OCEAN VUONG’S 2016 DEBUT POETRY COLLECTION, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, received a rave review from Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times Book Review, then the most important tastemaker in contemporary American literature. Rare enough for any book of poetry to receive critical attention from the NYTBR, but a debut collection? It was a sign of things to come—awards, accolades, and fellowships soon followed. Vuong’s 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous brought a thunderclap of acclaim and a massive commercial success, beaming Vuong to the forefront of his literary generation, so much so that his name is shorthand for certain attitudes and styles.
Above all, Vuong is famous and infamous for lyric excess of a sentimental kind. Night Sky with Exit Wounds and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous refashioned “diaspora writing” for a new era in proclaiming an ethic that eschewed the notion of universality and legibility in favor of the inarticulacy of the margin and the revel of the slum. His books center on the immigrant experience, particularly the experience of being Vietnamese and working class in New England. They deal with, yes, trauma, and turn on the usual big themes: family, love, identity, war, loss. History as it presents itself in Vuong’s work is always a ghost, a specter whose presence flickers and passes in shades across shut windows. Outside, but near enough to haunt. Most of all, his work is about mothers. Specifically, what we owe our mothers, what our mothers owe us, what war and pain can do to a mother, what that mother then can do to us, and on and on. The work is both hyperlocal (to a family usually comprising two or three women, a mother and grandmother, maybe an aunt, and a queer son) and strangely evacuated of particularity. He uses humble objects (bottles, glasses, knives, guns, tabletops, sheets, trucks, rust, barns, rope, tractors) to intensely emotional ends to portray the melodrama of unruly lives and raw passion. His willingness to be excessive, purple, and indeed his desire for excess has culminated in a broad appeal. His approach has also drawn accusations of catering to the white gaze and self-fetishization for the sake of careerist ambitions.
The first two books could be read as meditations on our mothers’ meditations—and on the griefs we have inherited from those mothers. Vuong’s follow-up collection of poetry, Time Is a Mother, changes the theme. It is a book about grief, specifically Vuong’s grief over his mother’s death, and also the grief of watching the Covid pandemic unfold. The book is more ambitious in form and scale, though it is less intense than Exit Wounds and more coherent than On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It is less everything than those first two books, but that is no great surprise. It takes you your whole life to write your first book or books. You use it all up. No wonder it burns so hot and so bright. What comes next is often less urgent, more reflective, or more ambitious in form and scope.
Vuong’s second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, spans several months in the fictional Connecticut town of East Gladness, a place “raised up from a scab of land along a river in New England.” The novel’s first chapter serves as an extended introduction to East Gladness in the epic mode, starting with its elemental geological history (“When the prehistoric glaciers melted, the valley became a world-sized lake, and when that dried up it left a silvery trickle along the basin called the Connecticut: Algonquin for ‘long tidal river.’ The sediment here is rich with every particle welcoming to life”) and extending to the awkward outcasts reading in the bleachers while a football game unfolds below them. Look at how the narrator travels across the different layers and levels of social experience, from they to you, from the collective to the individual and back out again:
It’s a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfathers’ trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they’re thirtysomething and the Walmart hasn’t changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces. It’s where fathers in blue jeans flecked with wood stain stand at the edges of football fields, watching their sons steam in the reddened dawn, one hand in their pocket, the other gripping a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts. They could be statues for what it means to wait for a boy to crush himself into manhood. And each morning you’d sit on the frost-dusted bleachers, a worn copy of To the Lighthouse on your lap, and watch the players on the field, blue tomahawks shivering on their jerseys, their plastic pads crackling in the mist. And when you’d turn the page it would slip right off the binding, flutter through the field, gathering inky blotches through the wet grass until it tangles between the boys’ legs and disintegrates under a pair of black cleats. The words gone to ground. That town.
