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The Committed

The Committed is a 2021 novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, serving as the sequel to his debut work The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.^[1]^[2] Published by Grove Press on March 2, 2021, the book continues the story of its unnamed Vietnamese narrator—a former communist spy and refugee—who arrives in France, enters the criminal underworld of drug dealing, and confronts profound ideological tensions between communism, capitalism, and the legacies of colonialism.^[1]^[2] Blending elements of literary thriller with extended philosophical reflections drawn from thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx, the narrative critiques power structures across Vietnamese, American, and French contexts while exploring themes of identity, violence, and redemption.^[1]^[3]^[4] Critics praised its ambitious scope and intellectual depth, positioning Nguyen as a significant voice in contemporary American literature, though some observed that the profusion of theoretical discourse could dominate the plot's momentum.^[3]^[5] The novel builds on the commercial success of its predecessor, which sold over one million copies, and underscores Nguyen's recurring examination of diaspora, espionage, and cultural hybridity.^[1]

Publication and Background

Writing and Development

Viet Thanh Nguyen conceived The Committed as an unplanned sequel to his debut novel The Sympathizer, driven by the unresolved trajectory of its unnamed protagonist and lingering thematic concerns around identity, memory, and ideological commitment.^[6] Following the completion of edits for The Sympathizer in early 2014, Nguyen promptly began drafting the follow-up, producing an initial 50 pages in a rapid burst before the demands of his first book's impending publication interrupted his momentum.^[6] The narrative's relocation to 1970s Paris stemmed from Nguyen's interest in France's colonial legacy in Vietnam and its postcolonial immigrant dynamics, allowing exploration of the protagonist's displacement amid drug trade, philosophical debates, and racial tensions.^[7] Nguyen structured the writing with a detailed 50 single-spaced page outline—far more elaborate than the two-page sketch for The Sympathizer—to guide the blend of spy-thriller action, satirical critique, and confessional form addressed to an imagined French inquisitor.^[6] He composed in disjointed 50-page increments, necessitating multiple revisions to ensure continuity in plot, voice, and emotional depth, while incorporating dense allusions to thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre to interrogate colonialism and revolutionary ideology.^[7]^[8] This approach drew from Nguyen's broader influences in modernism and genre fiction, aiming to subvert literary expectations while crafting a standalone text that recaps essential backstory for new readers without relying on formulaic exposition.^[6] The development faced significant hurdles, including prolonged interruptions from The Sympathizer's 2015 book tour, its 2016 Pulitzer Prize win, and subsequent publicity obligations, which fragmented Nguyen's writing rhythm and contrasted with the uninterrupted flow of his first novel.^[6]^[7] External pressures to replicate the debut's acclaim added psychological strain, prompting Nguyen to refocus on the protagonist's internal psyche as an anchor, advising himself to "write this book for yourself, not for anybody else."^[6] Personal reflections on his own refugee escape from Saigon in 1975, marked by ambiguous memories of violence, informed the epic scale of the protagonist's voyage and themes of unreliable narration rooted in trauma.^[8] Nguyen completed the manuscript around 2020, with publication by Grove Press delayed from an earlier schedule to March 2, 2021, due to the COVID-19 pandemic's disruptions to the industry.^[6] This extended timeline allowed refinement of the novel's balance between entertainment—through elements like gunfights and drug deals—and formal experimentation, ensuring it critiqued both communism and capitalism without diluting its philosophical edge.^[8]

Publication Details and Commercial Performance

The Committed was published in hardcover by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, on March 2, 2021.^[1] A paperback edition was released on March 29, 2022.^[1] The novel achieved commercial success as a New York Times bestseller.^[1]^[9] It received acclaim from major outlets, including selection as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and designation as one of the best books of the year by NPR, Time, and The Washington Post.^[1] While specific sales figures for The Committed are not publicly detailed, its performance built on the prior success of The Sympathizer, which sold over one million copies worldwide.^[1]

Plot Summary

Early Events in France

The unnamed protagonist, known as the Sympathizer, and his blood brother Bon arrive in Paris in 1981 as refugees, having fled Vietnam after the Sympathizer's year-long ordeal of torture in a communist re-education camp.^[10]^[11] Settling into the city, the Sympathizer secures menial employment at what he considers the worst Asian restaurant in Paris, performing tasks such as cleaning toilets, which underscores his precarious position as a Vietnamese "boat person" amid everyday urban degradations like police brutality and social indifference toward former colonial subjects.^[11] Seeking economic survival, the duo turns to drug dealing as an embrace of capitalism to transcend their traumatic histories and establish stability.^[12] The Sympathizer, adopting the guise of a Japanese tourist to minimize suspicion—exploiting French law enforcement's primary focus on Black and Arab immigrants—begins peddling narcotics to upscale clientele, including leftist intellectuals he encounters at dinner parties arranged by a French-Vietnamese figure he calls his "aunt."^[12]^[11] This enterprise soon entangles him with a Vietnamese criminal syndicate in the Parisian underworld, marking his inadvertent descent into organized vice dominated by figures from ex-French colonies such as Vietnam and Algeria.^[3]

