Brad Listi: I’d like to start by saying that I’m a man of questionable morality, prone to faulty logic, operatic self-pity, and annihilating guilt. I’m also profoundly ill-suited to judge anything, let alone art, with any kind of authority.

Brad Listi is the author of the novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder. and the founding editor of The Nervous Breakdown, an online culture magazine and literary community. He is also the host of Otherppl With Brad Listi, a weekly podcast featuring interviews with today’s leading writers. He lives in Los Angeles. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I interviewed Karolina Waclawiak and Lauren Groff on my podcast, Otherppl.”

My initial plan, devised before I even started reading, was to advance Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and kick Fran Ross’s Oreo to the curb because, well, Ross is dead, and Nguyen is still alive.

The logic here is simple: Ross won’t have her feelings hurt by losing. I can do the least amount of harm if I simply advance The Sympathizer, an elaborately drawn, tragicomic spy thriller, while letting Oreo, a bitingly funny, whip-smart cultural satire, fend for itself in the unforgiving wilds of the literary marketplace.

But that would be too easy.

The more that I considered my plan, the more I began to fear the ghost of Fran Ross and how she might curse me from The Great Beyond if I failed to give her a fair shake, because I’m the kind of atheist who believes in ghosts and curses. Oreo is the only novel Ross ever published. The book appeared in 1974, and then, for the most part, disappeared, and wouldn’t be resuscitated and properly appreciated until later, long after Ross’s death from cancer in 1985. She was only 50.

“Oreo” in Oreo is a racial designation and the nickname of Christine, a half-black, half-Jewish girl raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her mother, Helen, is mostly absentee and travels the country with a theatrical troupe. Her father is totally absentee, a white Jew named Samuel Schwartz who disappeared into Manhattan years ago. Oreo sets out in search of him. Her story, inspired by the Greek myth of Theseus and his journey into the Labyrinth, is a deft exploration of, among other things, patriarchy, race, ethnicity, and gender. Here, for example, is Ross describing Oreo’s “system of self-defense,” which she conjures in response to the often bitter realities of being a woman in the world:

She called her system of self-defense the Way of the Interstitial Thrust, or WIT … [and] developed a series of moves that made other methods of self-defense—jiu-jitsu, karate, kung fu, savage, judo, aikido, mikado, kikuyu, kendo, condo, and shlong—obsolete by incorporating and improving upon their most effective aspects … Whether he was big or small, fat or thin, well-built or spavined, Oreo could, when she was in a state of extreme concentration known as hwip-as, engage any opponent up to three times her size and whip his natural ass.

This is an outrageous and wise novel about the absurdity of identity, the bottomless quest for self. It paints a portrait that, in the context of the ’70s, was totally foreign to most readers, but which has become, thank goodness, in the intervening years, increasingly more familiar (though is sadly still alien to some). Another way of putting it: Oreo was, and in many ways remains, a good deal ahead of its time. I really enjoyed reading it and often found myself smiling as I went, but feel compelled to note that I never laughed out loud. I almost never laugh aloud while reading, but on the rare occasions that I do, I tend to feel really enthused, and also jealous, especially when the laughter is “wincing laughter,” as this is the experience I most crave from art. These are the books that I will often read a second, or even third time, and will recommend to friends, and so on. I should also confess that I often found myself lost as I read this novel, confused about characters and the details of Oreo’s family tree. Several times, I had to flip back to previous chapters to keep track of names and relations, and to reorient myself in the plot. This could be because the book is confusing and sloppily written, or else it could mean that I’m easily confused. The latter, let’s be honest, seems more likely.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, while covering vastly different terrain, shares many of Oreo’s thematic concerns. It, too, is a novel about identity and duality set in the 1970s, its anonymous narrator split in almost every conceivable way: a peasant born to a Vietnamese mother and a white French priest; who is a spy for the North, deeply embedded in the South; who is a Communist with an American education and friends on both sides of the line. In the aftermath of the war, he ends up in Los Angeles where, as a refugee, he continues his work as a spook, observing the diaspora and milking his boss, “the General,” for intelligence. And that’s just the start of it.

Certain sections of The Sympathizer felt over-long to me, and some of the jokes didn’t really land. The narrator’s voice, while consistent throughout, is almost unbelievably mannered, to the point where I kept imagining the book being written first in Vietnamese and then translated into English, which might, I told myself, at least to some degree, deliver this kind of effect. It later occurred to me that this might be exactly what Nguyen intended, as his narrator is Vietnamese and would almost certainly, in his confession, be writing in his native tongue, in which case the mannered-ness seems more impressive and, from a cross-cultural perspective, believable.

The Sympathizer is a sprawling, intricately plotted novel that dismantles, often with acid humor, many of the familiar Western tropes about Vietnamese culture and the war. At one point the narrator goes to the Philippines to work as an adviser on the set of a movie that is clearly modeled on Apocalypse Now (its director, “the Auteur,” an obvious stand-in for Francis Ford Coppola). And in one of the book’s better sequences, the narrator accompanies the General to a country club, where at the table of a famous author (the unsubtly named Richard Hedd) and some other local dignitaries, he delivers this cutting assessment:

As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could only go so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere … We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin, where our relatives read our reports with hilarity, confusion, and awe.

And speaking of confusion and awe, I now find myself saddled with the unenviable task of having to weigh these two fine books against one another, and, in accordance with the dictates of this hideous contest, pick a winner. Fran Ross, God rest your soul, I admire your fearless humor and obvious love of language and the world you made on the page, but in the end I’ve gotta give this one to Viet Thanh Nguyen and The Sympathizer, on the grounds that a) the man is still alive, and lives in my hometown of Los Angeles, and could feasibly come after me if I deny him the victory; and b) because his novel, grand in scope and steeped in history, seems like an unusually heavy lift. Hats off to both writers. And congratulations to The Sympathizer. It advances.