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.