Rising Conflicts and Alliances

Upon arriving in Paris in 1981 as a refugee alongside his blood brother Bon, the protagonist, operating under the alias Vo Danh, turns to the illicit hashish trade to sustain himself, initially stepping in for a missing dealer through a lingering spy contact.^[13] This venture draws him into a Vietnamese criminal consortium dominated by an ethnic Chinese crime boss who oversees a network of drug trafficking and prostitution from what is described as the city's worst Asian restaurant.^[13] ^[3] To prove his loyalty, Vo Danh performs degrading tasks such as cleaning the establishment's filthy toilet, solidifying an uneasy alliance within the underworld that positions him to supply hashish primarily to French intellectuals and leftists.^[13] Parallel to these criminal ties, Vo Danh forges connections in Parisian high society through his aunt, a prominent editor embedded among French leftist circles, allowing him to navigate dual worlds of ideological discourse and capitalist opportunism.^[14] He aligns with figures like a Maoist academic and a philosophically inclined enforcer, engaging in debates over Marxism, Sartre, and decolonization that underscore tensions between revolutionary ideals and practical survival.^[3] These alliances enable him to corner segments of the drug market catering to hashish-consuming elites, but they also expose fault lines, as his half-French heritage and past as a communist double agent fuel suspicions and rivalries within both criminal and political networks.^[14] ^[13] Conflicts escalate as competition over drug territories intensifies, pitting Vo Danh's consortium against ethnic Chinese rivals and prompting incursions into cocaine use and armed confrontations amid the Parisian underworld.^[13] Betrayals emerge within the group, exacerbated by ideological clashes between lingering communist loyalties and the raw pragmatism of capitalist crime, while Vo Danh grapples with the moral ambiguities of violence in pursuit of agency post-colonialism.^[3] ^[14] Interactions with prostitutes and enforcers further heighten risks, transforming initial survival strategies into a web of escalating threats that test the fragility of his formed partnerships.^[13]

Climax and Resolution

As tensions escalate amid ideological debates and criminal rivalries, the narrative culminates in a chaotic confrontation during a screening of Disney's Fantasia organized by the protagonist's intellectual and revolutionary associates. Bon, the staunch anti-communist companion, discovers the dual allegiances of Vo Danh (the protagonist's alias in France, meaning "nameless") and their blood brother Man, both revealed as double agents spanning communist and capitalist causes. Overwhelmed by betrayal, Bon hesitates before turning the gun on himself in suicide, an act that underscores the novel's exploration of irreconcilable commitments.^[15]^[16] In the ensuing violence, a ricocheting bullet from Bon's firearm strikes Vo Danh, precipitating severe injury and blurring the lines between physical trauma and psychological dissolution; readers debate whether this event results in his death or merely precipitates a voluntary commitment to a mental institution, reflecting the protagonist's fractured psyche and unreliable narration.^[15] The resolution unfolds with Vo Danh's recovery in the ironically named Paradise hospital, where he confronts lingering guilt over past atrocities, including wartime rapes and ideological manipulations. Urged by his influential aunt, a leftist lawyer, and a Maoist PhD candidate to document his experiences as a form of confession, Vo Danh begins composing the very narrative that frames the book, echoing the confessional structure of its predecessor. Concurrently, the Parisian underworld unravels: the Boss and his key lieutenants perish in an ambush by the rival gang led by Saïd (comprising figures dubbed the Beatles and Rolling Stones), dismantling the heroin trade that had sustained Vo Danh's exile.^[15]^[17] This denouement leaves Vo Danh's future indeterminate, with no clear redemption or ideological resolution, as he grapples with nihilism and the futility of absolute loyalty—prompting the author to describe the close as deliberately open-ended to accommodate a potential third installment in the series.^[18]^[6]

Characters

Protagonist and Key Allies

The protagonist of The Committed is an unnamed first-person narrator, the same character from Viet Thanh Nguyen's preceding novel The Sympathizer, characterized as a half-Vietnamese, half-French communist operative who functioned as a double agent—spying for North Vietnam while embedded in the South Vietnamese military and collaborating with the CIA.^[19] Following the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, he fled as a refugee to the United States, where he assumed various guises including academic and refugee advocate, before returning covertly to Vietnam, enduring torture and re-education in a communist camp, and being exiled to France in the early 1980s after a grueling boat journey from Vietnam via Indonesia.^[19] In Paris, he confronts his fractured identity—"a man of two faces and two minds"—while descending into the immigrant underworld of drug trafficking and gang violence as a means of economic survival, all while engaging in philosophical debates on ideology, colonialism, and betrayal.^[19]^[20] The narrator's closest ally is Bon, his blood brother sworn in an orphanage pact during their youth in Vietnam, a fiercely anti-communist enforcer whose father was killed by Viet Cong forces, rendering him an ideological foil unaware of the narrator's true loyalties until late revelations.^[21]^[20] Bon survives the same 1970s boat exodus from Vietnam, the Jakarta layover, and the re-education camp ordeal alongside the narrator—unbeknownst to him directed by their mutual blood brother Man—before joining him in France, where he operates as a "hatchet man" providing physical protection and operational muscle in their criminal syndicate.^[19]^[22] Their bond, rooted in shared trauma and fraternal oath, withstands ideological clashes, with Bon embodying unyielding commitment to anti-communism and personal vengeance, contrasting the narrator's ambivalence.^[23]^[20] A secondary but enduring ally is the Girl, a young orphan rescued by the narrator and Bon during their Vietnamese escape, whom they shelter and raise informally; she matures into an adult accomplice in their Paris-based enterprises, symbolizing continuity amid displacement and contributing to the narrator's makeshift family unit.^[20] This trio's interdependence underscores themes of loyalty forged in extremity, though strained by the narrator's secrecy and the hazards of their illicit trade.^[14]

