Marlon James and Viet Thanh Nguyen: Why is one's work considered crime fiction and the other's not?

I recently read two novels that won big literary awards, and I thought highly of both. One of the books is very much a crime novel, the other is not, yet it was the non-crime novel that won this year's Edgar Award for best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America.

That novel, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, I wrote:

"includes two killings of the kind that presumably would be investigated by local authorities if they happened in the real rather than a fictional California, but there is no such investigation in The Sympathizer. Nor do the protagonist's reaction to and thoughts about those crimes constitute a major component of the narrative. Significant, yes. Thematically dominant, no.

"Rather, the novel's generic affinities are from the very first sentence with the espionage novel, which has long led a comfortable co-existence with crime fiction. Still, I suspect that few readers will regard The Sympathizer as a spy story. Indeed, the subject does not come up in an interview with Nguyen included as an appendix to the Grove Press trade paperback edition of the novel. Rather, the book is a political novel, a novel of immigration, a novel about Vietnam, a novel about the United States, about the perils and exigencies of moving between the two, about the equivocal (at best) nature of revolutions, and, most important, about the illusory nature of binary opposition, whether between American and Vietnamese, European and Asian, communist and its opposite, or what have you."

Yet the MWA gave the novel an Edgar Award that the author can hang on his wall next to his 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The action of Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, on the other hand, is set in motion by a real-life crime reimagined: the 1976 assassination attempt against Bob Marley. It includes scenes of gang and drug violence in Jamaica and New York, and its story of a crime's ripple effects is something like that told in James Ellroy's A Cold Six Thousand or perhaps Don Winslow's Savages, yet James has no Edgar or Dagger Awards to hang next to the 2015 Man Booker Prize he won for A Brief History ...

I don't suppose it matters much in which category one places these two fine books, but I wonder why Nguyen's achieved purchase in the crime fiction world while James' achieved none, at least in that part of the crime fiction world that gives out awards. Did Nguyen's publishers make a conscious decision to promote the book as crime? Did James' make a conscious decision not to do so? And does it matter?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

A reason I liked The Sympathizer, or diversity is unity is diversity

A big reason I liked The Sympathizer:

Author Viet Thanh Nguyen's occasional jokes about the cultural differences between the north and the south of Vietnam, including this:

"Besides the simple yet elegant cha-cha, the twist was the favorite dance of the southern people, requiring as it did no coordination."

That makes me want to know about who is what in Vietnam. There's more to the North-South dynamic than communist vs. its opposite, us vs. them, colonial vs. indigenous, or all the rest of the usual dichotomies. Portrayals of tensions and rivalries within cultures unfamiliar to me always make those cultures seem more real and more human. It's why I like Henry Chang's Chinatown novels and Joe Nazel's Street Wars, and also why I like Isaac Babel's Odessa tales and Dashiell Hammett's story "Dead Yellow Women," which, despite a title unlikely to be allowed today, says more on its first page about Chinese social and political diversity in China and in the United States than I suspect many readers are accustomed to thinking about.

 I can well imagine that a minority group might be skittish about presenting divisions to the wider world, but to me that makes those populations seem that much more human. Reminders that no group is monolithic seem especially important in a time when religious and cultural differences are so easily exploited.

Years ago, I staggered into a restaurant in London late one morning, near-exhausted by jet lag. I was the only customer at that hour, Arabic-sounding music was playing, and the waitress was a curvy, henna-haired beauty, so I chatted her up.  The encounter happened several years after after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and as the month of Ramadan drew to a close. Both facts are relevant to what followed:

Me: "What is that music?"|
Waitress: "It's Arabic music."
Me: "I know it's Arabic music. From where?"
Waitress: "It's from my country."
Me: "Where is your country?"
Waitress: "I came from Paris, actually."
Me: "Where were you before you were there?"
Waitress: "Beirut."
Me: "Christian or Muslim?" 
Waitress: (Nervously) "Muslim."
Me: "I ask because it must be hard to serve food all day while you're fasting."
Waitress: (Relaxes and bursts into hearty laughter) "I don't fast during the day, but I sure do party at night."

