Viet Thanh Nguyen had just gotten back from a summer in Paris when he received an unexpected phone call from a Chicago number. He didn’t recognize the caller, so he let it ring. Out of curiosity, he texted back, “Who is this?”
The number replied, “It’s the MacArthur Foundation.”
“Oh,” Nguyen thought. “I should call these people back right away.”
Nguyen managed to stand for the first few seconds of the call, but soon had to sit down. He’d just won $625,000, no strings attached, as an unrestricted investment in his creative potential.
Eighteen months earlier, Nguyen had received another life-altering phone call when he won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut novel, The Sympathizer. Since the book’s publication in April 2015, Nguyen’s been no stranger to worldwide recognition: He’s also received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and countless others.
According to the MacArthur Selection Committee, “Nguyen’s body of work not only offers insight into the experiences of refugees past and present, but also poses profound questions about how we might more accurately and conscientiously portray victims and adversaries of other wars.” After writing in obscurity for more than a decade to honor his and others’ war stories — and all refugee stories, Nguyen insists, are war stories — he will now have even more resources to help tilt the world in a more peaceful direction.
I spoke with Nguyen the day after the MacArthur Foundation announced him, along with 23 other extraordinary recipients, as a 2017 MacArthur Fellow. (...)
How have you been feeling about defining the purpose of this monetary windfall — a definition the prize leaves entirely up to you?
This has been a crazy 18 months for me, ever since I won the Pulitzer. The Pulitzer had already started transforming my life economically. This award is just… it’s more than I actually need. (...)
You’ve spoken with Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic about how, up until you’d secured tenure in 2003, you’d lived your life in a “very pragmatic, very strategic way,” which “required a lot of repression.” Does the MacArthur put that phase of your life into a different context? Was it a necessary period of incubation for the scope of your work?
It was definitely necessary, just given my understanding of my own character. I’m like my parents — they are, at the same time, both risk capable and risk averse. They mostly want everything to be stable, to be safe, but when times require it, they will do tremendous things. They were refugees twice. They built their own fortunes twice. So they know when to take risks. But after those risks are successfully accomplished, they just want everything to be safe. I’m like that.
I wanted to make sure that my life was secure by being a professor, then I could maybe be more explicit about the risks that I was taking. I was already writing fiction before that, but no one cared, no one knew. After 10 years more people knew, but no one cared! So that was a very long period of risk-taking after tenure. That was like 12 years before The Sympathizer got published.
I think that with the MacArthur now, at this point, it’s a confirmation of the fact that the risk that I was taking paid off. It also just really adds to the pressure! No one knew who I was when I was writing The Sympathizer, which was very liberating. It’s one thing to take risks when no one knows who you are. It’s a different matter to take risks when expectations are heightened all around.
You wrote The Sympathizer as a comedic spy novel to draw readers into engaging with the history of the Vietnam War. Why was it so crucial, in order to create that engagement, to disguise theory and philosophy as plot and action?
I have spent a lot of time as a scholar thinking about the question of where art and politics intersect. It seemed to me that you would find this intersection happening very regularly in countries outside of the United States. It’s within the United States that there is great reluctance, generally, to engage in this. It’s a legacy of the fact that this is a very anti-communist country, with very stereotypical perceptions of what the intersection of art and politics can look like.
Coming at this as a writer who did not go through an MFA program, where I think it is discouraged to talk about politics explicitly, I felt that I could draw from what I knew as a scholar to try to do this novel. I had to create a character and a plot where it would be viable dramatically for him to think about these theoretical and political issues. The novel is implicitly a rejoinder to many of the works dealing with the Vietnam War — but in general, American literature — that shies away from that.
I did not want to write a realistic account of the Vietnam War because so many of those have already been written. I didn’t have anything new to add to that. I felt like we had to get beyond realism to talk about this war and its consequences.
Humor is also a very important strategy for when we are dealing with really horrific situations. It just helps to alleviate the mood, to make us more capable of bearing the burden of what we are witnessing. Soldiers who go through war find humor, terrible humor, in the most terrible things.
by Catherine Cusick and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Longreads | Read more:
Image: via
The number replied, “It’s the MacArthur Foundation.”
“Oh,” Nguyen thought. “I should call these people back right away.”
