and becomes fluent in its language and ways before returning to his homeland ostensibly to fight the Communist cause. With this advice as his polestar, the Captain goes on to university in the U.S. While the Captain suffers the slings and arrows of being considered a cultural mutt, his mother tells him as they squat in their hovel, “Remember, you’re not half of anything, you’re twice of everything.” His father was an absentee French priest who despite his own amorality infuses in him a sense of morality. The Captain, whose real name is never revealed, had been raised by a dirt-poor Vietnamese mother. The city is in chaos as the trusted Captain, the story’s narrator and as engaging and unlikely a literary hero I have encountered in quite a while, is sipping American post exchange whiskey with the General as they draw up a list of people who will be given visas obtained via a CIA agent from a bribed bureaucrat for passage aboard one of the last flights out of the country. The Sympathizer opens on the eve of the fall of Saigon in April 1975, an anniversary which incidentally passed this year with nary a peep from an American news media usually fixated on such milestones. And while there was a surplus of fools on all sides, the biggest were the brass at the American Central Command in Saigon.

could have “won” the war if the politicians had only butted out, that it was a fool’s errand from start to ignominious finish.

And both, in their genre different but similarly powerful ways, are reminders to believers of the cocked-hat notion the U.S. While one book is fiction and the other nonfiction, both tell the story of the Vietnam War, its aftermath and legacy from a Vietnamese point of view. The analogy is imperfect, but will suffice: The Sympathizer, the remarkable debut novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen, is a terrific bookend to Fire In the Lake, the Frances FitzGerald classic.

The sympathizer by viet thanh nguyen