Here is a narrator who tells us how people are, how they think, how they live, a narrator who leans forward and explains, floats a theory now and then, and attempts to integrate the shaggy procession of images and descriptions into a totality or at least into a meaningful structure. It’s a welcome reprieve from the current mode of contemporary narrators who flee from any sort of explanatory responsibility and whose jobs seem to be to obscure rather than to generate meaning through the integration of experiences. This is not to say that Vuong’s narrator is objective or pretends to be objective, but only to say that I enjoy a narrator who occasionally, like a narrator from Wharton or James, pauses to describe the kinds of guys who exist.
Toward the end of the chapter, we watch from a distance as a boy, nineteen, makes his way to a bridge. The narrator tells us that this boy intends to jump. It is also raining, because this is an Ocean Vuong novel and so it must be raining during a suicide attempt, pathetic fallacy be damned. Vuong writes, “I need you to understand, as black water churned like chemically softened granite below, the lights coming on one by one along the cobalt banks, that the boy belonged to a cherished portion of this world as he glanced over his shoulder and saw the phone lines sagging with crows resigned to dusk and the red water tower in the distance announcing us—East Gladness—in faded white paint, before he turned from this place, swung one leg over the rail and decided, like a good son, to jump.”
One wonders about that I. Who is this narrator telling the story? We later discover that “the boy” used to harbor literary ambitions before life got in the way. This invites us to imagine that the novel might be the story that the boy, having grown up and gotten past the events of the novel, has always wanted to write about this particular time in his life. Yet, the I comes through so sparingly throughout the novel and the boy, whose name we discover is Hai, remains at such a fixed distance from the narrator that if this is the book that the boy, Hai, has grown up to write, as the narrator, then why the lack of insight into his character? Into his motives? The point of a first-person retrospective narrator is to glean meaning through the telling. Whatever meaning this narrator acquires through the telling, they keep to themselves. Rather, it seems as though their function for telling is to put the characters and the events of their lives on display for a reader. As if to say, see how it really was back then? But toward what end? So is this Hai? If so, why is this the story he tells? And why separate himself, the I of the narrator, from the boy who experienced those events? Why does he loom Godlike over the proceedings, disguising himself, anonymizing and distancing through “they” and “you” and “I” and “he” and “the boy”?
I also wonder about the syntax of that sentence, particularly the repetition of as, which creates two clauses that we could ignore. The thrust of the sentence could be read as: I need you to understand that the boy belonged to a cherished portion of this world. There is interest there, for me, anyway, because this could mean life in general, the world in general, as in existence in general. Or it could mean something more specific or local, as in East Gladness, and the sentence could mean that the boy in question belongs to a cherished portion of East Gladness, there being particular people within this community who care about him. Both are plausible, and so they sit nested inside of each other, which is how effective symbolic resonance is typically mediated to a reader. But that’s not how it was written. It was written with two as clausestucked in there. And so, Vuong shifts the importance from the ambiguity contained within the word this to the simultaneity of the description of the world below and what the boy sees over his shoulder. There is something unwieldy in this construction, something nonsensical: Why would you insert the second as clause after “cherished portion of the world”? It actually makes no sense.
This is a good place to discuss point of view in The Emperor of Gladness. Perhaps it is dry, technical, and petty, but point of view matters a great deal to me as a reader. Point of view describes the organizing intelligence of a story. It controls the time signature, the outlay of information, the mode of telling, the mediation of backstory, the integration of event and description into experience, which itself compounds into meaning. Point of view isn’t just first, second, or third person. It’s also verb tense. It’s whether something is experiential or summarized. It’s whether or not a story is retrospective. Whether it’s told focalized through this character or that other character. It controls what feels right in a story versus what feels extraneous or improper.
The point of view in The Emperor of Gladness is unstable in a way that, pardon me, feels inappropriate. Take the first chapter, which I’ve just praised. Why does the narrator switch to an I? Or the novel in general: Why are some passages in the past tense and others the present tense? Are the present tense passages meant to be memories or dreams or both? Is the story retrospective? Is it the boy on the bridge telling us the story from many years later? Is this a story focalized through the boy? Certainly at times, we hang close to Hai, funneling observations and insights through the tight scrim of his voice. At other times, the novel sheds this limitation and attains a lyric intensity that sounds more like the Vuong of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in its sonorous profundity. Which loops us back around to the question of the narrator and who is telling us this story. Does it flow from an I and is that I Ocean Vuong or is that I Hai, the boy on the bridge at the start of the novel?