Nguyen managed to stand for the first few seconds of the call, but soon had to sit down. He’d just won $625,000, no strings attached, as an unrestricted investment in his creative potential.Eighteen months earlier, Nguyen had received another life-altering phone call when he won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut novel, The Sympathizer. Since the book’s publication in April 2015, Nguyen’s been no stranger to worldwide recognition: He’s also received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and countless others.
According to the MacArthur Selection Committee, “Nguyen’s body of work not only offers insight into the experiences of refugees past and present, but also poses profound questions about how we might more accurately and conscientiously portray victims and adversaries of other wars.” After writing in obscurity for more than a decade to honor his and others’ war stories — and all refugee stories, Nguyen insists, are war stories — he will now have even more resources to help tilt the world in a more peaceful direction.
I spoke with Nguyen the day after the MacArthur Foundation announced him, along with 23 other extraordinary recipients, as a 2017 MacArthur Fellow. (...)
How have you been feeling about defining the purpose of this monetary windfall — a definition the prize leaves entirely up to you?
This has been a crazy 18 months for me, ever since I won the Pulitzer. The Pulitzer had already started transforming my life economically. This award is just… it’s more than I actually need. (...)
You’ve spoken with Josephine Livingstone at The New Republic about how, up until you’d secured tenure in 2003, you’d lived your life in a “very pragmatic, very strategic way,” which “required a lot of repression.” Does the MacArthur put that phase of your life into a different context? Was it a necessary period of incubation for the scope of your work?
It was definitely necessary, just given my understanding of my own character. I’m like my parents — they are, at the same time, both risk capable and risk averse. They mostly want everything to be stable, to be safe, but when times require it, they will do tremendous things. They were refugees twice. They built their own fortunes twice. So they know when to take risks. But after those risks are successfully accomplished, they just want everything to be safe. I’m like that.
I wanted to make sure that my life was secure by being a professor, then I could maybe be more explicit about the risks that I was taking. I was already writing fiction before that, but no one cared, no one knew. After 10 years more people knew, but no one cared! So that was a very long period of risk-taking after tenure. That was like 12 years before The Sympathizer got published.
I think that with the MacArthur now, at this point, it’s a confirmation of the fact that the risk that I was taking paid off. It also just really adds to the pressure! No one knew who I was when I was writing The Sympathizer, which was very liberating. It’s one thing to take risks when no one knows who you are. It’s a different matter to take risks when expectations are heightened all around.
You wrote The Sympathizer as a comedic spy novel to draw readers into engaging with the history of the Vietnam War. Why was it so crucial, in order to create that engagement, to disguise theory and philosophy as plot and action?
I have spent a lot of time as a scholar thinking about the question of where art and politics intersect. It seemed to me that you would find this intersection happening very regularly in countries outside of the United States. It’s within the United States that there is great reluctance, generally, to engage in this. It’s a legacy of the fact that this is a very anti-communist country, with very stereotypical perceptions of what the intersection of art and politics can look like.
Coming at this as a writer who did not go through an MFA program, where I think it is discouraged to talk about politics explicitly, I felt that I could draw from what I knew as a scholar to try to do this novel. I had to create a character and a plot where it would be viable dramatically for him to think about these theoretical and political issues. The novel is implicitly a rejoinder to many of the works dealing with the Vietnam War — but in general, American literature — that shies away from that.
I did not want to write a realistic account of the Vietnam War because so many of those have already been written. I didn’t have anything new to add to that. I felt like we had to get beyond realism to talk about this war and its consequences.
Humor is also a very important strategy for when we are dealing with really horrific situations. It just helps to alleviate the mood, to make us more capable of bearing the burden of what we are witnessing. Soldiers who go through war find humor, terrible humor, in the most terrible things.
by Catherine Cusick and Viet Thanh Nguyen, Longreads | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I put off reading The Sympathizer for a long time even though it won the Pulitzer Prize (pretty much my gold standard for fiction recommendations) because... Vietnam. Who wants to read another book about that? But it was superb, and not anything like I expected. Here's an excerpt. I'm also taken by Mr. Nguyen's description of himself and his parents as "risk capable and risk averse"; a good way to be, I think, and a good description of my own approach to life (though never articulated in such a concise way).]