Antagonists and Supporting Figures

The Boss, a Chinese gangster operating a drug trafficking and protection racket in Paris, emerges as a central antagonist, luring the protagonist into the capitalist criminal economy while mirroring his internal identity fractures and symbolizing the exploitative leaders the narrator both resents and emulates for survival.^[20] This figure's influence exacerbates the protagonist's moral compromises, as he navigates alliances born of necessity rather than ideology, underscoring the novel's critique of commodified violence in post-colonial exile.^[24] Rival gang elements, particularly Algerian traffickers contesting control of the heroin trade, function as physical antagonists, igniting violent clashes that expose fractures among colonized peoples vying for scraps in France's underbelly; these conflicts, rooted in shared imperial histories yet fueled by ethnic rivalries, force the protagonist to wield brutality against former comrades-in-subjugation.^[3]^[25] Figures like the pretentious politician BFD, targeted for blackmail by the Vietnamese syndicate, represent institutional antagonists—embodiments of entrenched French power and hypocrisy—that the protagonist exploits but cannot fully subvert, highlighting the limits of revolutionary opportunism within liberal democracies.^[26] Supporting figures include intellectual interlocutors such as the Maoist PhD and the eschatological thinker, who engage the protagonist in exhaustive debates on revolution, decolonization, and existential despair, often serving as ideological foils that sharpen his bifurcated worldview without resolving its tensions.^[3] Bon, the protagonist's blood brother and a taciturn anticommunist assassin who harbors deep-seated hatred for both communists and the French, provides pragmatic aid in survival and combat yet embodies latent antagonism through his ignorance of the protagonist's divided loyalties, culminating in revelations that strain their bond.^[20]^[23] Additional supporters, like the well-connected "Aunt"—a covert communist operative facilitating entree into Parisian networks—offer strategic scaffolding amid the chaos, though their agendas align more with ideological continuity than personal fidelity.

Themes and Philosophical Underpinnings

Ideological Critiques of Communism and Capitalism

In The Committed, communism is critiqued through the protagonist's firsthand encounters with its authoritarian mechanisms, including reeducation camps where survivors like the narrator endure psychological and physical torment to enforce ideological conformity.^[21]^[26] Having spied for the North Vietnamese while embedded in the South, the narrator witnesses the system's internal contradictions, such as purges and betrayals that undermine its egalitarian rhetoric.^[27] A fellow revolutionary observes, "Now that we are the powerful, we don’t need the French or the Americans to fuck us over—We can fuck ourselves just fine," underscoring how communist regimes replicate the oppression they claim to oppose once attaining power.^[27] The narrator admits losing faith in the party while retaining a nominal Marxist lineage, highlighting the ideology's failure to transcend human flaws like power corruption.^[27]^[28] Capitalism faces parallel scrutiny as the narrator immerses himself in Paris's immigrant underworld, operating a hashish trade that exposes the system's moral blind spots and exploitative dynamics.^[21] He equates capitalists with "legalized criminals" who profit from mass suffering without self-reflection, contrasting their unacknowledged immorality with the drug dealer's at least partial awareness of vice: "Was I actually becoming a capitalist, which was a matter of bad morals, especially as the capitalist, unlike the drug dealer, would never recognize his bad morality, or at least admit to it."^[21] Business negotiations reveal raw self-interest, as partners demand profit shares backed by implicit threats of violence, mirroring how market forces prioritize accumulation over equity.^[27] The Vietnamese mafia's clashes with Algerian rivals further illustrate capitalism's tendency to exacerbate ethnic divisions among the marginalized, turning economic competition into bloodshed.^[26]^[28] The novel rejects binary allegiance, with the protagonist embracing nihilistic detachment after observing both systems' shortcomings: "Seeing the failures of both communism and anticommunism, I chose nothing, a synthesis that neither capitalists nor communists could understand."^[29] This stance emerges from empirical disillusionment—communism's totalitarian excesses and capitalism's commodified brutality—without proposing alternatives, emphasizing ideological promises' collision with human realities like greed and coercion.^[21]^[26] Through satire and confession, the narrative indicts both for perpetuating domination under different guises, informed by the author's refugee perspective on Vietnam's post-1975 upheavals and Western immigration struggles.^[27]^[28]

Colonial Legacies and Cultural Identity

In The Committed, the sequel to The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen relocates his unnamed protagonist—a Vietnamese refugee and former communist cadre—to Paris in the 1980s, using the French capital as a lens to examine the persistent scars of France's colonial rule over Indochina from 1887 to 1954. The narrative portrays France not as a beacon of enlightenment but as a site of unresolved imperial contradictions, where the protagonist encounters a society still grappling with its history of exploitation, including forced labor, cultural imposition, and military atrocities that claimed millions of lives during the Indochina Wars. Nguyen explicitly frames this confrontation as essential to the story, stating that he set the novel in Paris "because I wanted my narrator to confront French colonialism... to acknowledge both the horrors and the atrocities of what the French did."^[26] This setting underscores causal links between historical colonization and contemporary immigrant marginalization, with the protagonist engaging in drug trafficking amid Paris's underbelly, mirroring economic dependencies inherited from colonial extraction economies.^[11] The protagonist's hybrid cultural identity, stemming from his French father—a Catholic priest who abandoned him—and Vietnamese mother, embodies the fractured psyches produced by colonialism. As a Eurasian "bastard" (his self-designation), he navigates a perpetual split consciousness, loving Western culture while resenting its origins, a duality Nguyen amplifies through the character's namelessness ("Vô Danh," or anonymous) under the colonial gaze. This internal conflict reflects broader post-colonial hybridity, where individuals internalize both colonizer and colonized perspectives, leading to mental colonization that Nguyen, drawing from his own heritage, describes as a consciousness he seeks to decolonize. In France, this manifests in the protagonist's alienation: rejected by white French elites for his Asian features and by fellow immigrants for his opportunism, he experiences microaggressions and racial epithets more acutely than in America, highlighting France's failure to integrate its former subjects.^[26]^[14] Colonial legacies further erode cultural solidarity among the subaltern, as depicted in the protagonist's failed alliances with Algerian gangsters, whom he lectures on shared oppression only to face betrayal—illustrating how imperialism fosters division rather than unity among the colonized. Nguyen attributes this to colonialism's production of "fracture and division," evident in the novel's portrayal of police brutality targeting Black and Arab communities while overlooking the Vietnamese narrator, perpetuating racial hierarchies rooted in imperial divide-and-rule tactics. The protagonist's displacement echoes Nguyen's personal narrative of feeling "displaced no matter where I was," a diasporic condition tying Vietnamese identity to unresolved traumas of occupation, exodus, and reinvention. Ultimately, the novel critiques France's selective amnesia about its empire—contrasting it with America's overt militarism—while affirming that cultural identity for post-colonial subjects remains a battleground of memory, guilt, and adaptation.^[26]^[11]^[7]

