Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer ***

A Pulitzer Prize-winning espionage novel, "wrought in electric prose." It was inevitable that I would read The Sympathizer, and probably just as inevitable that I would be disappointed by it. Contrary to reviewers' adjectives like "blistering," "haunting," "audacious," and "darkly comic," I found the narrator's tone detached and his adventures mundane. He is a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist sleeper agent in America, but the extent of his spycraft is writing letters to a fake aunt in France about activities that the Vietnamese could surely follow for themselves.

The final 75 pages are far more intense and force reconsideration of the preceding 306 pages. It turns out the aloof tone was an intentional plot point. For me, though, it was too little too late.

George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 **** 1/2

The title says it all: Nash gives an epic history of the conservative movement from 1945 to 1975, with a postscript from 2006. He focuses on the ideas of conservatism rather than its political successes and failures. His protagonists are the likes of William Buckley, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman, not Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

Nash shows how the movement is a coalition of partially incompatible strands: originally libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-Communism, joined later by neoconservatism and the religious right. Libertarians disagree with traditionalists about individualism (natural rights versus natural law) and with anti-Communists about foreign policy; traditionalists can be more comfortable with government programs than the other two; and so on. But they all fundamentally disagree with some aspect of the liberal program.

The book explicitly lays out the philosophical underpinnings of each conservative approach, and shows how they reject liberal ideas that are often taken for granted in modern America. Even some conservatives suspect that America is fundamentally a liberal country. The history also illuminates the reason for some conservative obsessions, such as with the South and the Constitution. (Conservatives are drawn to defend the pre-Civil War South and African colonialism for reasons that are separate from the racism that unfortunately comes wrapped up in these subjects.)

Fascinating and thought-provoking, if a little repetitive.

Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes ** 1/2

I really want to love this book. It is a cult classic among literary types, unknown outside the boundaries of its cult. "Written by a self-pitying autodidact for consumption by self-pitying autodidacts," as Walter Kirn puts it in his review. A mocking narrator, a sui generis story about failure, pretentious literary references, a cover in the classic Vintage Contemporaries style, passionate fans among a tribe I want to belong to - what's not to like?

Alas, it doesn't speak to me. The narrative meanders and repeats itself rather than developing its theme (what happens when you reject bourgeois values but still measure yourself against them). Everything I said the first time I reviewed it still applies, but I'm docking it a star for failing to meet my expectations... in a thoroughly Exley-like fashion.