That might offend some Muslims and make some white liberals squirm, and I'd have hesitated to name the woman or her restaurant in a newspaper story. But I cannot imagine a better lesson in common humanity. And no, she did not party with me that night.

(Read my posts on The Sympathizer and Portnoy's Complaint: One man's squid is another man's liver and The Sympathizer, Part II: Genre, politics, and genre politics.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

The Sympathizer, Part II: Genre, politics, and genre politics

I've finished reading Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer- and Edgar-winning novel The Sympathizer, and, while I still don't see how it fits any reasonable definition of crime fiction, I'm still glad Mystery Writers of America gave it the best first novel Edgar Award last month because it's a funny, exciting, and thought-provoking book that I might not have read otherwise.

First, the genre question: Much of The Sympathizer's action is related in the form of a confession written by the narrator-protagonist, but the crimes of which he is accused are political, not criminal. The novel includes two killings of the kind that presumably would have been investigated by local authorities had they happened in the real rather than a fictional California, but there is no such investigation in The Sympathizer. Nor do the protagonist's reaction to and thoughts about those crimes constitute a major component of the narrative. Significant, yes. Thematically dominant, no.

Rather, the novel's generic affinities are from the very first sentence with the espionage novel, which has long led a comfortable co-existence with crime fiction.  Still, I suspect that few readers will regard The Sympathizer as a spy story. Indeed, the subject does not come up in an interview with Nguyen included as an appendix to the Grove Press trade paperback edition of the novel. Rather, the book is a political novel, a novel of immigration, a novel about Vietnam, a novel about the United States, about the perils and exigencies of moving between the two, about the equivocal (at best) nature of revolutions, and, most important, about the illusory nature of binary opposition, whether between American and Vietnamese, European and Asian, communist and its opposite, or what have you.

So how did the book come to the attention of the crime fiction community? One is tempted to imagine genre readers hankering for respectability and grasping a literary novel into their midst, but I think it's at least as likely that publishers and other promoters of "literary" novels grasp at genre labels because they want people to read their books.  I'm not sure that strategy benefits crime readers all the time, but in this case, the result is all to the good, because The Sympathizer is a hell of a book.

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Here's Part I of my comments about The Sympathizer. In Part III, I'll tell you why I liked the book, with possibly a quibble or two.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

The Sympathizer and Portnoy's Complaint: One man's squid is another man's liver

The last time the question of literary vs. genre came up, I suggested that if literary has any meaning with respect to crime fiction, it might apply to crime novels that work as something else as well, whatever that something might be. Qiu Xiaolong's Death of a Red Heroine deserved its place on one recent list of "literary" crime novels, as did Hammett's Red Harvest and James Ellroy's White Jazz,  though the novels are not especially similar. (One thing I'm pretty sure literary does not mean, or at least with which it is not synonymous, is written in ravishing prose. That's why I was skeptical of one fellow commenter's suggestion that James Crumley and James Lee Burke belonged on the list.

(The Barnes and Noble nearest to me shelves Ellroy in mystery and Lee Child in fiction and literature. I'll mention that the next time anyone talks about literary and genre.)

Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction and Edgar Award for best first crime novel, is one current Great Obliterate the Distinction Between Literary and Genre hope, championed as such in a recent piece that hyperventilated more frantically than most without—naturally—offering any definition of literary. If I can find a link to the damned thing, I'll post it here.

I'm about a third of the way through the novel, and here are some reasons I think it might qualify as something in addition to (not more than) a genre book:

1)  It works its way into its genre-like plot, in this case espionage rather than crime, only slowly, telling us much along the way about the narrator/protagonist and his adventures in Saigon and California (if you say either character-driven or plot-driven, I'll shoot you between the eyes.)

2) Its humor is not just funny, but it also sheds entertaining cultural light, Here the protagonist, a native of northern Vietnam, observing a wedding celebration in California:
"Besides the simple yet elegant cha-cha, the twist was the favorite dance of the southern people, requiring as it did no coordination."

3) It pays tribute to, or at least echoes, another novel of American ethnicity, Portnoy's Complaint, using a squid where Philip Roth used liver.

Read an interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016