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

Thomas E. Ricks on the Vietnam War

I'm back to my pre-Bouchercon reading, and my respect only grows for Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals. I read Ricks' sections on World War II and the Korean war for my Bouchercon panel on wartime crime fiction. Here are some excerpts from his section on the Vietnam War, the first from another author whom Ricks cites:

"From corporals to colonels, the men whose main job it is to train fighting soldiers and forge them into fighting units find themselves instead mere cogs in the vast machinery of the `system'; martyrs to the American devotion to the idea that the American businessman is the most efficient individual in the world and therefore all American institutions should be `run on business lines.'"

— George Fielding Eliot on the Korean War-era U.S. Army 

* 

"'We were beautifully managed and inadequately led,' O'Meara wrote." 

*  

"A popular myth, persisting even in today's military, is that senior civilians were too involved in the handling of the war. In fact, the problem was not that civilians participated too much in the decision making but that the senior military leaders participated too little. President Johnson, Maxwell Taylor, and Robert McNamara treated the Joint Chiefs of Staff not as military advisers but as a political impediment, a hurdle to be overcome, through deception if necessary." 

* 

"Unlike what happened in Hue City, the My Lai massacre has lived in in American memory — but only as an instance of a rogue platoon led by a dimwitted lieutenant. What has been forgotten is that the Army's subsequent investigations found that the chain of command up to the division commander was involved either in the atrocity or in the cover-up that followed." 

* 

"They were led by Lt. Calley, a short, pudgy 1963 dropout from Palm Beach Junior College who had drifted into the Army while down on his luck in Albuquerque and has somehow been sleeked to be an officer." 

That last bit exemplifies one of Ricks' main strengths as a writer. Ricks is a reporter, but his touches of color are light years beyond the typical hyperventilating to which most journalists resort when they follow the dreary rule that says they must humanize their stories by giving the reader more than just process. Ricks' description of Calley could be the sketch of a character in a neo-noir novel.

(Here are my previous posts about The Generals. Click on the link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Paris, city of crime, part III

It transpires that more Parisians than just the woman on the Metro read French translations of Donald Westlake. A number of Paris bookstores stock fairly generous selections by that great American crime novelist, better selections than does my friendly neighborhood chain store back home, for instance.

I'd noticed, however, that the stock in Paris was heavier on Westlake's standalones than on his series about John Dortmunder and his burglar friends. Perhaps, I thought, French readers don't go for comedy with their crime. This afternoon, though, I found a store that did carry two of the Dortmunder novels in translation, but I still may have been partly right. The cover of Au pire, qu'est-ce qu'on risque? (What's the Worst That Could Happen?) is surprisingly dark for a comic caper novel, especially one whose film version co-starred Danny DeVito. But then, the nation that gave the term film noir to the world may just have a predilection for darkness, shadows and harsh contrasts.
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I found some intriguing historical crime fiction today, a series written in French by the Vietnamese sisters Thanh-Van and Kim Tran-Nhut about a young magistrate in 17th-century Vietnam. The books have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, Russian and Italian, but not — stop me if you've heard this before — into English.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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