(He named, among others, the memoirist Le Ly Hayslip and the novelist Bao Ninh.) It’s just that English-speaking audiences, having ignored those earlier works, imagined that they did not exist. Nguyen, partly from modesty and partly as a reprimand, hastened to point out that he was by no means the first writer to offer this perspective. The novel was greeted rapturously, with many reviewers stressing the new perspective it offered on the Vietnamese experience-on the war and its legacy. in English and is a professor at U.S.C.), and it is scathing not only about America’s acts during the war but also about its subsequent cultural depictions of those acts. It is critical, indeed, in more than one sense it contains and embodies a healthy dose of political and literary theory (Nguyen holds a Ph.D. Its unnamed Vietnamese narrator is a spy-a double agent, in fact, living as an anti-Communist while working for Communists-though calling the book a spy novel is about as helpful as calling “Crime and Punishment” a police procedural. “ The Sympathizer,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016, is set during and just after the years of the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. “But I didn’t know how to do this, and no one could teach me this, and it took the discipline of sitting in a chair for countless hours over 20 years before I could even approach bringing together the critical and the creative.” This patience, and this determination to escape traditional influences, help explain why Nguyen made his début as a novelist at the relatively late age of forty-four, a début that proved, for author and readers alike, worth the wait.
“I wanted my fiction to be as critical as it was creative,” Viet Thanh Nguyen recalled in an essay a few years ago.
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