The Committed

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel follows its unnamed narrator, a half-French, half-Vietnamese former communist spy, as he arrives in early 1980s Paris and descends into the criminal underworld while wrestling with questions of identity, colonialism, and forgiveness.

The novel opens with a prologue told in the collective voice of 150 Vietnamese refugees crammed into a small boat. Over days at sea, they endure starvation, blistering heat, and passing ships that refuse to rescue them. Two children die. A storm strikes on the seventh day, and the refugees are certain of two contradictory things: that they will die and that they will live.

The narrator introduces himself as writing from Paradise, with two holes in his head: one self-inflicted and the other from when his blood brother Bon shot him. A man of two minds and two faces, he arrives at Charles de Gaulle airport with Bon in July 1981, having been rendered refugees three times. A border official tells him he is "definitely not French," despite his French father. They are received by the narrator's "aunt," actually the aunt of Man, the narrator's third blood brother and former communist handler. She is a Parisian book editor and leftist sympathizer. Bon does not know Man is alive or that the narrator was a communist; the narrator fears Bon will kill him if he learns the truth.

Over dinner, Bon spots Ho Chi Minh's photograph on the aunt's mantel and accuses her of being a communist. She calls herself a Trotskyist fellow traveler, a nonmember sympathetic to leftist politics. The next day, the narrator and Bon visit the Boss, an ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese gangster in Paris's 13th arrondissement. They deliver packages of kopi luwak coffee from the refugee camp that turn out to contain a drug disguised with vegetable dye. The Boss gives both men jobs: Bon as an enforcer and the narrator at Delights of Asia, a restaurant fronting the Boss's criminal operations. His field marshal, Le Cao Boi, nicknames Bon "Killer" and the narrator "Crazy Bastard." His foot soldiers are the Seven Dwarfs, short henchmen who carry cleavers.

The narrator gives the aunt his 367-page confession from the reeducation camp, a forced labor facility where he was imprisoned after the fall of South Vietnam. She reads it and partly sides with the revolution's treatment of him, arguing he was too Americanized, and reveals she has already informed Man of his arrival. Seeking income, the narrator proposes selling hashish through her network of French intellectuals. He meets BFD, a socialist politician, and the Maoist PhD, a psychoanalyst, giving BFD a free sample as a hook. His aunt demands 60 percent of the profits.

Disguised as a Japanese tourist to exploit racial invisibility, the narrator expands his drug network. Bon proposes infiltrating the Vietnamese Union, a cultural organization with communist sympathizers. At a meeting, the narrator fabricates a story about Bon being rendered mute by American friendly fire, winning sympathy. A young woman named Loan, a Union member, begins communicating with the supposedly silent Bon through written notes, sparking a connection. The narrator spots a poster for Fantasia, a Vietnamese variety show, and is electrified by the image of Lana, the General's daughter and his former lover.

Two young Algerian-French gang members the narrator calls Beatles and Rolling Stones attempt to rob him. Despite his appeal to anticolonial solidarity, they attack, and in a brutal fight the narrator stabs Rolling Stones with a switchblade and flees through the metro. At the restaurant, Le Cao Boi offers him his first dose of "the remedy," a powdered drug inhaled from heated foil that produces an identity-dissolving euphoria. During this high, Bon reveals that the faceless man, the political officer from their reeducation camp, is stationed at the Vietnamese embassy. Only the narrator knows the faceless man is Man.

The Boss sends the narrator to recover at Heaven, a brothel in a northern suburb, where he meets the Ronin, a Corsican gangster born in Vietnam who is the Boss's partner. He also meets Madeleine, a Cambodian sex worker, with whom he experiences complete impotence tied to his memory of watching a communist agent being raped by southern policemen without intervening. When one of the Seven Dwarfs is killed by a rival gang, the narrator serves as bait until Beatles's crew kidnaps him. In a cellar, the Mona Lisa, a charismatic Algerian-French gang leader, forces him to play Russian roulette. He pulls the trigger six times on empty chambers before Bon, Le Cao Boi, and the Ronin storm in, killing the captors. The Mona Lisa escapes.

The Boss sends the narrator to Paradise, a sanitarium, for nearly two months. He reads Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and struggles with his dependency on the remedy. Upon his return, the Boss enlists him in a blackmail scheme targeting BFD, culminating in a secretly filmed party where the narrator serves as a costumed drug bearer. After realizing that the women in his own sexual encounters may have been silent not from pleasure but from something else entirely, the narrator visits Madeleine and performs oral sex, receiving nothing in return but experiencing a profound shift.

The crew tracks and kidnaps the Mona Lisa. Left alone to interrogate him, the narrator instead shares cigarettes, water, and the remedy. The Mona Lisa reveals his real name is Moussa and that he chose gangster life after being rejected from legitimate work because of his Arab name. The narrator surprises himself by forgiving Moussa, realizing that forgiveness is the revolution he has been seeking. Soon after, Saïd, Moussa's brother recently returned from Afghanistan, storms the warehouse with Rolling Stones, killing the Boss, the Ronin, Le Cao Boi, and the remaining henchmen. Moussa intervenes, and Saïd spares the narrator.

The narrator takes money from the Boss's safe, delivers half his share to Madeleine, and attends the Fantasia preshow party. Lana slaps him and reveals he has a three-year-old daughter named Ada. At the performance, Bon spots Man entering the theater in a white mask. Man has come to Paris so his blood brothers would find him.

The three converge at the shuttered restaurant. Two henchmen burst in; Bon kills them. Man removes his mask, revealing a face devastated by napalm but partially reconstructed. He shows the scar from their blood oath and declares himself their brother. The narrator confesses that he and Man were communist spies from the beginning. Bon is shattered, calling the narrator a traitor for betraying their brotherhood. The narrator tells Bon to kill him. Instead, Bon turns the gun on himself.

In the epilogue, the narrator reveals that Bon's bullet ricocheted and grazed his own temple. He holds Bon's body while Man applies saline drops to his burned-shut tear ducts, the only way Man can cry. Committed to Paradise, the narrator writes this confession, sharing a room with a kind old gentleman with dementia who listens to his stories and always forgets them. He pins a photograph to his wall of young Vietnamese people marching alongside Arabs and Africans in a Paris protest, three wearing yellow masks as a sign of solidarity. In the final scene, Claude, his former CIA handler, arrives carrying the narrator's leather duffel, confessions, blackmail videotapes, whiskey, and a gun, telling him to remove the sunglasses he refuses to take off. The story continues.