Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Committed takes the light out of Paris

In 2015, a professor at the University of Southern California published his first novel, called The Sympathizer. The story was a cerebral work of historical fiction and political satire cleverly infiltrated with cultural criticism. Although cloaked as a thriller, it didn’t fit neatly into that popular genre and could have slipped by unnoticed as a good spy novel.

Except that the author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, was too startlingly brilliant to ignore. The Sympathizer flushed colour back into those iconic photos of the fall of Saigon, and recast the worn lessons of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a communist agent hiding in the United States. An instant classic, the novel aggressively engaged with the nation's mythology and demonstrated Nguyen's extraordinarily intellectual dramatic range. The Sympathizer swept through the year’s literary awards, winning a Pulitzer Prize, a Carnegie Medal, the Centre for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Asian/Pacific American Award, an Edgar Award and more.