What The Reviewers Say

Positive

Based on 36 reviews

The Committed

Viet Thanh Nguyen

What The Reviewers Say

Positive

Based on 36 reviews

The Committed

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Rave
Jonathan Dee,
The New Yorker
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.
Rave
Junot Díaz,
The New York Times
Equal parts Ellison’s Invisible Man and Chang-rae Lee’s Henry Park, Nguyen’s nameless narrator is a singular literary creation, a complete original.
Positive
Rumaan Alam,
The New York Review of Books
The Sympathizer could conceivably be enjoyed by an aficionado of the spy novel. Its sequel is more ironic about the conventions of crime fiction. 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. But Nguyen seems more comfortable, now, with the artifice of his project.
Positive
Dwight Garner,
The New York Times
The first 100 pages of The Committed are, to my mind, better than anything in the first novel. The narrator’s voice snaps you up. It’s direct, vain, cranky and slashing — a voice of outraged intelligence. It’s among the more memorable in recent American literature.
Rave
Vanessa Hua,
Alta
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.
Rave
Sara Webster,
Chicago Review of Books
As with The Sympathizer , Vo’s motivation to protect his best friend, Bon, from discovering his communist identity serves as the primary tension that heightens throughout the novel. The plot is elusive. And, yet still, a lot happens. We finally get to meet Vo’s aunt (who is really Man’s aunt), a sophisticated literary editor who takes a shine to Vo’s confessional manuscript.
Positive
Sam Sacks,
The Wall Street Journal
[Vo Danh's] roiling, pox-on-both-their-houses cynicism often comes across like bits from a stand-up comedy routine.
Rave
THÚY ĐINH,
NPR
With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Committed continues the travails of our Eurasian Ulysses.
Rave
Aminatta Forna,
The Guardian (UK)
... a dense book, full of lengthy debates between the characters.
Positive
Michael Magras,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Mr. Nguyen explores many dichotomies in this book, from different interpretations of 'committed'—commitment to a cause, the possibility of committing suicide—to the clash between capitalism and communism.
Rave
Michael Cronin,
The Irish Times (IRE)
Nguyen’s narrator is forensically devastating on the evasiveness of white privilege and the infinitely receding horizon of racial assimilation.
Mixed
Piper French,
Los Angeles Review of Books
Nguyen is a perceptive, scathing, and genuinely funny writer, qualities which suffused The Sympathizer and are somewhat more unevenly on display here. Other artists (Marie NDiaye, Michael Haneke, Kamel Daoud) who have explored the long and brutal legacy of the French Empire have done it more subtly and to more devastating effect. In comparison, the captain’s observations as he arrives to his new place of refuge feel, well, American: obvious and somewhat oversimplified. There are near-constant comparisons between the two countries’ ways of doing colonialism. I felt a little like I was reading Adam Gopnik if he’d been sent to a reeducation camp and forced to mainline Fanon. What these observations are not, though, is sanitized or sentimental. There are no rose-colored glasses to be found here.
Positive
Vince Schleitwiler,
International Examiner
A narrator this good can take a novel anywhere.
Rave
Laura Miller,
Slate
There’s a deliciously complex irony to this development, as there is in so much of Nguyen’s fiction.
Rave
Christian Lorentzen,
London Review of Books (UK)
... one of the more irresistible characters in recent American fiction.
Rave
Jenny Shank,
The Star Tribune
The plot of The Committed is action-packed with sex, drugs and violence, but those events don't characterize the essence of the book. The strength of this novel is the same as that of its predecessor — the probing, sensitive, educated and droll mind of its narrator, who perceives power dynamics that few examine.
Mixed
Michael Upchurch,
The Seattle Times
... contains brilliant writing, perverse insights and Tarantino-esque action sequences. Its wit is bitter; its pain is palpable. But it’s also less fluid in feel than The Sympathizer, as though its narrator — rather than being a fully animated and unpredictable character — is now a useful construct on which Nguyen can hang intellectual concepts.
Positive
David Canfield,
Entertainment Weekly
Nguyen once more trades in genre staples — crime fiction and gangster drama get particularly juicy play here — but he's more dedicated than ever to the ideas behind them, the psychological experience of a life lived as haunted by war, colonization, disenfranchisement, and lies.
Positive
Steven W. Beattie,
Toronto Star
Nguyen’s erudite narrator...is a vehicle for the author’s deep knowledge of philosophical and social history.
Mixed
Ron Charles,
The Washington Post
If you read The Sympathizer, you’ll immediately recognize this ironic and endlessly conflicted voice. If you haven’t read The Sympathizer, you’ll be hopelessly lost, so don’t even think of jumping in here. The setting and action of this second book are different, but The Committed is so dependent on earlier relationships and plot details that these two novels are more like volumes of the same continuing story.
Positive
Eliot Schrefer,
USA Today