Naturally, some will say that the Western tradition of the realist novel as it descends from Henry James with its single, controlling point of view is an outmoded and outdated notion that is itself a refutation of the novel’s early profligacy with respect to style of narration. And that a looser, messier, even seemingly incoherent set of choices with respect to point of view comes closer to the experience of consciousness, etc., something, something, non-Western narrative traditions, whatever, OK. But the questions I always return to are: Does the technique make the book better? Does it add something? In this case, I would say the violations in point of view just felt random and distracting and underattended to. But let us return to the plot.
The boy on the bridge is Hai, and he is fresh from a stint at rehab, and fresher still from a fight with his mother. Just before he can jump from the bridge, he is stopped by Grazina, a Lithuanian octogenarian suffering from dementia. After some crisp banter, Grazina invites Hai in out of the rain, literally and also metaphorically. Hai reveals that he’s on the outs with his mother (she currently thinks he is in Boston for medical school) and therefore has nowhere to go. Grazina reveals that she’s on a waitlist for a home care aide and needs someone to take up these duties. She offers Hai the job in exchange for a place to stay until he gets on his feet. He accepts, and the two enter into a kind of folie à deux.
It is easy to draw a line from As I Lay Dying to The Emperor of Gladness, and in the hands of Faulkner descendants like Marilynne Robinson and Paul Harding, the drama and comedy of the relationship between Hai, a recovering addict, and Grazina, the aging woman whose memory flickers and glitches, with all of its familial overtones and dissonances, would have been totally sufficient for a novel. But Vuong did not become one of the most famous writers on Earth by knowing or heeding what is sufficient. His fiction is more cleaver than scalpel. So we don’t just get a novel about this relationship between Hai and Grazina, but also a novel about Hai’s working life as he takes a job at a fast-casual restaurant called HomeMarket, where Vuong introduces us to a really wonderful cohort of characters. The manager BJ is a six foot four black woman who dabbles in both music production and amateur wrestling. There’s Sony, Hai’s cousin, a neurodivergent young man whose special interest is the Civil War. There’s Wayne, the grill guy, who drinks from a pistol flask. Maureen is a delightfully salty older woman who knows how to work her gifts. Completing the group is Russia, a teen who works the drive-thru.
The Emperor of Gladness splits, as life splits, between the domestic life of Grazina’s house and the working life centered on HomeMarket. The novel is smart about the ways that restaurants package and sell back to us the illusion of domestic comfort without labor. The labor, of course, has been displaced to the unseen and sweating masses in the back who work for minimum wage for hours upon hours. As BJ explains to Hai during a tour of HomeMarket, “They’re walking into Thanksgiving. Except in here there’s no fucked‑up relatives, no nasty dried-ass turkey, no cooking or basting or cutting. Hell, not even the shitty decor and moldy pumpkins, none of those stupid cone baskets with squash in them for no reason. This is all about home cooking. . . . What we give to America is the taste of the holidays without the pain of the holidays. When people come in here, we give them the sensation of home.” This speech also demonstrates how canny the novel is about the ways that companies sell to their workers the illusion of family and home because here is BJ delivering a rousing, inspiring mission statement. Giving her crew, her family, a sense of purpose, pride, direction. They aren’t just throwing their lives away on a shift. They are providing America with “the taste of the holidays without the pain of the holidays.” In this way, the workplace becomes an illusion within an illusion, and the exploitation of the worker is made total as their loyalty to the “found family” of coworkers is exploited to serve the needs of the business.
Vuong does not do this without irony. Early on in his time at HomeMarket, Hai sees beneath BJ’s soaring rhetoric:
After you gather the sacks, you head out back to the instaboiler, which is a huge cauldron of hot water with two hooks suspended above it. You clip a bag to each metal hook, and as they sway like concrete slabs you pull a lever to lower the bags into the boiling water, which is perfectly timed to melt the contents into “kitchen freshness.” By the time you pull them out, cut open the top, and pour the contents into a metal loaf pan, the mashed potatoes are so luscious and fragrant with garlic, bits of parsley so miraculously verdant, you’d never guess it was reheated.
