to marginalize the refugee and non-white French national’s place in this society. In the narrator’s reclamation of various subject pronouns and his inchoate verbal mania, I see reverberations of Fanon’s fissiparousness, which are accentuated by the narrator’s need for the drugs he sells. The collective “we” of the refugees seeking recognition and rescue at the novel’s opening shifts to the “me,” “myself,” and “I” of the fractured self. And the split “you” wants to explore the tu and vous of the colonizer’s language. While I understand the importance of examining the various voices of the narrating colonial subject, this confession flirts with navel-gazing (perhaps unavoidably) as it considers some important ideas. It pays homage to Voltaire’s critique [End Page 126] of human suffering at the hands of other humans, Beckett’s theatre of the absurd where nothing happens, and Sartre’s littérature éngagée. If The Sympathizer explores the colonial subject’s quandary of self-representation, its sequel values the perspectives of the colonized. Nguyen’s cast of characters exposes the dialectic between refugees of the colonial diaspora as well as the white French, like the politician known by his monogram “BFD” and “the Maoist Ph.D.” In his high-risk position as a drug dealer, the Vietnamese-born-American-educated narrator relies upon his invisibility (and sexual impotence) as a non-threatening Asian male to move through various circles in Paris. When Vo Danh meets “the eschatological muscle” of the brothel Heaven, who is French-born to Senegalese parents, he reads what the muscle reads: Césaire’s A Tempest and other primers on colonialism. These encounters in 1980s Paris foreshadow the rise of FN and Le Pen and the tense climate for the non-white French who become known by their racial epithets. In one of the more disturbing but droll scenes between the narrator and “Mona Lisa,” a competitor in the drug underworld, the French North African dealer teaches the narrator various racial epithets to supplement “Arab,” and they bond over their...