In 2019, Ocean Vuong, an award-winning Vietnamese American poet, stunned readers with his first novel. “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” was a brutal and tender coming-of-age story about surviving the aftermath of political and domestic trauma, written in the form of a son’s letter to his illiterate mother. In his unremittingly gorgeous second novel, “The Emperor of Gladness,” Vuong again deftly walks a tightrope between despair and hope, heartache and love.
For Vuong, fiction is a moral instrument, and he plays it with the practiced hand of a virtuoso. At the heart of his new novel is a bookish 19-year-old Vietnamese American “in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light.”
We meet Hai at a low point. Freshly out of drug rehab, he feels he’s “run out of paths to take, out of ways to salvage his failures.” He doesn’t want to further disappoint his mother – a hardworking manicurist who thinks he’s studying medicine – and so he reasons, from atop a bridge, that there’s no shame “in losing yourself to something as natural as gravity.”
Why We Wrote This
Compassion and kindness motivate the actions of a 19-year-old man, whose troubled life is briefly redeemed by the care he gives an older woman. Our reviewer was captivated by the evocative writing and moved by the characters’ plights.
Hai finds a measure of relief in unexpected bonds forged with strangers, who become like family.
The first is with Grazina Vitkus, an 80-something World War II refugee from Lithuania who talks him down from the ledge and offers him shelter in her decrepit riverside house. Grazina misinterprets his name and calls him Labas, which is Lithuanian for “hello.” Hai later tells her that his name means “sea” in Vietnamese, which of course evokes the author’s first name, Ocean.
Hai steps easily into a caregiving role: He picks up Grazina’s groceries (including her favorite frozen Salisbury steak dinners); he administers her medications for her progressive dementia; he bathes her. When Grazina awakens with night terrors that carry her back to her teens in Lithuania in 1944, which was under siege from both Nazis and Soviets, Hai joins her in her dreamworld – a trick he learned while caring for his grandmother who had schizophrenia. Fueled by what little he knows about the war from popular culture, he pretends to be an American infantryman named Sergeant Pepper who guides her to safety. He anchors her in 2009 by repeatedly asking who the president is.
Hai finds another family in his co-workers at HomeMarket, the fast food restaurant where the question of the hour, of every hour, is “How can I help you?” Vuong’s sympathetic portraits of this crew, each with their own problems – medical debts, a sister in rehab, a mother in prison – recall the big-box store workers in Adelle Waldman’s “Help Wanted.” Here, too, people who barely eke a living from their minimum-wage jobs band together to help each other, often by accompanying their co-workers on crazy crusades.
“The Emperor of Gladness” is set in fictional East Gladness, Connecticut, 12 miles outside of Hartford. Vuong vividly evokes the beauty of the depressed, post-industrial town in scene-setting descriptions that channel Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” His third-person narrator tells us: “Our town is raised up from a scab of land along a river in New England.” Earlier, the narrator says, “Mornings, the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal.” He describes a “dried-up brook whose memory of water never reached this century,” and a wooden sign “rubbed to braille by wind.” And he urges us to “Look how the birches, blackened all night by starlings, shatter when dawn’s first sparks touch their beaks.”
We’re told that no one stops in East Gladness, but readers will be stopped in their tracks by Vuong’s imagery: “We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds, our faces mangled by wind and speed like castaway Munch paintings,” he writes. “We live on the edges but die in the heart of the state. We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.”
I had to read these pages several times before I was ready to move on.
But Vuong keeps his book flowing, like the river, like the traffic. There’s heartache aplenty, and a troubling ending – but also, amazingly, hijinks and humor, including Grazina’s belated realization that Hai is what she calls a “liggabit” – LGBT!
But it’s the moments of tenderness you’ll remember, such as when Hai accompanies his Civil War-obsessed younger cousin, Sony, to therapy appointments and on prison visits to see his mother. Or when, after one of Grazina’s nightmares, “[Hai] reached over, across the half century between them, and cleared the stray hairs from her damp face.”
Life lessons begin with the novel’s first line: “The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.” Grazina has another idea: “To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all.” Vuong borrows the last line from Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov” – one of the worn paperbacks Hai picks up in Grazina’s basement – to bring home his point: “But don’t be afraid of life,” Hai’s mother tells her drug-addled, dissembling son. “Life is good when you do good things for each other.”
