By Michael Upchurch
First novels don’t come much finer than “The Sympathizer,” the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner by Vietnamese American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. The book, with its strong echo of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” in its opening lines, grabs you from the start.
“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” its narrator proclaims. “Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”
Nguyen’s protagonist is a communist agent embedded with the South Vietnamese military during the Vietnam War. The choices he makes over the course of the book grow dizzyingly confused after he joins the South Vietnamese exodus to the U.S., following the fall of Saigon in 1975.
“The Refugees” (Grove Press, 209 pages, $25) Nguyen’s new book of eight short stories set in Vietnam and California, doesn’t match the sweep of his brilliant novel. But it shows the same wily, penetrating mind at work. Most of its characters fled Vietnam after the communist takeover, but their tales vary sharply from story to story.
In “Black-Eyed Women,” the female narrator – a professional ghost writer with ghosts of her own who haunt her refugee past – is hired to help the sole survivor of an airline crash tell his story for publication. As she shapes his memoir, she’s visited by her dead brother, who makes her see her own survival in an increasingly disquieting light.
In “War Years” and “Someone Else Besides You,” Nguyen focuses on formidable parents who shock both their children and the reader with their actions.
The martinet father in “Someone” takes drastic spur-of-the-moment measures to correct the mistakes he believes his recently divorced son has made in his personal life. The mother in “War Years,” proprietor of a Vietnamese market in San Jose, has no patience with her customer, Mrs. Hoa, who is all but extorting cash from her community to raise funds for a guerrilla campaign to retake Vietnam from the communists. Feeling threatened, the mother, with her teenage son in tow, tracks Mrs. Hoa to her home to confront her. The outcome couldn’t be more unexpected.
Other stories pay heed to weaker characters. Arthur Arellano, the ailing out-of-control gambler/drinker in “The Transplant,” strays on the wrong side of the law as he tries to thank the son of the man who donated a liver to him. The father in “Fatherland” names all three children of his second marriage after the three children of his first marriage, and has a pitiful explanation for why he did it. (The story is also a wickedly wry compare-and-contrast exercise that pits the illusions of those who fled Vietnam against the escapist dreams of those who stayed.)
Nguyen is an expert on prickly family dynamics. In “I’d Love You to Want Me,” a Vietnamese American wife deals with her husband’s worsening dementia and their son’s tactless attempts to force a solution on her. In “The Americans,” a retired African American soldier and his Japanese wife visit their daughter: a teacher in Saigon who, in her father’s eyes, can’t do a single thing right. Nguyen hits grace notes in the wrap-ups of both tales, yielding an inch or two to sentimentality, but no more.
He can also be a sly humorist. Prime example: “The Other Man,” in which Liem, an attractive young Vietnamese refugee, winds up living with a bickering gay couple in San Francisco.
The story comes with some Oscar Wilde-worthy lines: “There’s a reason why saints are martyred. Nobody can stand them.” There are also tough realizations on Liem’s part as he looks back on his escape from Vietnam: “He tried to forget what he’d discovered, how little other lives mattered to him when his own was at stake.”
“The Refugees” confirms Nguyen as an agile, trenchant writer, able to inhabit a number of points of view. And it whets your appetite for his next novel.
–Michael Upchurch, for The Oregonian/OregonLive
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Viet Thanh Nguyen
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23
Where: Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.
Tickets: Free, powells.com/events or 503-228-4651
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