"The Sympathizer" by Viet Thanh Nguyen

    This book is lavishly praised, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2015. It was also one of NYTimes Best Books of the Year. I think it is terrific up to page 307, and then I found that boredom set in, and I skipped a lot of the final 75 pages.
    The narrator is an agent for the North Vietnamese, working undercover as a loyal South Vietnamese for a General of the South's Secret Police. The start of the book deals with the fall of Saigon and the evacuation of the narrator and the General and his wife and daughter to Guam. These opening chapters are a tour de force of writing, and thereafter the book never really recaptures the drive and drama of this opening. The General and his family end up in Orange County, California, and there is a strong satirical vein running through this section of the book as the narrator 'discovers' the United States, has a love affair, and gets involved in some nasty emigre killings. Eventually he gets caught up in a rag-tag collection of emigres who are intent on the hopeless task of reconquering the South. The narrator goes back with a small group into Thailand and ends up making an incursion across the Mekong River, where he is captured.
    The novels first 307 pages are written as a confession, addressed to the "dear Commandant" And then we move into the re-education camp where the narrator has spent a year in solitary confinement writing the first 307 pages of his confession. Thereafter, the author lost me.
    There are lots of glowing blurbs on the covers of the paperback edition...all quite brief..'sparkling and audacious,' 'Pulses with Catch -22-style absurdities,' 'Scenes worthy of Dostoevsky,' 'Astounding,' 'Powerful and evocative,'
And from The New Yorker, "The novel's best parts are painful, hilarious exposures of white tone-deafness....the satire is delicious."