Readers who want more of a good thing will be excited to dive into The Committed.
Positive
Randy Boyagoda,
The Financial Times (UK)
... brainy, brawny.
Positive
April Yee,
Ploughshares
Using suspense as a vehicle for postcolonial philosophy has a certain logic: what could be more suspenseful, at least for ex-colonies and their diasporas, than the rush towards their own futures? Theory dominates so heavily that reading at times feels more like sitting in a graduate seminar than being swept away in a story. But narrative cannot exist without theory.
Rave
G. Robert Frazier,
BookPage
The Committed invites debate through its complex portrayal of political alignments, racial identity and, as the narrator admits, selfish flaws. It’s richly layered with philosophical arguments and intellectual ideas, as well as a small but engrossing dose of criminal thrills.
Rave
Anderson Tepper,
Air Mail
The Committed arrives with as much verve and audacity, and as many angst-ridden rants, as The Sympathizer did.
Pan
Tanjil Rashid,
The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
... the end product amounts, essentially, to a series of creative footnotes, which seem designed to cater largely to a cloistered audience of the author’s peer reviewers: hardly the words of action Sartre had in mind, and much closer to the solipsistic coupon-clipping he scorned. If there is anything here that will rouse one to action, it is the novel’s beautifully rendered prologue: three theory-free pages narrating the ordeal of the so-called 'boat people' who fled Vietnam by sea. The controlled, formal style here mimics the refugees’ futile efforts to maintain dignity in the grimmest of circumstances ('But even eating so little, we still left our human traces all over the deck'). The conflict Nguyen feels between craft and commitment ultimately proves false. For, in the end, it is only through convincing and well-crafted sentences that any commitment can enduringly be expressed..
Rave
Ben Eastham,
Art Review
Readers of The Sympathizer will be familiar with Nguyen’s trademark combination of high theory with low genre fiction, and Vô Danh’s transformation into drug dealer for ‘bobo’ Parisian society provides plenty of opportunities to sneak postcolonial philosophy in under the cover provided by shootouts between Arab and East Asian gangs. We could say that this tension between high and low is only one of the many binaries reconciled through Nguyen’s dialectical method, or we could say that sandwiching a cocaine-fuelled orgy in which Catholic priests and corrupt politicians do unspeakable things to nubile girls from the global south in between discourses on Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969) and Hélène Cixous’s Le Rire de la Méduse (2010) is having your cake and eating it. Either way, it’s a lot of fun. That Nguyen can get away with these and other absurd plot devices...is a near-miracle of style..
Rave
Jonah Raskin,
Counterpunch
Nguyen’s Big Red Books that waltz, tango and jitter bug with capitalism, colonialism, national liberation struggles, as we called them back in the day, and with communism and anti-communism.
Rave
John Domini,
The Brooklyn Rail
Is this novel a comedy or a tragedy? It’s a rare page that doesn’t prompt a chuckle, and the plot often tumbles into staples of farce, the rowdy stuff of bed and bathroom.
Rave
Jana Siciliano,
Bookreporter
The Committed is a shiny pearl of a novel that carries on this story.
Positive
Ryan Al Shawaff,
PopMatters
The Committed is thin on plot and more cerebral than it's predecessor, with the author apparently heedless of the pitfalls of having his erudite protagonist/narrator expatiate upon anti-colonial theory as propounded by Fanon and Césair. Yet, in a carefully wrought and incremental development, that protagonist's perception of himself as the consummate "sympathizer" emerges as more apt here than it did in his first book. Although he increasingly sees the faults underlying the ideological constructs towering over both sides of the Vietnam divide, he feels for those of his compatriots propping up either edifice.
Mixed
Ananya Bhattacharyya,
Washington Independent Review of Books
One of the most interesting aspects of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed, sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer, is how much of a critique it is of three cultures: Vietnamese, American, and French.
Rave
Elissa Greenwald,
New York Journal of Books
Readers eagerly await more from a writer whose finger is on the pulse of the 21st century. His project is key for our time: reckoning with the tragic colonial history of previous centuries and our own.
Rave
Terry Hong,
Booklist
Undeniably erudite and culturally fluent as ever—interweaving history, philosophy, political treatise, theology, even literary criticism—Nguyê˜n effortlessly enhances the story with snarky commentary, sly judgments, and plenty of wink-wink-nod-nod posturing to entertain committed readers.
Rave
Publishers Weekly
... an exhilarating roller-coaster ride filled with violence, hidden identity, and meditations on whether the colonized can ever be free.
Positive
Kirkus
The pages are rife with prostitutes, drugs...and, in the late pages, gunplay. But...Nguyen keeps the thriller-ish aspects at a low boil, emphasizing a mood of black comedy driven by the narrator’s intellectual crisis.