As an avid reader, I will profess a love for book adaptations. Hulu’s Interior Chinatown was excellent. My book club is going to see Oedipus on Broadway. And do not get me started on Pride & Prejudice (Keira Knightley version, of course). Naturally, I was thrilled when Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer got the HBO limited series treatment last year. However, after reading many reviews, I hesitated. It was “Robert Downey Jr. this” and “Robert Downey Jr. that”—did the series, I wonder, even set out to tell the story it had licensed? Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me. After binge watching all eight episodes in a weekend, I can say that The Sympathizer was one of 2024’s most underrated shows…but the novel? Even better. Here, I make my case.
HBO’s ‘The Sympathizer’ Was Totally Underrated (But the Book Was Even Better)
My heart was ripped out
PureWow editors select every item that appears on this page, and some items may be gifted to us. Additionally, PureWow may earn compensation through affiliate links within the story. All prices are accurate upon date of publish. You can learn more about the affiliate process here.
The Book Is Propulsive but Reflective
The Sympathizer has excellent credentials. While the show premiered in 2024, Nguyen actually published the novel in 2015. It was the 2016 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and well received by critics.
The novel opens with one of the most intriguing lines in fiction—and I write that as someone who reads, on average, a book per week. (Truth: I read six books in a month this year.) “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” the narrator, who remains unnamed, begins. This is the fascinating, heart-wrenching, tragic and somehow simultaneously heartwarming saga of a Vietnamese communist spy who infiltrates the south and ends up expatriating to America after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Though he never reveals his name, this revolutionary, who only goes by The Captain, proves himself to be a complex man. The son of a Vietnamese mother and French priest. A Viet Cong infiltrator into the Western-backed south Vietnam. Asian immigrant unmoored in the suburban malaise of Los Angeles.
Something I found unique to this novel was that it was written in the style of a confession, generated by the protagonist in a reeducation camp in Vietnam. The book accomplishes the tall order of having both a propulsive plot—Assassinations! Political machinations! War-torn escapes! Hollywood glamour!—with the emotional depth of a man attempting to determine his identity.
It’s a Novel Take on a Major Historical Event
Another thing that struck me about The Sympathizer is that it was, I’m ashamed to say, the first time I’d read about a big historical conflict from a non-Western perspective. Not only that, but from a perspective that is often demonized. I don’t know what I was expecting to learn from a Communist spy, but it certainly wasn’t themes like loyalty, friendship, love, identity, heartbreak, regret, longing and loneliness. Humanity was bursting at the seams of this novel, and I remember lying in bed, late at night, turning the last page and just thinking, “Wow.” It was a powerful indictment on the one-sidedness of history.
The Series Was 2024’s Hidden TV Gem
Screen adaptations of award-winning fiction (however incredible) don’t always translate. I’m not going to lie, my book club watched the first episode of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude after reading the book and I don’t think any of us went further than that. On the flip side, The Sympathizer was incredibly well-executed. The cinematography was crisp but not overbearing like in One Hundred Years of Solitude, with just enough texture to transport me to ‘70s and ‘80s Saigon and Los Angeles. Major kudos to the set and costume designers there.
Additionally, it held pretty faithful to the original text, with some minor liberties taken to accommodate, what I assume, is a Hollywood spin to up the stakes and keep the viewers engaged. Otherwise, the visuals were amazing, and it was fun to see it all portrayed on the screen. Hoa Xuande was phenomenal as The Captain, with the incisive ability to convey a swath of emotion in the smallest, most nuanced facial expression. After watching the series, I’m wondering why he wasn’t nominated for any of the tentpole TV awards! Injustice.
One major gripe I had upon reading initial reviews was that Robert Downey Jr. played several roles. Though it did come off a bit distracting (and reviews I read focused only on Downey Jr. and not the wider story), I thought it was a brilliant way to build The Captain’s world. To him, he sees each character played by Downey Jr.—CIA Claude, a movie director, a professor, etc.—not as distinct people but one and the same, the West trying to bring his people into submission, bend them to the West’s ideology of who a Vietnamese, and, more broadly, who an Asian can be in America. And that was genius.
