He was only four when his parents fled Vietnam for America in 1975, and he has few memories of the war. But the Vietnam War and its personal, political, and emotional toll is at the heart of the work of the novelist and social critic Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen serves up the existential despair left behind by the war as black comedy, but the torn lives and shattered beliefs he depicts are deadly serious. His 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer and its 2021 sequel, The Committed, follow the misadventures of a nameless protagonist on a futile search for identity in the expatriate Vietnamese community in Los Angeles, a Hollywood set of a Vietnam War movie, a Communist North Vietnamese reeducation camp, and the criminal underworld of Paris. A third novel is in the works, along with a memoir, and an HBO series based on The Sympathizer starring Robert Downey Jr. As a writer, Nguyen defies categorization. His books are comic, tragic, ribald, poignant, and often so enigmatic his work has been compared to a Zen koan. That’s where we began our conversation when I reached him at home in Los Angeles.
At the end of The Sympathizer, the hero has an epiphany when he says he “became enlightened,” and it’s a single word: “Nothing.” It reminds me of the Zen koan in which Master Chao-chou replies to a monk’s question with the word “Mu!”—meaning “no” or “not.” Were you aware of the Buddhist parallels as you wrote those scenes? I was aware that when the narrator is enlightened by the word nothing it echoed the Buddhist concept of emptiness. But I wasn’t raised a Buddhist, I was raised a Catholic and have very limited understanding of what that actually means in Buddhist teaching.
In your next book The Committed, you riff on the word “nothing” until it becomes a kind of mantra. What do all these nothings mean? I’m not sure the idea can ever really be satisfactorily articulated or explained—and that’s the point. On the one hand, you have the inevitability of nothing, death, and the great terrifying mystery confronting us all. On the other hand, as a writer I’m confronted with the nothingness of the blank page. For me, nothingness generates narrative. When faced with what we don’t know we tell stories to try to make sense out of what has happened and what will happen to us. Religions and ideologies—Catholicism and communism in my novels—offer their believers narratives of faith to confront and resolve this. My books are about how you can’t resolve it.
Your hero is left with nothing because he’s lost his faith. He loses his faith in Catholicism and finds a substitute in communism, and then loses his faith in that. The only resolution is an unfinished resolution.
Can writing about what’s unresolvable help you resolve it? I have a belief as a writer that somehow language can save me if I can just write a beautiful enough sentence or construct a sufficient kind of a story. And yet, there’s always an insufficiency with writing. The work is never finished—the problem I’m trying to solve with my words is always going to be irresolvable.