The story begins where its predecessor left off. At the end of The Sympathizer, the unnamed narrator/protagonist becomes one of many refugees collectively known as “boat people” who fled Vietnam in the wake of the collapse of the slightly democratic South to the overwhelming communist forces from the North as a result of American troops finally leaving after more than a decade of pointless war. This story opens with the still unnamed narrator on describing the horrific escape across the water on his way to a new homeland in France.
The story then leaps forward in time to the commencement of the 1980s as the narrator describes his existential crisis of being a communist revolutionary without a revolution to fight and a crisis in ideology. He is still firmly committed to the communist cause but has come to fully appreciate how Party politics can corrupt and obstruct theory to the point that the practice becomes all but unrecognizable from the theoretical.
He introduces a woman he calls aunt, but who is really a non-relation with whom he was in secret encoded contact during his years as a communist spy living in the U.S. In an example of the loosely structured form the novel takes, the aunt will come to play a big role in the narrator’s life in France as the host of dinner parties for fellow intellectual in which she takes on the role of facilitator of the various political discussions and debates which make up a significant portion of the book as well as, arguably, the most interesting sections. These dinner parties are narratively staged in such a way that the discussions become a kind of mini-adult education class in the history and ideas of famous names and text associated with the broader and more comprehensive conception of communist ideology. For instance, whereas much American classroom discussion of communism begins with Marx and ends with Lenin, these discussions touch upon the politics of Mao and Che as well as the aesthetic theories of Theodor Adorno and the sociological implications of Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses.
Everything is not dinner and Derrida for the narrator, however. Juxtaposed against his maintaining residence with his communist sympathies is his much darker exposure to real-world elements of capitalism. This exposure arrives not in the form of becoming an exploited worker within the machinery of a heartless corporation. The narrator comes to learn the nuts and bolts of how capitalism works by becoming an exploited worker within the machinery of a heartless underworld criminal organization specializing in trafficking a new kind of drug called “the remedy” which is derived from Vietnamese coffee beans. Drawn into the gangster underworld by the lure of much bigger money than he could possibly hope to make doing legitimate work, but simultaneously repulsed by the violence required to pursue that money, the narrative quickly establishes the nature of its existence. Rather than seamlessly integrating the multiple components into a coherent narrative, the juxtaposition of the ideological discussions and the pulp fiction of gangsters is engaged for a purpose rarely seen in American fiction: the novel as an exercise in Hegelian dialectics.
The portrayal of communist ideology within a purely theoretical sphere is facilitated by a woman called aunt who isn’t really a relative conducted by other people using anonymous nicknames like “the Maoist Ph.D.” touching upon respectable historical figures from Frantz Fanon to Walter Benjamin to Hélène Cixous. By contrast, the world of capitalism is presented in practice within its ugliest but no less true form in which the head of the criminal organization is ironically referred to as “The Boss” and the various low-level thugs sport absurd anonymous nicknames like the Seven Dwarfs, The Mona Lisa (who is male), and two guys called Beatles and Rolling Stones respectively. (Even the narrator himself comes to be referred to as Crazy Bastard.)
Although not technically an example of a stream-of-consciousness novel, for the most part, the story does have that sort of feel to it as the narrative jumps episodically from scenes of very serious political discourse to what seems to be a purposely stereotypical organized crime storyline which includes multiple scenes of excessive torture resulting from gang war between the narrator’s group of Asian thugs and a rival gang of French-Arab thugs. The point of this specific multicultural hyphenation is to use the native heritage as a political commentary on French colonialist incursions into North Africa and Southeast Asia. The deeper that the narrator dives into the pursuit of capitalist lucre, the farther he moves from the engagement of the mind expressed in the scenes of political discourse. It is the violence of the drug trade that becomes the narrator’s connection to capitalism and ultimately the things which threaten to disconnect him from his sanity.
And then that connection is made brutally visceral with the showdown he has been studiously avoiding throughout the first book and this one. His closest companion is his “blood brother” Bon who knows everything about the narrator except for his greatest secret: that he is a true-blue communist. This revelation is literally explosive, and it is at this point in the concluding section of the novel that the book does suddenly make the leap fully into stream-of-consciousness storytelling.
Adopting a second-person perspective in which the narrator refers to him as “you” and verb use shifts to present tense, the story becomes a portrait of a mind slipping into madness and the connotation of the title undergoes a significant transformation. He is no longer committed to being dedicated to a cause he is willing to die for. He is committed to that far less positive connotation reserved for those occupying buildings where the staff all wear white and doctors ask questions using terms like “Oedipal complex” without irony.