Here is an example of what makes Vuong good. He doesn’t come out and say, “Food at an industrial scale is kind of antithetical to the illusion of home cooking that we sell.” Instead he slides these little echoes of the industrial process into the description. For one thing, this litany doubles as a set of directions, you do this, you do that, you do this, taking out the earlier romanticism and replacing it with the dull exactness of an algorithm. Then there is the diction, humble as it is: “concrete slabs” and “contents” rather than “food” or “potatoes.” It’s all clips and bags, levers, and hooks. It’s a subtle thing, but it totally pays off with this line that’s almost miraculous in its understatement: “HomeMarket was not so much a restaurant as a giant microwave.” The microwave is in fact a charged term within the world of HomeMarket. BJ makes quite the show of HomeMarket not possessing a microwave, unlike some other fast-casual restaurants. I could go on about the microwave—it’s the best symbol in the whole book because it operates as all good symbols should, as a literal fact within the world of the story that acquires a symbolic or spiritual life as the novel progresses.
Vuong further stretches the theme of “found family” and troubles it with the transactional nature of capitalism in the context of Grazina’s home, where Hai plays both caretaker and surrogate grandson. He dishes out Grazina’s pills, bathes and clothes her and feeds her. When she begins to suffer greater lapses of memory and lucidity, he comforts her by entering into her delusions. He assumes a military persona of Sgt. Pepper, and the two stage war games across the shattered terrain of Grazina’s memory. One of the pleasures of The Emperor of Gladness is watching Hai try to improvise during these games. The two eventually form a history, a mythos, of their own:
“Your family, including your brother, is safe. They have already been moved to evacuation zone C, a camp for displaced persons outside of—” He knew nothing, he realized, of World War Two, of Europe, the world. “Outside of Gettysburg.” Sony had rambled on about the Civil War during their shifts at HomeMarket, most of which Hai was able to tune out. But at least it was a battle. It was a war, something.
“Gettysburg?” Grazina’s eyes flickered, trying to locate the village in her mental map. She nodded, her face pinched. “German, yes? Are we still in Germany?”
“I’m afraid so, ma’am.” He gritted his teeth and gathered himself. “It’s a small village. Occupied to store supplies for our next offensive on Hitler’s front.”
“Hitler!” she cut him off, then considered him with one eye, her way, he would learn, of measuring character. “Don’t forget Stalin, Mr. Pepper,” she said coldly. “There is more than one devil these days.”
Hai is not qualified in any real sense to be acting as a home care aide. He could, very easily, fuck up and kill this lady. One gets the sense that he takes the job in part because he has nowhere else to go. And we also get the sense that she offers him the job because she knows this and needs something from him—his youth, yes, but also the sharpness of his mind. So, is she taking advantage of him? Or is he taking advantage of her? Or are they, simply, two people in need who have come, as so many people do, to a mutually beneficial arrangement that is problematic only when viewed through cynical or transactional logic? It occurs to me that this job usually has boundaries and standards in place to prevent or at least discourage slippages between the professionalized and medicalized aspect of caretaking and what might be considered the personal or the familial aspect of caretaking. The joke of course is that these boundaries are all lies, and that there is no caretaking that is not at least partly personal, and that the personal aspect of it doesn’t prevent it from being labor.
There is something moving about the image of these two people, a Vietnamese-American teenager and a Lithuanian octogenarian, both refugees (Hai’s family fled Vietnam and Grazina’s family fled Lithuania during World War II) whose personal histories have each in different ways at different times been disfigured by war and displacement, finding each other in a messy, dark house in Connecticut of all places, and venturing into an imaginary past. Even as Vuong elaborates the imaginary war game that Grazina and Hai undertake, complete with maneuvers and operations and shooting drills, he doesn’t overplay his hand by making more of it than his characters are likely to. The symbolic aspect then is free to emerge on its own without over-articulation on Vuong’s part. This makes the relationship feel real to us, because it is not treated first and foremost as a metaphor. Rather, it is first literal and then figurative.
