The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer is a novel by the Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, published in 2015. It was his first novel, and it is narrated by a man whose name is never given.

The narrator is a mole. He is a North Vietnamese agent inside the South Vietnamese army, and when the war ends he goes with the community he has been watching to the United States and stays embedded in it there, in Los Angeles.

The book takes in more than one kind of novel as it goes: it is a mystery and a political story, it is darkly funny in places, and it is a spy story and a war story at the same time. It is also concerned with the way the war has been turned into an American story.

The narrator, who works as a cultural adviser on an American film about the war, has opinions about that. The novel is about being two things at once, a man who is both a mole and an immigrant, and about what that costs.