Save this story for later. “I wanted my fiction to be as critical as it was creative,” Viet Thanh Nguyen recalled in an essay a few years ago. “But I didn’t know how to do this, and no one could teach me this, and it took the discipline of sitting in a chair for countless hours over 20 years before I could even approach bringing together the critical and the creative.” This patience, and this determination to escape traditional influences, help explain why Nguyen made his début as a novelist at the relatively late age of forty-four, a début that proved, for author and readers alike, worth the wait. “The Sympathizer,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016, is set during and just after the years of the war between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. Its unnamed Vietnamese narrator is a spy—a double agent, in fact, living as an anti-Communist while working for Communists—though calling the book a spy novel is about as helpful as calling “Crime and Punishment” a police procedural. It is critical, indeed, in more than one sense; it contains and embodies a healthy dose of political and literary theory (Nguyen holds a Ph.D. in English and is a professor at U.S.C.), and it is scathing not only about America’s acts during the war but also about its subsequent cultural depictions of those acts.