The Sympathizer: A Novel

By Viet Thanh Nquyen
2016
384 pages / 13 hours and 53 minutes
Fiction

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There are some skills a preacher should master that will be obvious to anyone, especially if the preacher doesn't have them. One that is greatly underrated is the ability to inhabit different points of view in a biblical text. We get so accustomed to reading the text through one character’s eyes that we fail to see how they might look if we turn the camera lens in a different direction. For instance, how does the Jacob story look from Leah's point of view?

This brings me to today’s astounding novel. The Sympathizer was Viet Thanh Nguyen’s first novel and received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Well deserved, I assure you. The author was born in Vietnam but raised in the United States. Why would you possibly want to read one more novel about the Vietnam War? Because you have almost certainly not read one written from a Vietnamese point of view.

I need to get this out clearly and strongly: this is a war novel of sorts, though there is almost nothing about combat, battles, or war strategy. However, there is extreme violence in the book including a troubling torture scene that is crucial to the book's plot. There are also frank descriptions of rape and sexual activity that some readers will find intolerable in a novel. This is an utterly unsentimental view of the Vietnam War from the point of view of a Vietnamese person. If you are offended by this kind of material, please don't read it.

This book won not only the Pulitzer but also virtually every other literary prize. It is one of the more remarkable novels I've read in the last decade. It most assuredly is not just a war novel. It is a brilliant social satire and a page-turning thriller. You can't be too sure you know exactly what is going on, because none of the characters or narrators are particularly reliable. And while this seems impossible, I also have to say that the book is amazingly funny. It is often comedic and sometimes fall-on-the-floor-roll-around funny … and then the book will proceed to break your heart.

As usual with my fiction reviews, I will stay away from plot details. But the book asks us to do something that my students find extraordinarily difficult: look at the world through someone else's eyes. In my ethics class I describe this as sympathetic imagination. We are so sure about our own perspective on the world that it becomes impossible for us to understand how anyone else could fail to see it our way. And in this particular moment in American life, this is a most dangerous and vexing problem. It is also a problem in our churches.

I don't want to make the book sound preachy, because it is anything but that. It is a brilliantly conceived and executed novel that turns the camera lens and compels us to see events from a different angle. But be warned: if you don't want this book in your head, you’d best not read it, because you will not soon forget it.