Violence, Betrayal, and Moral Ambiguity

In The Committed, violence permeates the narrative as both a historical legacy of decolonization and a contemporary tool of survival in the postcolonial underworld, with the unnamed protagonist—known as "the Captain" or Vo Danh—engaging in and reflecting on acts ranging from torture and gang beatings to murders that blur revolutionary zeal with criminal expediency.^[30] The protagonist's past experiences, including brutal reeducation camp tortures by communist allies and killings during the Vietnam War, recur as flashbacks, underscoring how colonial and ideological conflicts engender cycles of brutality that extend to Paris, where Vietnamese and Algerian immigrant gangs clash over drug territories in scenes of graphic carnage, such as extended descriptions of beatings followed by heroin injections.^[11] Author Viet Thanh Nguyen interrogates whether such violence remains indispensable for reclaiming agency lost to empire, positing in interviews that while it has historically "detoxified" colonized minds per Frantz Fanon's theories, nonviolent alternatives might prove equally transformative, though the novel illustrates violence's seductive persistence in revolutionary imagination.^[14]^[30] Betrayal emerges as an intrinsic counterpart to ideological commitment, exemplified by the protagonist's concealed communist loyalties toward his blood brother Bon, an ardent anti-communist who unknowingly partners with him in exile, a deception that culminates in metaphysical and literal confrontations revealing the fragility of fraternal bonds strained by hidden allegiances.^[31] This personal treachery mirrors broader fractures, as the protagonist's shift from revolutionary spy to drug trafficker—selling cocaine and hashish—betrays his Marxist ideals for capitalist pragmatism, escalating into turf wars where attempted solidarities with Algerian rivals collapse into near-fatal ambushes, highlighting how colonial divisions preclude unity among the oppressed.^[11] Nguyen frames betrayal not as isolated moral lapses but as systemic outcomes of empire's corrosive effects, where characters like the protagonist confess to "crimes of violence, torture, and betrayal" without resolution, their actions driven by survival amid disillusionment with communism's hypocrisies.^[14] Moral ambiguity suffuses these elements, rejecting binary judgments in favor of a nihilistic lens where "one man’s murder is another’s revolution," as the protagonist navigates dual consciousnesses—confessing atrocities while rationalizing them through postcolonial theory—and embodies contradictions like a communist profiting from imperial vices.^[30] The novel's epigraph, "Nothing’s more real than nothing," encapsulates this void, reflected in the protagonist's "Crazy Bastard" persona, which oscillates between shame-fueled atonement (e.g., sparing a rival) and indifferent brutality, while supporting figures like a racist socialist politician expose ethical hypocrisies in leftist circles.^[11] Nguyen's satire amplifies this through intertextual nods to Fanon, where even antagonists invoke the same anticolonial rhetoric, blurring perpetrator-victim lines and questioning the sincerity of revolutionary passion amid absurdity.^[30]^[14] Ultimately, the themes converge to critique how violence and betrayal, unmoored from clear moral anchors, perpetuate existential despair in the Vietnamese diaspora's ideological odyssey.^[31]

Literary Style and Structure

Narrative Voice and Satire

The novel employs a first-person narrative voice delivered by its unnamed protagonist, referred to as "the Committed" or the "man of two minds," who serves as an unreliable narrator continuing his confessional style from the preceding work.^[21]^[8] This voice is marked by directness, vanity, and a blend of philosophical introspection with sardonic wit, immersing readers immediately through its opening lines that establish the character's duplicitous psyche and moral ambiguities.^[32] The narration weaves highbrow allusions to existentialist thinkers like Sartre and Camus with gritty depictions of criminality and exile, creating a tone that oscillates between intellectual discourse and visceral action, often haunted by the protagonist's past betrayals and ghosts.^[14] Satire permeates the narrative as a tool for critiquing ideological hypocrisies, with the protagonist's observations exposing the absurdities of French intellectualism, colonial legacies, and the commodification of revolution under capitalism.^[21] The French left-wing elite, depicted indulging in hashish while pontificating on anti-colonialism, become prime targets for ridicule, highlighting their detachment from the material realities faced by immigrants and revolutionaries.^[14] Colonialism itself is the novel's broadest satirical object, portrayed through the protagonist's drug-dealing ventures in Paris, where European pretensions to universality mask exploitative power dynamics akin to those in Vietnam.^[25] This approach extends to no group unscathed, lampooning the abuses of power across communist, capitalist, and postcolonial frameworks via exaggerated scenarios that underscore betrayal and moral plasticity without exempting the narrator's own complicity.^[21] The biting humor facilitates critique of establishment hypocrisies, making dense philosophical undertones more palatable while maintaining a raucous, confrontational edge.^[33]

