The New York Times and The New York Post both described Kevin Nguyen’s near-future American novel Mỹ Documents, which follows a right-wing government calling for the incarceration of people based on their ethnicity, as “timely.”
“While I don’t disagree that the concept matches the headlines, it was never my intent to publish a ‘timely’ novel,” said Nguyen.
At 3:30 p.m. Thursday in the Hall of Philosophy, Nguyen discussed Mỹ Documents, his sophomore novel, for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle. When he began writing the novel in 2018 — imagining a sweeping incarceration of Vietnamese Americans, an idea inspired by the American history of Japanese incarceration, the Vietnam War and modern-day migrant detention centers — he hoped the novel would feel urgent, but never wanted to see it reflected in the real world.
“At a recent event, an aspiring writer asked me if this political climate got me excited for the sales potential. ‘Be honest,’ he asked, ‘Are you stoked?’ I told him I wasn’t. I am also not sure I have ever been stoked,” Nguyen said.
Fiction that attempts to be newsworthy often falls flat, according to Nguyen. Rather than intend to write a political work, Nguyen interpreted three major themes that were “in the water” while writing during COVID-19 pandemic — rise of surveillance through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the emergence of big technology corporations and anti-Asian-American sentiment.
Departing from his typical form of journalism as a current features editor at The Verge and former culture editor at GQ, Nguyen investigated the intersection of these themes and channeled reactions to those events into his characters.
“If all that sounds heavy and complicated, then I’m here to tell you that the book is fun or hopefully fun and hopefully funny and hopefully — in some ways — hopeful,” Nguyen said.
If readers see Mỹ Documents as timely today, Nguyen hopes that it will become timeless.
“I wrote a book not so it would be read today, but to be enjoyed and interrogated decades from now. The goal of most novelists is the earnest hope that a story might not get stuck in the moment it was published, but endure for the years to come. If Mỹ Documents is timely today, I want it to be meaningful tomorrow,” he said, “That would make me stoked.”
