A man of two faces A memoir, a history, a memorial

Nguyen (The Committed, 2021) explores "the thin border between / history and memory" in this many-faceted, stylistically complex, eviscerating, and tender montage of memoir, facts, dissent, and clarification. Having fled war-riven Vietnam as a young boy, greatly lauded Nguyen delves into the ongoing traumas of losing one's home and country, stating that refugees are seen "as the zombies of the world." Tracing the lives of his hard-working parents who owned and managed a store in San José, he recounts his dawning recognition of the deep contradictions within the American Dream as television, movies, and comics revealed the embedded racism that made his being both Vietnamese and American a perpetually difficult balancing act. The doubleness he navigates is expressed in his probing narrative voice as he addresses himself in different modes as a "man of two faces." As Nguyen chronicles his loving family's struggles and triumphs, and his becoming a professor, a writer, a husband, and a father, he dissects the legacies of colonialism, war, and displacement, as well as the "racial hierarchy," lies, and denial that permeate American life and culture. Nguyen, whose trenchant essays appear in such venues as the New York Times and the Washington Post, offers a uniquely intricate, clarion, and far-reaching inquiry into what we disparage and what we value, asserting the bedrock necessity of history, story, and remembrance.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With his highly awarded first novel, The Sympathizer, adapted for a forthcoming streaming series, Nguyen's unflinching blend of memoir and social critique will garner avid attention.

This bold and ambitious memoir from novelist Nguyen (The Committed) employs a dazzling hybrid of prose and poetry to explore the author's life in America as a Vietnamese refugee. Arriving in the U.S. in 1975, at age four, Nguyen was placed with a different sponsor family than his parents and brother, the first of many perplexing and traumatizing acts inflicted on him by his new homeland. In early sections, Nguyen intersperses stories of his California youth--flush with opportunity, thanks to the sacrifices of his shop owner parents, with whom he was promptly reunited--with pop culture critiques and citations of postcolonial literature. As a young adult, Nguyen pursued an academic, writerly path, and his parents seemed headed for a well-earned retirement. But his mother, who survived a litany of horrors back in Vietnam, suffered a mental break from which she never recovered. Nguyen's writing about his mother exemplifies the memoir's self-awareness: he longs to honor her, but worries that doing so on the page is a "betrayal." Elsewhere, Nguyen's self-knowledge is employed to funnier ends, as when he skewers the model-refugee memoir with painful precision, laying out a blueprint from "old-world hardship" to "reconciliation" for aspiring practitioners to follow ("For writers hoping to win literary prizes," he advises, "express reconciliation with great subtlety, mixed with regret and melancholy"). It's a savvy and complex account of coming-of-age in a foreign land. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Assoc. (Oct.)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.