But this is an Ocean Vuong novel—we are never far from excess. In one of the novel’s tackiest sequences, we are treated to some dignity porn in which a rude customer demeans a homeless woman named Cookie, who is sitting in the dining room of HomeMarket:
“You smell like shit,” he shouted at a woman sitting behind him. He had stood up from his meal to confront her. But the woman didn’t move. Just sat there staring at one of Sony’s origami penguins on the table. It took Hai a minute to realize she was a regular who went by Cookie. She’d come in once a week just about, asking for a cup of hot water and permission to use the rest‑room, which the staff allowed, figuring she was homeless.
The man turned to BJ, his face pink as ham and his wispy, thin hair coming off his head like cartoon steam. “How can you let someone like this in your business? It’s terrible for your customers. She smells like literal shit.” Hai had the sudden urge to throw a corn bread at him. You get protective of your regulars, even if they don’t buy anything. The woman was scrunched over in her seat, an oily brown coat draped over her shoulders with a matted ponytail poking out the back collar.
I would like to pause here to note the glitch in the point of view. “You get protective of your regulars, even if they don’t buy anything” is phrased like a generalization, which often takes the simple present tense, but the phrase could be attributed to Hai, as in a thought he was having about his own behavior in that precise moment. This is ambiguous at best, but also an example of an intrusion by the narrator that further muddies matters. Imagine, for a moment, if it had been written with parallel tenses, “Hai had the sudden urge to throw a corn bread at him. You got protective of your regulars, even if they didn’t buy anything.” Then the thought in the second sentence would be tucked inside of the field of action rather than floating outside of it. The observation would attach to Hai rather than to the narrator. By attaching the thought to the narrator, Vuong directs the reader’s attention out of the story and away from the action.
Anyway, back to the scene. The man demands to know why they won’t throw Cookie out even if he is paying and she isn’t, and Cookie eventually replies:
“You can’t hurt me. You can’t never hurt me. I’ve been through much worse than being yelled at,” she said in a drawn-out monotone, staring at her scabbed knuckles. The guy shook his head and walked out. He tried to slam the door, but it had pressure-resistant hinges, so it just shut behind him with a slow, tepid whoosh.
Now, most writers would have stopped there. They might have trusted that they had done their work. After all, Cookie is named, and the man isn’t. Cookie’s status as a regular, as a member of the HomeMarket Tribe, grants her a status that the man, being a mere paying customer, could not supplant. Such a relation is displayed in the very syntax and grammar of the scene. It works, despite some questionable details (there is a prurient delight in the description of Cookie’s hair and odor that feels a little . . . weird).
Again, this is an Ocean Vuong novel. What follows is a sequence that made me put the book down and say, out loud in my apartment and later online, “Millennials are not OK.”
Vuong writes:
The homeless woman was sitting on the toilet with the lid still down, her head nodding back against a giant framed close‑up of corn bread. There was an empty rig on the floor by her feet. Blood ran down her veined arms, phone cord wrapped tight around her bicep. BJ covered her nose and yelled for somebody to call 911. Wayne tried to get the woman down on the floor so she wouldn’t fall and knock her head. Her mouth was open like a Scream mask. On the woman’s thin, sun-wrinkled wrist was a bracelet made of lettered white beads strung with hemp, which spelled out MY BROTHER’S KEEPER.
Wayne asked Hai to grab one of her arms, and they started dragging her down the hall so the medics could get to her faster, BJ on the phone shouting directions to the dispatch. When they passed one of the counters, Wayne, trying to grab the ledge for support, accidentally pulled down a giant bucket of cheese sauce that was set out to cool, and the whole thing dumped on their heads. The cheese sauce, meant for pouring over the mac and cheese for extra creaminess after defrosting, went right into the woman’s opened mouth. Luckily, it was lukewarm and didn’t burn. Wayne, his face and hair plastered, started frantically scooping out the yellow goo from her mouth. “Fuck,” he said, wiping cheese off her eyelids. “What the fuck is happening?”
