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 (2015), 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.^[3]

The Committed

First edition cover
Author	Viet Thanh Nguyen
Audio read by	Francois Chau[1]
Cover artist	Christopher Moisan[2]
Language	English
Genre	Historical crime
Set in	Paris in the 1980s
Publisher	Grove Press
Publication date	March 2, 2021
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback), e-book, audiobook
Pages	368
ISBN	978-0-8021-5706-5 (hardcover)
OCLC	1224586967
Dewey Decimal	813/.6
LC Class	PS3614.G97 C66 2021
Preceded by	The Sympathizer

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".^[4]

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."^[5] 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."^[6] 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."^[7]