Intertextuality and Philosophical Allusions

The Committed engages extensively with intertextual references to postcolonial and existential literature, particularly through the unnamed narrator's immersion in French intellectual circles during the 1980s. The novel draws on Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which characters invoke in debates over decolonization and violence, reflecting the protagonist's conflicted identity as a Vietnamese refugee navigating capitalist excess in Paris.^[24] ^[34] These allusions underscore the narrator's critique of French colonialism's lingering hypocrisies, as he traffics drugs among self-proclaimed leftist elites who quote Fanon while ignoring their own privileges.^[35] Philosophically, the text alludes heavily to Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, with the narrator grappling with concepts of bad faith and freedom amid moral ambiguity in drug deals and ideological betrayals; Nguyen explicitly acknowledges Sartre's influence in an author's note appended to the novel.^[35] References to Albert Camus appear in explorations of absurdity and nihilism, as the protagonist confronts the meaningless violence of his past reeducation camp experiences transposed to Parisian underworlds, echoing The Stranger's themes of alienation.^[36] Simone de Beauvoir's ideas on ethics and oppression also surface in discussions of gender and power dynamics among the expatriate community.^[34] The novel's bibliography, compiled by Nguyen, cites sixteen thinkers including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adrienne Rich, integrating their ideas into dialogues that satirize academic posturing while advancing the plot's examination of commitment versus detachment.^[24] These allusions extend to Marxist theory, with characters debating Karl Marx's critiques of capital in the context of the narrator's heroin trade, highlighting the commodification of ideology in a post-colonial diaspora.^[37] Such interweavings critique the selective application of philosophy by Western intellectuals, as the Vietnamese narrator exposes gaps between theory and lived colonial trauma.^[3]

Reception and Critical Analysis

Positive Assessments

Critics acclaimed The Committed for its seamless extension of the unnamed narrator's sardonic, introspective voice from The Sympathizer, infusing the sequel with biting satire and intellectual vigor. The Los Angeles Times highlighted its dual role as a "seamless continuation" of the prior novel—retaining its "unsparing intellect and take-no-prisoners sardonic wit"—while standing alone as a multifaceted literary thriller incorporating political, historical, and comic dimensions.^[33] Reviewers praised Nguyen's ability to propel ambitious philosophical inquiries through hairpin plot twists, striking a balance between entertainment and rigorous examination of ideology, colonialism, and identity.^[33] The Guardian commended the novel's "distinctive voice," which adeptly fuses erudition with vernacular speech, quiet reflection with emotional intensity, and threads throughout a "biting wit," exemplified in virtuoso sequences like a multi-page fight scene rendered in one breathless sentence.^[3] Described as a "powerful follow-up" that masquerades as a thriller to deliver unapologetically political content, it serves as an "invitation to the reader to think... deeply about political systems and ideologies," rendering it a "rich and valuable read" essential for understanding colonial legacies.^[3] In The New Yorker, Nguyen's "rhetorical intensity" was celebrated for electrifying the narrative, channeling "pure stylistic energy" akin to Louis-Ferdinand Céline in critiquing human failings and colonial self-satisfaction, while integrating allusions to thinkers like Frantz Fanon to elevate its critical edge.^[21] The publication positioned the author as a "standard-bearer" in American literature's shift toward diverse perspectival storytelling.^[21] The New York Times underscored the work's "plenty of action and outrage," with the opening 100 pages surpassing elements of the debut through a direct, captivating narrator that immerses readers immediately.^[19] Such praise contributed to the novel's recognition, including a shortlisting for the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize, affirming its thematic breadth on immigration, ideology, and diaspora experiences.^[38]

Criticisms and Shortcomings

Critics have faulted The Committed for its didactic tone, where philosophical digressions and theoretical expositions often eclipse the novel's thriller elements and narrative momentum.^[39] In a review for the Toronto Star, Max Fawcett observed that "the more didactic elements take attention away" from the high-octane plot, with ideas threatening to "suffocate the novel."^[39] Similarly, Tanjil Rashid in the Times Literary Supplement critiqued how "theory [clogs] up the narrative," resulting in ideas that overwhelm the story's action and character development.^[35] The portrayal of characters as vessels for intellectual discourse has drawn particular scrutiny, with some reviewers decrying the transformation of rough figures like drug dealers into "salon-grade thinkers and revolutionary polemicists."^[40] A Financial Times assessment described this as a "didactic presentation," arguing it strains plausibility amid the novel's violent, underworld setting.^[40] Compared to The Sympathizer, the sequel's execution appears uneven, with its scathing wit and perceptive insights manifesting less consistently.^[11] The Los Angeles Review of Books noted that the narrator's observations can feel "obvious and somewhat oversimplified," akin to superficial applications of thinkers like Frantz Fanon, while stylistic choices such as cycling pronouns to convey psychological disintegration come across as gimmicky rather than organic.^[11] These elements contribute to a sense that the novel prioritizes ideological critique over cohesive storytelling, potentially alienating readers seeking tighter plotting or subtler integration of themes.^[35] ^[11] Despite its ambitions, the work's hyperviolent sequences and extended monologues on colonialism and ideology have been seen as occasionally hyperbolic or forced, diluting the satirical edge that distinguished its predecessor.^[11]

Awards and Recognitions

The Committed did not win major literary prizes, such as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction or the National Book Award. However, the novel received recognition through inclusion in several prominent year-end compilations of notable fiction. It was selected for The Washington Post's list of 50 notable works of fiction for 2021, praised for its intellectual depth and narrative ambition amid a diverse field of newcomers and established authors.^[41] Additionally, Literary Hub featured it in their ultimate best books of 2021 list, highlighting its contributions to contemporary literary discourse.^[42] These inclusions underscore critical appreciation for Nguyen's sequel, though it fell short of formal award contention.

