Review of The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Feb 22, 2021The narrator's voice snaps you up. It's direct, vain, cranky and slashing — a voice of outraged intelligence. It's among the more memorable in recent American literature. Viet Thanh Nguyen

Mar 4, 2021In The Committed, a political novel comes in the guise of a thriller. I wondered, as I was reading it, whether I would have enjoyed it as much had I not read The Sympathizer first. The answ

It's been 4.5 years since I read Viet Thanh Nguyen's forerunner to The Committed, the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer, and my memories of that first book are somewhat vague. I know, however, th

Mar 4, 2021The Committed 's revolutionary core is its plasticity — a novel of ideas that continuously shapeshifts to question its raison d'être. This fluidity can be seen in Vo Danh's meandering appro

Feb 22, 2021The setting and action of this second book are different, but "The Committed" is so dependent on earlier relationships and plot details that these two novels are more like volumes of the s

New York Times The first 100 pages of The Committed are, to my mind, better than anything in the first novel. The narrator's voice snaps you up. It's direct, vain, cranky and slashing — a voice of out

Mar 5, 2021His roiling, pox-on-both-their-houses cynicism often comes across like bits from a stand-up comedy routine (Paul Beatty's masterly race satire "The Sellout" took a similar approach). True,

Mar 2, 2021Silva's latest Gabriel Allon novel is a bit of a throwback—in the best possible way. One-time assassin and legendary spymaster Gabriel Allon has finally retired. After saying farewell to hi

Reading THE SYMPATHIZER first may help you enjoy the sequel even more, but THE COMMITTED operates just fine on its own as a powerhouse of a novel that captures a time left behind and the repercussions

Mar 2, 2021History repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce," according to Marx. Viet Thanh Nguyen follows his tragic first novel, The Sympathizer, with a hilarious, terrifying farce. In The C

Mar 9, 2021It feels, to this reader anyway, that the turns of events aren't the issue so much as the set-up, or lack there-of, in some cases. The book ends much like its predecessor, in a hazy, open-e

Apr 9, 2021March 2021. While Viet Thanh Nguyen's new novel, The Committed, is a stand-alone story, it also furthers the intellectual evolution and emotional disintegration of a character from an earli

The much-anticipated sequel to Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, The Committed invites debate through its complex portrayal of political alignments, racial identi

Mar 3, 2021Elissa Greenwald reviews The Committed for New York Journal of Books. History repeats itself, "first as tragedy, then as farce," according to Marx. Viet Thanh Nguyen follows his tragic firs

Feb 23, 2021A few books later, and he's back with a sequel — common to the spy canon, sure, but hardly so ubiquitous in literary fiction. The Committed picks up with our narrator in 1981 Paris, where

An Amazon Best Book of March 2021: In The Committed, we follow the same nameless narrator to Paris where he is "no longer a spy or a sleeper"—as he was in the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathi

Mar 2, 2021The Committed does not ask for our credulity, but our attention. The book is so intellectually rigorous I wanted a syllabus (in truth, as above, the author provides one). The plot whirrs an

The much-anticipated sequel to Viet Thanh Nguyen's 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathizer, The Committed invites debate through its complex portrayal of political alignments, racial identi

Mar 18, 2021The satire throughout is abrasive and unrelenting. The sympathiser as well-schooled gangster is witheringly funny on the disdainful self-importance of the entitled and the cartoonish binar

Mar 4, 2021BY THÚY ĐINH. With smoke-and-mirrors panache, The Committed — Viet Thanh Nguyen's sequel to The Sympathizer — continues the travails of our Eurasian Ulysses, now relocated to France and sel

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert (Goodreads Author) 3.44 · Rating details · 53,125 ratings · 5,349 reviews At the end of her bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Eliz

Some of the writing reads like a first draft, the storytelling fails to impress, the plot often losing pace and lacking a primary piece providing narrative tension to pull readers forward. In sum, thi

Feb 26, 2021The novel draws its true enchantment — and its immense power — from the propulsive, wide-ranging intelligence of our narrator as he Virgils us through his latest descent into hell. That he

Apr 25, 2021THE COMMITTED.By Viet Thanh Nguyen. Grove Press. 341 pages. $27. About a third of the way through Viet Thanh Nguyen's new novel, "The Committed," the narrator finds himself in a waiting ro

Mar 29, 2022Nguyen does Salman Rushdie one better by deploying the conventions of genre fiction; he gently seduces the reader into two rambling, discursive works passionately interested in war and vio

Committed, Gilbert's attempt to think marriage through, is all head. It lacks, to a great degree, the warmth and intimacy readers have come to expect from this writer. Halfway through Committed, Gilbe

Feb 23, 2021Book review. Few novels have catapulted their way into the American literary canon as quickly as Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, ... "The Committed" (the title is a pun o

May 19, 2021The book is not long and this review will be short. The reason for both delays is once again finding myself at odds with the overwhelming majority of critics out there about a recent piece