Note: This is an older review to introduce Substackers to our house style (TCTIN). A majority of the books we review will be advanced review copies (ARCs) given to our parent companies, everafterbooks.uk and theubergroup.org.
The coolest thing I noticed about Viet Than Nguyen’s genre-defining novel The Sympathizer is how it broke the door wide open in the spy thriller world for authentic stories told by people with a foot in the other side.
It’s ten years old now, so I’m not breaking any news to concur with the Pulitzer it has already won, but I would suggest that anyone who wants to know where the spy novel genre is going or could go be sure to read it and consider what a watershed moment it symbolizes. Genre fiction and literary fiction are often held up as opposites, but they don’t have to be. A majority of spy, military, and political thriller still follows the “white guy shoots things” formula well established by the likes of Ian Fleming and Tom Clancy, in which the primary threat is “dear god, an ethnic man has gotten control of a submarine!”
Sometimes we vary it up by having a white woman shoot things instead, but for the most part, if a book spends too much time inside the head of one of the “bad guys” or “love interests” it becomes consigned to the dustbin of “very literary, no one read it.” Nguyen gleefully proves that wrong by writing something fully literary with gorgeous prose from the perspective of a half-Vietnamese, half-white protagonist who fits in neither here nor there, but also enough movement and hook value to interest the spy thriller readers and get adapted for HBO.
If you want to know what upmarket spy thriller can be these days, The Sympathizer is an essential bit of research to demonstrate what can work and what audiences are willing to vicariously experience. We need more books like this. We need to take advantage of the lane blown wide open by this landmark novel to push intelligent, empathetic, well-written stories that aren’t so impassably dense and dreary as to put off the casual thriller reader, but also not so dumb and formulaic as to put off the literary fiction reader, and which are told authentically from every side, including sides that may not speak English as a first language even when the story is written in English. We interact with the whole world and are a part of this.
Let this book be an example of what to do right.
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