By Morin Bishop, lifetime writer and editor and current co-owner of Womrath Bookshop

June 2, 2021: Trying to adequately describe The Committed, the brilliant, new novel from Viet Thanh Nguyen, is a fool’s errand, if ever there was one. This a book of big ideas circling around the tortured history between France, the U.S., and Vietnam: colonialism versus the colonized, communism versus capitalism, ideology versus cynicism, commitment versus apathy, God versus nothingness. It is also a thriller, with our narrator, a half-French half-Vietnamese self-described “bastard,” facing near-certain death many, many times as he navigates Paris in the early ‘80s—this after escaping from a reeducation camp in Vietnam, where he was tortured despite his work as a communist double agent for much of the war that so ravaged his native land. Lest this sounds too terribly serious, I should mention that this book is also frequently—very frequently—laugh-out loud funny, driven by our narrator’s mordant, self-deprecating wit.

This is serious, literary fiction that also manages to be highly entertaining and wonderfully readable. Gifted writer Claire Messud describes the work as “furious and exhilarating” and says of this novel and its predecessor, Pulitzer-Prize winner The Sympathizer: “Like [Ralph] Ellison’s Invisible Man, these novels will surely become classics.” High praise, indeed, and well deserved. Don’t miss the chance to read a writer likely to establish himself in the decades ahead as one of this century’s greatest.

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