Broader Context and Impact

Connection to The Sympathizer

The Committed serves as the direct sequel to Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, continuing the narrative of the unnamed protagonist, a Vietnamese communist spy known as the Captain or the man of two faces/minds.^[14]^[19] The story picks up immediately after the events of the first novel, where the protagonist endures torture in a communist reeducation camp following the fall of Saigon in 1975; he escapes via a perilous boat journey across the South China Sea, accompanied by his blood brother Bon, landing in an Indonesian refugee camp before relocating to Paris in the early 1980s.^[33]^[12] This relocation shifts the setting from Vietnam and the United States—central to The Sympathizer's depiction of espionage, war, and exile—to France, the former colonial power, allowing Nguyen to extend the protagonist's internal conflicts into a new cultural and ideological arena.^[3]^[43] Character continuity reinforces the connection, with the protagonist retaining his dual loyalties, confessional narrative voice, and moral ambiguity as a half-Vietnamese, half-French operative who sympathizes with revolutionary ideals yet critiques their implementations.^[6] In The Committed, he adopts the alias "Vo Danh" (Nameless in Vietnamese) and immerses himself in Paris's underworld, dealing drugs to affluent intellectuals while engaging in philosophical debates influenced by thinkers like Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre—echoing the first novel's allusions to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and the protagonist's role as a confessor to a ghostly Auditor figure.^[19]^[11] Bon, revealed in The Sympathizer as a secret communist with a tragic family backstory, accompanies him, their fraught brotherhood driving plot tensions amid encounters with French communists, Algerian immigrants, and capitalist excesses.^[4] Nguyen has stated that the sequel explores the protagonist's inability to fully escape his divided self, evolving from spy thriller elements in the first book to a crime narrative infused with postcolonial critique.^[18]^[14] Thematically, The Committed builds on The Sympathizer's examination of ideological betrayal, identity fragmentation, and the Vietnamese diaspora's disillusionment, extending it to interrogate French colonialism's legacies and the failures of universalist republicanism. Where the debut novel satirized American imperialism and South Vietnamese exile communities through the lens of the Vietnam War's end, the sequel targets France's hypocritical socialism and racial hierarchies, portraying Paris as a site of "nothingness" where the protagonist confronts capitalism's commodification of revolution.^[44]^[26] This progression maintains the unreliable narrator's voice, blending satire, violence, and philosophical digressions—such as extended reflections on commitment versus sympathy—but shifts toward explicit engagements with decolonization theory, reflecting Nguyen's intent to "continue his misadventures" across global contexts of power.^[33]^[45] While standalone readable, the novel presupposes familiarity with the protagonist's backstory for full resonance, as Nguyen incorporated explanatory recaps to bridge the six-year gap between publications.^[6]

Influence on Discourse about Vietnamese Diaspora and Ideology

The Committed extends the ideological ambiguities introduced in The Sympathizer, portraying a Vietnamese refugee protagonist whose shifting allegiances between communism, capitalism, and nihilism mirror tensions within the diaspora, where anti-communist orthodoxy dominates due to the 1975 fall of Saigon and subsequent reeducation camps that displaced over 1.6 million refugees by 1995.^[46] ^[47] The novel's depiction of the unnamed narrator's involvement in Paris's 1980s drug trade and intellectual circles critiques ideological extremism, suggesting that rigid commitments—whether to Ho Chi Minh's revolution or Western liberalism—lead to betrayal and violence, thereby prompting diaspora readers to confront suppressed sympathies for leftist causes amid generational divides.^[34] ^[48] By relocating the narrative to France, the work illuminates lesser-discussed facets of the Vietnamese diaspora, including Franco-Vietnamese hybridity and interactions with Maghrebi immigrants, challenging U.S.-focused refugee stories that emphasize assimilation and victimhood under American patronage.^[49] This expansion has influenced academic discourse on cosmopolitan identities, as analyses highlight how the protagonist's "man of two faces" embodies Nussbaum's global citizenship, transcending nationalistic ideologies to critique colonialism's lingering effects on marginalized groups.^[50] Such portrayals counter hegemonic narratives in Vietnamese American literature, which often reinforce anti-communist exceptionalism tied to U.S. geopolitical triumphs post-1975.^[51] The novel's satire of ideological discourse, drawing on Fanon and Césaire to link Vietnamese experiences with Black anticolonial struggles, has spurred conversations on memory and ethics within diaspora communities, encouraging recognition of "coexisting truths" over polarized histories.^[49] ^[52] While mainstream literary reception praises this nuance for broadening refugee narratives beyond trauma and resettlement statistics—such as the 800,000 Vietnamese arrivals in the U.S. by 1980—some diaspora voices view it as overly sympathetic to communist flaws, reflecting broader skepticism toward Nguyen's critiques of American imperialism.^[26] ^[7] This tension underscores the book's role in fracturing ideological consensus, fostering debates on whether hybrid loyalties undermine or enrich collective identity.^[53]

