The Committed

The Committed is a 2021 novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen. It is his second novel and the sequel to his debut novel The Sympathizer, which sold over one million copies and was awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Committed was published by Grove Press on March 2, 2021.

Synopsis

The novel is about a man who refers to himself as "Nameless" in Vietnamese, "Vo Danh," and arrives in Paris after having been tortured by Communists. Vo Danh dislikes being called a "boat person".

Reception

In its starred review, Kirkus Reviews wrote, "Nguyen is deft at balancing his hero's existential despair with the lurid glow of a crime saga." Publishers Weekly, in its starred review, praised "the narrator’s hair-raising escapes, descriptions of the Boss's hokey bar, and thoughtful references to Fanon and Césaire." The New York Times praised the first hundred pages of The Committed as "better than anything in the first novel," while regarding the second half as, "shaggy, shaggy, shaggy."