The Sympathizer sequel: The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, reviewed.

Slate has relationships with various online retailers. The Captain pitches his “aunt’s” friends to the Boss as a potentially lucrative market, and in no time he’s selling drugs to professors and politicians. This he considers a downfall, not because of the drugs, but because he worries he’s “becoming a capitalist, which is a matter of bad morals, especially as the capitalist, unlike the drug dealer, would never recognize his bad morality, or at least admit to it.” This work leads him into violent encounters with a rival French–Algerian gang and a convalescence in a brothel where the Senegalese bodyguard reads Frantz Fanon and watches intellectual talk shows all day. He’s at his funniest when pointing out the absurdities around him, such as a “culture show” designed to celebrate Vietnamese traditions, “even if staging a culture show was really an acknowledgement of one’s cultural inferiority. The truly powerful rarely need to put on a show, since their culture was always everywhere.” To the Captain’s mind, such a show should focus not on folk dances but on what his fellow Vietnamese truly excel at, such as gambling, smoking, drinking coffee in cafés, and “gossiping about our friends and relatives, whom we loved to backstab even more than stabbing our enemies, whose backs were harder to reach.” He observes that the French love American jazz “partially because every sweet note reminded them of American racism, which conveniently let them forget their own racism.” “Ah, contradiction!