References

[1]
The Committed - Grove Atlantic
The Committed tells the story of “the man of two minds” as he comes as a refugee to France and turns his hand to capitalism.
[2]
The Committed - Nguyen, Viet Thanh: Books - Amazon.com
Book details ; Publisher. Grove Press ; Publication date. March 2, 2021 ; Dimensions. 6.5 x 1.25 x 9.25 inches ; ISBN-10. 0802157068 ; ISBN-13. 978-0802157065.
[3]
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen review - Books - The Guardian
Mar 4, 2021 · On its own The Committed is a rich and valuable read, but together with The Sympathizer, it amounts to much more than the sum of its parts.
[4]
The Committed: A Novel | Washington Independent Review of Books
Mar 24, 2021 · 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.Missing: awards | Show results with:awards
[5]
The Committed proves Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of America's ...
The Committed proves Viet Thanh Nguyen is one of America's greatest living novelists. March 14, 2021. Duncan White reviews The Committed for The Daily Telegraph ...
[6]
The Committed - Wikipedia
It is his second novel and the sequel to his debut novel The Sympathizer (2015), which sold over one million copies and was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for ...
[7]
WD Interview: Viet Thanh Nguyen on The Committed - Writer's Digest
Mar 2, 2021 · The process of writing the book was initially very easy. What had happened was that I finished all the edits for The Sympathizer in early ...
[8]
Viet Thanh Nguyen: 'I always felt displaced no matter where I was
Mar 6, 2021 · The Sympathizer established Nguyen as both a literary star and an advocate for displaced people around the world. In The Committed, his unnamed ...
[9]
He Writes Unreliable Narrators Because He Is One, Too
Mar 1, 2021 · Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2016 for ... Viet Thanh Nguyen Packs Plenty of Action and Outrage Into 'The Committed'.
[10]
Viet Thanh Nguyen on redefining what it means to be a refugee - CBC
Oct 13, 2023 · Several years later, Nguyen followed it up with a sequel called The Committed, which was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times ...
[11]
Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Committed takes the light out of Paris
The novel opens in 1981 when the dangerously sympathetic spy arrives in Paris with his old friend Bon. They have survived a year of torture in a re-education ...Missing: summary | Show results with:summary
[12]
Where Solidarity Cannot Exist: On Viet Thanh Nguyen's “The ...
Mar 18, 2021 · A refugee several times over, he's fleeing both Vietnam, where he was brutally tortured by his own allies in a reeducation camp, and the United States.
[13]
Summary and Reviews of The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Rating 4.3 (7) Mar 2, 2021 · The Committed follows the unnamed Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon.
[14]
THE COMMITTED | Kirkus Reviews
7-day returnsTHE COMMITTED · Viet Thanh Nguyen · RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2021. A quirky intellectual crime story that highlights the Vietnam War's complex legacy. ; TWICE · Mitch ...
[15]
In 'The Committed,' Viet Thanh Nguyen Returns To The Story ... - NPR
crammed with people ...<|separator|>
[16]
The Committed Summary & Study Guide - BookRags.com
The Sympathizer begins to recount past traumas while he is in recovery, including his participation in the rape of a young communist woman while he was working ...
[17]
Does Vo Danh die from Bon's ricocheting... — The Committed Q&A
Question about The Committed: “Does Vo Danh die from Bon's ricocheting bullet or did he somehow survive and has really been in a self-committed mental h...
[18]
Unsteady and Yet Gripping Storytelling "The Committed"
Mar 9, 2021 · In The Committed, the faceless commissar Man exiles his blood brothers, Bon and our sympathizer, from Vietnam to Paris.Missing: analysis | Show results with:analysis<|control11|><|separator|>
[19]
Poured Over | Viet Thanh Nguyen on THE COMMITTED
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed (now out in paperback), among other books, joins us on the show to riff on the return of ...Missing: sales | Show results with:sales
[20]
Book Review: 'The Committed,' by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Mar 1, 2021 · “The Committed” is a sequel to Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer” (2015). The books share a narrator, a Communist spy, half ...
[21]
The Committed Characters | GradeSaver
The protagonist of the novel is the unnamed first-person narrator who was the title character in the book preceding this novel titled The Sympathizer.
[22]
How Viet Thanh Nguyen Turns Fiction Into Criticism | The New Yorker
Feb 22, 2021 · Viet Thanh Nguyen turns fiction into criticism with “The Committed,” the novelist establishes himself as a conscience of American literature.
[23]
Viet Thanh Nguyen Nearly Cleaves His Protagonist in ... - PopMatters
Apr 9, 2021 · Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Committed loosens what binds the protagonist in his earlier book, The Sympathizer, and nearly cleaves his protagonist ...Missing: key | Show results with:key
[24]
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen - bookclique
Jun 10, 2021 · The new novel is a raucous, finger-pointing takedown of French colonial history in Vietnam, layered over an often cartoonishly outré gangster story.Missing: rising alliances
[25]
Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Committed - The Brooklyn Rail
So too, this new novel serves up plenty of unhappiness. The primary players are refugees from Vietnam, struggling to catch on in Paris. The threat of fratricide ...Missing: summary early
[26]
The Committed: a book review - Viet Thanh Nguyen
The main characters are drug dealers, gangsters, and prostitutes, seeking money for survival; they come from former French colonies, mostly Vietnam and Algeria.Missing: summary | Show results with:summary
[27]
Viet Thanh Nguyen's “The Committed” Is a Spy Thriller Where the ...
Mar 11, 2021 · After encountering and enacting violence in Vietnam and the United States in The Sympathizer as a dual agent, the protagonist gets a fresh start ...Missing: alliances | Show results with:alliances