This all unfolds with such attention to detail to the props that it feels more like a TikTok skit than a scene in a novel. The phone cord on her wrist. The blood on her veiny arms. The rig on the floor. The “extra creaminess” and the fact that it’s her open mouth. I would also like to point out that Cookie has once again become “the homeless woman,” as if her suffering has turned her into just another object in the mise-en-scène. It’s a kind of total dehumanization right down to the storytelling grammar. I mean, come on. Come on.
When something good happens to a character in an Ocean Vuong novel, you tend to expect a quick and vicious reprisal. The Emperor of Gladness traffics in many such downbeat rituals of humiliation.
THERE’S A MOMENT WHEN GRAZINA, fresh from a brutal Christmas visit to her neglectful son and his family, strips and gets into a bathtub to wash off the scent of piss. As Hai attempts to comfort her, Grazina’s dentures fall out of her mouth into the dirty bathwater. Again, this occurs after a long sequence of watching Grazina’s grandchildren and daughter-in-law ridicule her, a sequence that is remarkable not for the cruelty of the characters but for the cruelty of the author.
When BJ, the manager of HomeMarket, is introduced, Vuong spends so long lovingly telling us about her dreams, her ambitions, her hopes for herself, that I knew immediately he would not rest until he had totally stripped those hopes from her. After her debut as an amateur wrestler flops in terrific fashion, she thinks a club promoter is offering her representation only to find out that he thinks she wants to buy weed. Then she is dressed down twice by the regional manager in front of everyone.
During one of their many nighttime war games, Grazina gives Hai $4,000, which happens to be enough money to bail his aunt, Sony’s mom, out of jail. They ride over to the bail bondsman, and just as Hai is about to place both wads of cash on the counter, he is overcome by a sense of guilt. “Hai shut his eyes until the sound of the ticking radio in the corner and the clerk’s wheezing dissolved, and through the shadow under his lids, Grazina’s head swam up to him, open and innocent as a lily, and he saw his own face reflected in her wide glasses.” Hai balks and only puts up half the money, bringing their total to just under $5,000. His aunt will have to stay locked up during the holidays. As I read this scene, it seemed remarkable to me that Sony would not have asked to count the money himself. He’s the one who’s determined to get his mom out of jail. He’s the one who’s accustomed to family let-downs and people not coming through. And he’s not going to count the money? With his own hands? But if he had counted the money, that would have deprived the novel of another opportunity to humiliate Hai and to milk reader sympathy.
The closest The Emperor of Gladness comes to an actual moment of grace occurs during the novel’s best sequence, when Hai and his coworkers end up at a hog-butchering operation. There, many of the novel’s ideas about precarity, family, and labor are made concrete and attain an intense symbolic resonance. The writing here grows loose and allows Vuong to relax into one of his strengths. He is good at casual materiality and conjuring the surface details of rooms and spaces.
Over the course of the hard, brutal day, Hai watches animals die, deflects his mother’s concerns over the phone, and comes close to a breaking point, culminating in a gorgeous passage:
He wondered how far the hogs’ souls had traveled by now. He wondered if they’d ever catch up to the human dead, if there was even a difference between them. How silly, he thought, to believe souls go anywhere at all. Why should they? What if they just lay down like this pig here and decided enough was enough? What if the soul is just as tired as the body? Just as worn out from seeing its family get tricked into a tent with dog treats only to come out emptied, soon to be roasted by a political candidate who will spend 50 million dollars on a campaign she’d end up losing anyway? Where’s the soul in that?
It’s the hogs, as in Flannery O’Connor’s brilliant story “Revelation,” that emanate grace in this section. Hai’s attention to them, the active demands of the job he’s trying to do, the dual demands of his actual family and the found family of HomeMarket, all make for a vivid and particular substrate on which to graft notions of mercy, forgiveness, duty to our fellow creatures, and more. And it is the hog, that most humble of creatures, who reappears toward the end of the novel to return both Hai and the reader to the topic of grace.
