A mental puddle, Vo is prone to cry over minor troubles, sometimes for no apparent reason at all. It’s important to note that Vo is not well. Mostly, we are in Vo’s head amid a lot of violence that surrounds such a profession.
This new role as a drug pusher causes Vo to consider his morals, his past life, and the fact that he left behind the revolution and communism for a Parisian lifestyle, which has no real, revolutionary purpose.
In this sudden acceptance, Vo becomes a capitalist. For money, Vo takes up the Boss’s offer to sell both hashish and the remedy. He’s a Chinese-Parisian Godfather, which is to say, the Boss reads as a bit of a stock character, yet still provides a good point of anxiety for Vo. Vo befriends the Boss, a Chinese gangster who pushes a “remedy” drug made from Vietnamese coffee beans and collects “insurance” to leave people alone, like something out of a Coppola or Scorsese movie. We finally get to meet Vo’s aunt (who is really Man’s aunt), a sophisticated literary editor who takes a shine to Vo’s confessional manuscript. As with The Sympathizer, Vo’s motivation to protect his best friend, Bon, from discovering his communist identity serves as the primary tension that heightens throughout the novel. Bon hates communists and doesn’t know that both Vo and Man were communist spies. Instead, most people call the sympathizer by his nickname, Crazy Bastard, because he’s become, understandably, unhinged. Now, the narrator goes under the alias Vo Danh however, it’s that alias which is rarely used. In The Committed, the faceless commissar Man exiles his blood brothers, Bon and our sympathizer, from Vietnam to Paris.
When we last saw the unnamed sympathizer, he had been dispatched from an intense episode of torture. Such is the case in The Committed, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s thrilling sequel to his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel, The Sympathizer. In a great novel, they react and change with their conditions. It’s easy to feel like you really know a character after reading a confessional novel.
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