ENTERTAINMENT — “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.”
This opening sentence of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer is one of the finest beginnings in espionage literature; it’s also the most ambitious. The reader immediately knows the risk in believing the narrator and learns over time the narrator isn’t describing himself in four ways, but is revealing that he is all four personas at the same time. It’s a novel in twelve words. The novel’s first sentence is also the unnamed narrator’s opening to his written confession of his espionage, and lays bare a spy’s life defined by culture, geography, loyalty, and the legacy of geopolitics defined by the Vietnam War. We are all defined by the times we live in, but spies are unique in that their professions and their day to day are inextricably linked to larger geopolitics and darker forces. A car salesman sells cars regardless of a coup in Algeria. A programmer codes regardless of a car bomb in Islamabad. In the CIA, one day you’re studying Russian, and the next you’re sleeping in a tent in the desert, with mission, career, and future redefined by global events.
The first time I was almost fired I had only been in the building six weeks. I hadn’t even started real training. I was working on a desk, writing cables and “learning the culture.” I was sitting at my computer, probably writing a cable only four people in Western Africa would read, when my boss ran out of his office and told me to get in his office and shut the door. I asked what was happening and he said “The Turk” was coming, he was pissed, and he was looking for me. I shut the door. The Turk was a very senior officer, a legend for his temper, and according to rumor, not happy to be heading to retirement.
I had never met The Turk. What I had done earlier that day was submit my package for a training identity, which was a requirement for future field training. As a final step this package would need the approving signature of the Turk, and as I stood behind the door in the windowless office it occurred to me that I may have been a bit too cute in the name I had come up with for my training identity. In my defense I was romanticc and enthusiastic. And stupid. Definitely stupid.
I could hear The Turk even before he was in my area screaming about “trainees” and then he was outside the door.
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“*Atticus?! Atticus? Who the hell is (my name)? Where is he?
With courage rare for a CIA middle-manager, whose fate could rise and fall at the whims of someone like The Turk, my boss said I was at a training class but he would fix whatever the problem was. The Turk went on a rant about my paperwork, all trainees, and the stupidity of case officers these days, that ended with a “you tell that little s**t the whole purpose of a clandestine identity is to not get noticed,” and asked my boss “how many as*****s named Atticus’ do you know?”
“Zero!” The Turk answered for him, “because that is exactly how many as*****s are named Atticus in America.”
To be honest, The Turk wasn’t wrong. To be fair, it was only the middle name.
“You tell that s.o.b I will fire him and everyone he knows if I see more of this s**t.”
The Turk lobbed a final, “I hate trainees,” as he departed. I mortified. My career was over before it started.
After a pause to make sure The Turk hadn’t doubled back, my manager opened the office door and looked at me.
“Atticus? Really?” he asked. He was not persuaded by my middle name defense.
When I later asked my boss why The Turk hated trainees so much, the answer was simple:
“Because you didn’t serve in Vietnam.”
Let me offer a little bit of background on career culture for an operations officer at CIA. Because a career is often broken up into “tours” of 2 to 4 years, ideally overseas, operations officers tend to progress through their careers as part of a generation, defined by the national security priorities of the time. Until you reach the more senior ranks, regardless of where you’re working, your missions and your ethos remain consistent with your peers and come to define your generation of service.
Officers that started in the 80s ran operations defined by the Cold War. Those starting after the fall of the Berlin Wall marked a new generation, defined by Cold War tradecraft and liaison operations striving for influence in the new post-Soviet landscape. And then 9/11 happened, driving an unprecedented surge of new officers whose careers would be defined by sand, heat, and new tradecraft focused on the counter-terrorism mission.
What is often forgotten, perhaps purposefully, is there was an entire generation of tradecraft and operations that were defined by the Vietnam War. The Vietnam conflict drove innovations in tradecraft and applications of intelligence in new and often controversial ways. The Sympathizer returns to this conflict with all the quality of Graham Greene’s Vietnam espionage novels and establishes itself as one of the most important works in the canon in recent decades.
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The Sympathizer is complex and difficult to unpack in a spoiler-free review, but its special quality and rare rewards are powerful enough that I will do what I can to highlight why it is a must read for fans of the espionage genre. There are chalk marks throughout the novel, but in The Sympathizer the sticks, bricks and clandestine messages of specific operations are secondary to the creation of entire identities that in themselves are acts of espionage. This is the espionage the narrator is confessing to, and he shares his secrets with raw authenticity, but as befitting a spy living a lie(s), he parses what truth he tells and when. The narrator-protagonist uses confession, commentary, and exposition to shape his story and spy craft. The narrator’s incremental revelations of his espionage, while being held prisoner, lead to a dramatic ending rooted in the history of CIA and the Vietnam War, but from a perspective not seen before.
The narrator isn’t a hero spy, and he isn’t operating in the more familiar terrains of the Cold War or counterterrorism. Nguyen adds to the complex morality of Vietnam a narrator born to Vietnamese and French parents, raised in California, and whose CIA relationship is defined by conflicting loyalties and a Hollywood film production. He is at turns a spy, a sleeper, a spook and a man of two faces. There is enough simmering beneath the surface that a Jack Ryan character would have burst into flames, but Nguyen and our narrator are both craftsmen of the highest order. Few novelists can write like Nguyen and even fewer in life or fiction have lived amidst subterfuge at the level of the narrator.
The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016 and really warranted a Chalk Marks review before this, but I was inspired into action by the forthcoming TV adaptation premiering on Max on April 14th. The series is produced by Robert Downey Jr., who also stars in multiple roles, and will fill HBO’s prestige TV slot on Sunday nights. The trailer suggests an ironic tone, differing from what I found in the novel, but with material this rich I am open to interpretation and have some faith that if RDJ put his stamp on it, he means for it to be good.
I highly recommend picking up this brilliant novel before the show premieres, particularly if the show takes another approach to the same material. Knowing the origin story can only make it better. As always, an ops plan to get you going:
- Primary Reading Window: While traveling, with limited distractions. The Sympathizer isn’t a hard read, but it is rich and rewards long intervals where you can lose yourself in the story;
- Alternate Reading Window: Audiobook, read by Francois Chaou – I almost made this the primary. Chaou is pitch perfect as the narrator, and the slower pace of audio highlights the richness of the language;
- Beverage: Scotch. Or Cognac. Or whatever you prefer, there is so much drinking in this novel you will find your place;
- Snack: smoke ‘em if you got ‘em;
- Post-read movie: Apocalypse Now – It seems clear the film in the novel is based on Copolla’s film and that context only adds to the novel’s brilliance;
- Post-read read: A Man of Two Faces, Viet Thanh Nguyen – this atypical auto-biography only adds to the richness of The Sympathizer.
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