[28]
Something From Nothing, by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Harper's Magazine
From The Committed, which will be published this month by Grove Press. The ... capitalists to critique themselves was like asking the police to police themselves—.
[29]
'The Committed' Remains Uncommitted — And That's Its Strength
Mar 4, 2021 · While disillusioned with communism, Vo Danh is not ready to embrace capitalism or disavow Marxism. In two instances in The Committed, when he ...
[30]
Return of the Nameless Man | Rumaan Alam
May 13, 2021 · “Seeing the failures of both communism and anticommunism,” the ... The Committed does not ask for our credulity, but our attention. The ...
[31]
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Ploughshares
Feb 26, 2021 · In The Committed, the narrator from The Sympathizer, landing in Paris after a perilous boat journey and a stay in a refugee camp, decides to ...Missing: early plot<|control11|><|separator|>
[32]
Book Blog - The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen - Tzer Island
May 10, 2021 · The narrator is a communist who lives as a capitalist, selling hash and later a harder drug he calls “the remedy.” He speaks fluent French and, ...<|separator|>
[33]
Viet Thanh Nguyen Packs Plenty of Action and Outrage Into 'The ...
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 ...
[34]
'The Committed' by Viet Thanh Nguyen: What to expect
Mar 1, 2021 · A half-Vietnamese, half-French communist double agent navigating life, love, loyalty and espionage in Los Angeles after the fall of Saigon.
[35]
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen review
It is the story of the impact that fighting the war had on the bodies, minds and hearts of mainly white American males. It is, as Nguyen himself has observed in ...
[36]
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen review: Ideas overwhelm in ...
Apr 16, 2021 · The Committed is a hybrid of narrative and theory. It continues the story of “the man of two faces” first encountered in Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning ...Missing: awards | Show results with:awards
[37]
Viet Thanh Nguyen's Fictional Flirtations with Nihilism - MLToday
Jun 15, 2021 · ... Nguyen's subject is communist revolution versus a corrupted and unjust capitalism. He does distance himself from his narrator's musings. In ...
[38]
[PDF] Novel Dialogue 2.7 Viet Thanh Nguyen in Conversation with ...
In The Committed I decided to make. Page 3. the theory more explicit in the sense that there are actual conversations about theorists taking place in the book.
[39]
Aspen Institute Announces the Five Finalists for the 2021 Aspen ...
... Viet Thanh Nguyen, Daniel Shaw and Luis Alberto Urrea. The shortlisted titles address a broad range of important contemporary social issues, from the ...
[40]
Is Viet Than Nguyen's new book 'The Committed' a novel of ideas or ...
Mar 7, 2021 · The danger with novels of ideas is that the ideas threaten to suffocate the novel; in the case of “The Committed,” the more didactic ...
[41]
The Committed, by Viet Thanh Nguyen — rawness and rage
Mar 3, 2021 · The result is a didactic presentation of thugs, addicts and hustlers as salon-grade thinkers and revolutionary polemicists, with the ...
[42]
50 notable works of fiction - Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed is featured in The Washington Post's list of notable works of fiction. Newcomers and established prize winners alike stunned us this year with ...
[43]
book lists Archives - Viet Thanh Nguyen
Literary Hub features Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Committed in their Ultimate Best Books of 2021 List. BuzzFeed News | Best Books of 2021. December 13, 2021. Tomi ...
[44]
Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about sequel to Pulitzer Prize ...
“The Committed,” a sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Sympathizer,” continues the story of the refugee narrator from Nguyen's first book.
[45]
Shootouts and Philosophy: Viet Thanh Nguyen's 'The Committed'
Jul 15, 2021 · In this sequel to the award-winning novel The Sympathizer, Nguyen's anonymous narrator pursues a nihilistic life in France as a drug dealer for 'bobo' ...
[46]
'The Committed' Remains Uncommitted — And That's Its Strength
a rabid anticommunist — Vo Danh becomes a drug dealer.
[47]
Viet Thanh Nguyen, 1st Asian American Pulitzer board member, on ...
Sep 29, 2020 · "The Vietnamese American community is the only Asian American ... The Committed," he said. "I take the idea of citizenship seriously ...
[48]
50 Years After the Fall of Saigon: Refugee Stories From Vietnam
Apr 15, 2025 · On April 30, 1975, Saigon fell. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees left. Families were separated in the chaos.
[49]
Book Review: The Committed - Center for Literary Arts, San Jose.
May 9, 2022 · With the narrator being half-Vietnamese and half-French, despite France being his father's homeland, he remains outcasted as “not French.” In ...Missing: protagonist key
[50]
Between the Covers Viet Thanh Nguyen Interview - Tin House
With France's very different relationship to communism with the communists valorized for their role in the French resistance during Nazi occupation, with the ...
[51]
Exploring Viet Thanh Nguyen's Cosmopolitan Ideals in His Novels
In The Sympathizer and The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen reveals and critiques the impact of Western power structures on marginalized groups. These works not ...<|separator|>
[52]
Understanding the politics behind Vietnamese refugee narratives
Nov 10, 2020 · Professor Jana Lipman from Tulane University calls for unsettling dominant accounts of Vietnamese refugee migration after the war.
[53]
Viet Thanh Nguyen on the Need to Recognize Coexisting Truths
... Nguyen has written, among other books, the new memoir A Man of Two Faces (2023); The Sympathizer's sequel, The Committed (2021); and the nonfiction title ...Missing: colonial analysis<|separator|>
[54]
Belonging Is a Complicated Thing: An Interview with Viet Thanh ...
Sep 12, 2022 · JA: How do you make a book political without becoming didactic? I know a strong story is very important to you as well. How do you balance ...Missing: review | Show results with:review