Best books...chosen by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new novel, The Committed, is a sequel to The Sympathizer in
which the central figure of that 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner becomes a drug dealer in
1980s Paris. Below, Nguyen recommends other books that interrogate commitment.The Book List ARTS 25
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963). I read
Plath’s novel as a student in an all-boys Jesuit
high school and was suitably disturbed by its
story of an ambitious young woman who suffers
a mental-health crisis and is committed to a psy-
chiatric hospital.
Red Comet by Heather Clark (2020). The Bell
Jar returned to my thought after I read Heather
Clark’s new biography of Plath, a compelling
reminder of how committed Plath was to her
writing. At 1,118 pages, the biography is itself
an example of commitment, both on the part of
the author who wrote it and for the reader who
picks it up. I enjoyed its very detailed examina-
tions of everything from Plath’s great poetry to
her love life. I hope no one ever writes such a
book about me.
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
(1961). The Committed refers to numerous liter-
ary and political works of commitment, most of
all to The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon’s
classic account of the Algerian revolt against the
French and passionate call for violent revolution
by subjugated peoples. The Martinique-bornpolitical philosopher himself became a com-
mitted revolutionary and died young, leaving a
remarkable body of work.Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan (2002).
Eka Kurniawan’s brutal, funny, wildly imagina-
tive novel is about many things, and among
them are the crimes committed in Indonesia dur-
ing colonialism and afterward.Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (2001). I’m drawn
to writers who relentlessly dig up the past
that most other people would rather leave
untouched. W.G. Sebald, a German writer, made
it his life’s work to deal with the Holocaust and
its aftermath. I particularly love this magisterial
and melancholic novel about an orphan who
learns he is Jewish and embarks on a quest to
find out what happened to his parents.I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (2010). This is
Karen Tei Yamashita’s masterpiece, an epic and
expansive novel about San Francisco’s revolu-
tionary Asian- American movement of the 1960s
and ’70s, from which I, as an Asian- American
writer, am descended.Also of interest... in forbidden indulgences
Rosa Brooks
When Rosa Brooks decided to
become a cop several years
ago, she didn’t enjoy much
family support, said Terr y
Gross in NPR.org. The push-
back was especially strong
from her mother, Barbara
Ehrenreich, the best- selling
author and
lifelong leftist.
“Oh, we had
a lot of pretty
tense con-
versations,”
Brooks says.
“She said,
The police are
the enemy; you’re joining the
enemy.” Still, Brooks’ curios-
ity won out. A law professor
at George town Uni ver sity
who was already in her 40s,
she was simply amazed that
Wash ing ton, D.C., offered an
unusual program in which
she could become a “reserve
police officer”—an armed
volunteer working three patrol
shifts each month. Only once
she’d started did she decide
to write a book about the
experience.
In Tangled Up in Blue, Brooks
recalls a few incidents from
her four years on the force
that still bring her shame, said
Isaac Chotiner in The New
Yorker. She once arrested
a woman who had tried to
shoplift food for a grandchild
and another time hauled away
a teenage girl who was in
tears—in both cases following
protocol instead of her best
judgment. “Being a good cop
at this moment in time is not
possible,” she says, citing
such rigid mandates as well as
the demands put on officers
to handle too many types of
crises. “This is where,” she
says, “there’s tremendous
common ground between the
‘Defund the police’ movement
and police themselves.” As
for policing’s overuse of vio-
lence, she advocates systemic
changes that she believes will
also be welcomed by her ex-
colleagues. “I think the typical
person goes into policing as
an idealist,” she says. “A lot of
that gets beaten out of them.”Author of the week
Be
Be
Ja
co
bs,
Jo
dy
M
cK
itri
ck
This book by a Columbia University
neuroscientist “represents a calcu-
lated risk,” said Sally Satel in The
Wall Street Journal. Carl Hart has
concluded, after close study of test
subjects, that heroin, methamphet-
amine, and other widely feared drugs can be used
safely by most adults. Yet “as persuasive as Hart
can be,” the vexing reality, as he admits, is that
the same drugs can destroy the lives of the small
minority of people who are not psychologically
equipped to resist overdependence.Drug Use for Grown-Ups
by Carl L. Hart (Penguin, $28)
This anthology of stories about non-
traditional sex is “a tasting menu of
real variety,” said Jo Livingstone in
NewRepublic.com. Carmen Maria
Machado offers a sapphic romance
that “leans into the silliness of eroti-
ca’s vocabulary,” while Garth Greenwell, another
prominent contributor, explores when erotic stim-
ulation crosses into violence. Because sex so often
resists precise description, the collection becomes
“an invitation to enjoy the fact that the body
speaks a language we can’t understand.”Kink edited by R.O. Kwon & Garth Greenwell
(Simon & Schuster, $17)The nuanced argument advanced
in this essay collection “may be lost
on the linear- minded,” said Scott
McLemee in InsideHigherEd.com.
The industrialized world prizes focus
and productivity, but writing professor
and Los Angeles Review of Books founder Tom
Lutz draws on memoir, cultural history, and litera-
ture to argue that pursuing experiences aimlessly
enriches one’s experience of life. To some, that is
“bound to seem counterintuitive, if not positively
nihilistic,” but “I think he hits the mark.”Aimlessness
by Tom Lutz (Columbia, $20)
“Whether you dress to the nines or
prefer sweats,” this history of fashion
crimes is “essential reading,” said
Tariro Mzezewa in The New York
Times. Dialing back several centuries
to find examples of people being pun-
ished for their choice of attire, author and lawyer
Richard Thompson Ford ends up proving that
every jacket, every shoe, and every earring we’ve
worn “has something to tell us about sociopoliti-
cal status, sexual morality, and identity.” It’s “a
deeply informative and entertaining study.”Dress Codes
by Richard Thompson Ford (Simon & Schuster, $30)