Race and Belonging

The Committed is understandable first and foremost as a meditation on the refugee experience and the various physical and psychological traumas that come along with it. Nguyen opens his text with a prologue that depicts a perspective-free account of a ship full of refugees as it struggles to navigate rocky seas; this visceral, exhausting, and gripping experience sets the tone of the entire novel, which proceeds at a confusing, complex, breakneck, and draining pace. As The Sympathizer struggles to find his place in the city of Paris, he encounters various roadblocks, all of which are, in some sense, tied to his fraught relationship with his own background. The Sympathizer is the child of a French priest and a Vietnamese woman, a history which marks him as a “bastard” in the eyes of most of the people he encounters. The novel is deeply concerned with...