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VIET THANH NGUYEN explores what it means to be an outsider

Vanities /Books

IN DECEMBER 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen had something he felt needed to be said and, luckily, a platform of unusual gravity on which to say it. Earlier that year he was tapped to give the Norton Lectures, a nearly century-long Harvard series in which an artist addresses the public six times over the course of a year. This April, Nguyen will release To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other, an edited compilation of the lectures, preserving their piercing insight into the dilemmas faced by outsiders working in an insider literary culture.

"There is a task and a purpose for those who believe in literature—there is important work for us to do," he says. "For those of us who are concerned about the injustices of our society, whether it's injustices being committed domestically or overseas in our name, there's a total relationship between beauty, art, truth, and justice."

Nguyen is known for writing that distills the experiences of Asian Americans and addresses the Vietnam War, its complexities, and its aftermath, including The Sympathizer (2015), which became an HBO limited series in 2024. The collection weaves in the work of those who inspire him, like Maxine Hong Kingston, Jeffery Paul Chan, and Ken Chen, along with literary giants including Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Herman Melville, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ralph Ellison.

Nguyen had initially drafted the lectures while in Paris the previous summer. "October 7 happened literally between the second and the third lecture. So I felt I had to address that and all of its consequences," he says. In a few weeks, he wrote a skillful argument urging Asian Americans to see a reflection of themselves in the Palestinian struggle. "I felt like there was an organic relationship for me to Palestinian thought and anti-colonial thinking that was deeply tied into the Vietnam War and to me becoming an American."

Though the lecture did occasion an audience interruption when it was delivered in December 2023, it fit comfortably with what he had initially planned, a series of emotional tales that makes palpable his intellectual understanding of an artist's role in the political discourse and the way politics works its way into art.

"We want the writer and the artist who will tell us that art will save us. But it's competing against this human impulse to destroy," he says. "Art can illuminate that process, in ways that are not there to make us feel better, but for us to realize how deeply embedded this impulse for destruction is. If we can realize it, then we can save ourselves."

ERIN VANDERHOOF