Two recent novels, The Sympathizers, by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Dragonfish, by Vu Tran, are debut novels by two Vietnamese-American men, and the books have many elements in common (besides their excellence). The ndmerican media have been assuring us since Vietnam reunited, and since Western businesspeople began to go there to seek business opportunities, that the Vietnamese, known for their long memories and long view of history, are ‘over’ the Vietnam War (as if it were a disease), and that lingering ambivalence about that war resides wholly in America, where some suffer from guilt about the war, others complain that our troops were never allowed to bust loose and win the war; America’s ambivalences about the role of the military and the role of force in today’s world probably began with the loss of the Vietnam war, and those various feelings/ideas ran through the Persian Gulf War, The War in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and are revving up with the upcoming war against ISIS or ISL. Vietnam itself has been trying to join the world economy, and many an American soldier has returned to that country, along with Western tourists, who’ve been enjoying bicycle tours of that country. Even the foodies have ‘discovered’ Vietnamese food, a wonderful combination of French and Southeast Asian. Each approach to Vietnam seems to reflect various American ‘lifestyle’ interests and the polarized Left and Right in politics.

But the backdrop of both of the two novels under consideration is absolutely the Vietnam war itself. Both authors have adopted a kind of noir quality to their writing, which seems a neat fit with the Surrealism of the war itself, and of the intrigues and duplicity that ran through the war–these novels reflect the world of Graham Greene, the English Catholic novelist who wrote so well about moral decay and corruption in Southeast Asia (among other topics and areas of the world), while focusing primarily upon those moral/ethical conflicts into which Greene places his character: the emphases have much changed, from moral ambiguity in Greene’s fiction to the worlds of violence, corruption, duplicity and rage in the work of both Nguyen and Tran. Both writers completely reject the American trope that the Vietnamese are ‘over’ the war (well, it was a series of wars, The French, The Americans, etc.). And those ideas surrounding moral corruption are key to Dragonfish, while the definition of what constitutes loyalty in extremis, and how friendships may survive or be damaged beyond repair, is the primary theme of The Sympathizer. But the war itself is both the background and the foreground in both novels, reminding us, as Americans, that though the Vietnamese may appear to be ‘over’ the war, that perhaps that’s a long term strategy to prove to Westerners that Vietnam is now a stable country worth investing in.

Of the original three Vietnamese friends in The Sympathizer, all supposedly fighting on the side of the South Vietnamese and The Americans, one is already part of the Communist insurgency, one really is a South Vietnamese soldier, and one is a sympathizer, the title character. He’s a spy, in other words, and works for a South Vietnamese general. When Vietnam is about to fall (South Vietnam/Saigon), and the general and our sympathizer are making a list of those who’ll get flights to America at the bitter end (remember those images of people clinging to helicopters atop the American embassy in Saigon?), the communists decide that the sympathizer must go to America and continue to spy upon the general and others who make it to America; he sends coded letters written in invisible ink to an alleged ‘auntie’ in Paris, who gets them to Vietnam. The interrelationships of these three men will shift as the novel unfolds; the South Vietnamese soldier’s wife and child are killed just as their plane for America is about to take off; the sympathizer falls in love with a Japanese American woman in LA, and the general begins to realize that there’s a spy in his midst. Since I can’t abide book reviews that reveal much about mysteries, suffice it to say that these three friends will meet again in Vietnam, under the commander, the original, first friend, in whose labor/reeducation camp they fall as prisoners. We are privy to some of the grimmest details of torture, the use of mind-altering drugs, and the like: the sympathizer is given the exact treatment that he gave to South Vietnamese people/soldiers/loyalists in Vietnam. The pointlessness of all this torture and hatred and proofs of loyalty is, of course, a major theme of the novel. It’s a gripping, fascinating, nail biter of a novel, brilliantly written, and the characters of these three old friends beautifully delineated. The Sympathizer is likely to end up on many a ‘best fiction ‘list this year.