But this marks an exception rather than a rule. More often the novel treats its characters like hogs to the slaughter. Why else does Vuong strip them again and again of their dignity, making them dance like rickety little puppets? The novel’s worldview is bleak beyond imagining, which itself is no great sin, but the mechanism of that bleakness seems particularly cruel. It feels somehow that the novel wants to convince us that these characters are living lives worth living and also that they’re fucking fools.
In interviews timed for the release of the novel, Vuong has expressed a desire to write about characters who fall outside the paradigm of progress. He wants to write about stuck people who work dead-end, annihilating jobs that will never permit them to rise out of material precarity. In short, he wants to write about the way that most people live. One senses that this novel is written to appear “unsentimental.” I find it very sentimental. In fact, I find it practically romantic about the prosaic facts of working-class life. Vuong resists turning everything into poetry as he did in his first novel, that’s true. But I would argue that the romantic or sentimental impulses have merely been camouflaged by the novel’s more prosaic language.
What I mean to say is that the physicality of the work and the griminess of Hai’s living conditions never fully transcend the level of detail—they don’t feel real to me. The unpleasantness of the characters’ lives is reduced to small symbols that feel like symbols. This is most glaring in the case of Grazina and her home. She is an old woman with dementia. When Hai is working his long shifts at HomeMarket, he doesn’t really seem to worry about her safety. Or cleaning her. Or feeding her. Who is doing all of this work while he is away at his job? Also, the house is a mess, which the novel does tell us, but it is possible to forget that the rooms these two are crawling through and around during their war games are in fact filled to the brim with clutter and hoarded materials. The sheer difficulty of living in an old person’s house that is filled with all of her history and also her husband’s borderline hoarding problem is undersold here, reduced to mentions of her ceramic owls (which later serve as grenades to fend off a social worker) and her husband’s disintegrating books. Grazina’s house feels like a fairy tale house. In the same way that HomeMarket feels like a fairy tale job. Both settings are introduced with a great deal of skill, but the novel does not deepen either as a world, and so they function more like backdrops.
This has to do with the novel’s worldview: the characters are not people, not really, so much as symbols to be shuffled around the page in service of the overriding idea that their lives are hard and no one must ever come out as a winner. It’s a weird paradox because Vuong seems wed to a kind of cruelty toward the characters at the same time that he seems to be incredibly protective of them. This puts Vuong somewhere between Flannery O’Connor and Hanya Yanagihara. O’Connor spares her characters nothing. The world is a strange place, a dark place, but in that darkness, there is a capacity to transcend. No matter what situation she puts her characters into, there is always the sky over them, beaming down warmth from a vast and incalculable distance. Even the hogs have the sun. Yanagihara’s cruelty is of a different nature entirely. Her characters suffer solely to validate her underlying supposition of a world lacking transcendence. Like O’Connor, Vuong believes in grace and transcendence. A soul. But there’s something that won’t let him fully commit to the bit, that lingering protectiveness over his characters. And so their hell is a cartoon hell, and the humor is mere pratfall comedy. It lacks the vicious cynicism of Yanagihara or the thoroughgoing faith of O’Connor.
But then it’s just as easy to say that these demands are inappropriate. One does not expect the Stars Hollow of Gilmore Girls to depict the same kind of reality as the Baltimore of The Wire. House of Cards, Scandal, and The West Wing all operate in different keys of melodrama and have differing relationships to the underlying reality of the Washington, DC, they depict. The Emperor of Gladness is not quite realism, but neither is any Great American Novel. In fact, the ambiguous relationship to realism is what makes this novel so deeply (vexingly, perhaps) American. What feels so wet and so excessive about The Emperor of Gladness is the very thing that makes Vuong’s work so massively appealing to his hundreds of thousands of readers. The Emperor of Gladness posits a dream about working-class life that falls apart under any sort of scrutiny or pressure. But I would say that for some readers, many readers, and at times even myself, a dream is no small thing and no meager gift.
Brandon Taylor’s novel Minor Black Figures will be published by Riverhead in October.