A MAN OF TWO FACES

A Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist sifts through his influences and experiences in a kaleidoscopic memoir.

“This is a war story,” writes Nguyen, an acclaimed author of fiction (The Sympathizer, The Refugees) and nonfiction (Nothing Ever Dies), in an autobiography that is deeply personal and intensely political. In nonlinear fashion, the author recounts his family’s flight from wartime Vietnam in 1975, when he was 4; a childhood in San José, California, where his parents (called, in their native tongue, Ba Má) operated a Vietnamese grocery store; and his development as a writer, scholar (he is a professor of English, American studies, and ethnicity at the University of Southern California), and conflicted citizen of what he sardonically calls AMERICA™—a process that inevitably widens the gap with his immigrant parents. Along the way, Nguyen offers sharp assessments of Vietnam War films such as Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, and The Green Berets, the latter a “work of propaganda so spectacular and atrocious that only the Third Reich or Hollywood could have produced it.” If the author’s criticism is understandably scathing, there is also a mischievous sense of humor, as when he includes a page of one-star Amazon reviews of The Sympathizer (“Absurdist and repulsive”; “If you like torture read this book”; “Bafflingly overpraised”). The sections about Ba Má, shaded by the unreliability of memory, strike a melancholy note, although his parents remain somewhat hazy as characters. Idiosyncratic typographical treatments—passages set like lines of poetry; words blown up in large type—add visual variety without quite justifying themselves. Readers seeking the anchor of narrative will be frustrated, but Nguyen indisputably captures the workings of a quicksilver and penetrating mind. The author includes a selection of black-and-white photos.

A fragmentary reflection on the refugee experience, at once lyrical and biting, by one of our leading writers.