Where Vuong’s 2019 debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, often felt overwrought and too writerly, his latest is firmly grounded and perfectly tuned
Ocean Vuong’s second novel is as wide in scope as it is quiet and tender. Set in a blue-collar northeast American town characterised by copy-paste strip malls, the story follows nineteen-year-old Hai after he runs away from home. For all its preoccupations with war, poverty and addiction, the novel never succumbs to self-seriousness, swimming easily among currents of Obama-era pop-culture and occasional slapstick. In it, Vuong retrieves hope and faith from the realm of worn, dull cliches and renews them in kaleidoscopic detail.
The first moments for our protagonist, however, are grim. Hai (which, mirroring the author’s name, means ‘ocean’ in Vietnamese) meets Grazina, an eighty-two-year-old Lithuanian immigrant who fled the Soviet invasion of her hometown in 1944, when he is in a moment of desperation. Hai moves into the old woman’s house, which is stuffed with relics and ghosts of her late husband and now-grown children, and the two become fast friends and housemates. With that there are occasions when the novel teeters into the territory of a feel-good drama.
Hai has vague literary ambitions but dropped out of New York’s Pace University after just a few months of college. He isn’t able to explain to his single mum, who works at a nail salon in their town of East Gladness, somewhere near Hartford, Connecticut, that the cause was grief; his best friend, a boy she didn’t know existed, had died of an overdose. Unmoored, Hai goes looking for a job at the fast casual dining chain HomeMarket, hoping for an in through his estranged younger cousin, Sony (as in the Japanese electronics conglomerate), a winsome Civil War wonk with autism.
The HomeMarket crew is full of characters who seem ready-made for the big screen, including BJ (for Big Jean, pronounced the French way, of course), the six-foot-tall Caribbean-American manager who dreams of making it as a pro wrestler. These down-and-out addicts-with-hearts-of-gold belong in an asylum movie montage, romping through road trips and capers with unflagging affection for one another. In an early HomeMarket moment: “‘He can’t help it. It’s his thing. He’s acoustic.” BJ pointed at her own head and gave Hai a knowing look.’
But Vuong, who came to prominence via his poetry, handles his language with such specificity and mastery that the sweet stops short of the saccharine. Where his first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) often felt overwrought and too writerly, The Emperor of Gladness is firmly grounded and perfectly tuned (though it misses a few beats for 2009 anachronisms, like flat whites and NPCs).
It paints a portrait of a young gay man coming of age just before the advent of smart phones, when boredom and small-town desperation were actual gateways to greater self-destruction. Hai is just dust in the cracks of the American Dream, threatened over and over by darkness and his own addictions, and by the evils of corporate banality and imperial whims. Yet again and again he (and the reader) are saved from despair by light and to-the-gut hilarity. He and Grazina are crying together at one point: “‘(So) you’re –” she gestured at him, “a liggabit. Boy and boy, girl and girl. I see them in newspapers. Liggabit community.” “Oh – oh, you mean LGBT?” He wiped his eyes and let out a single disbelieving laugh.’
With its poetic morsels, ambivalent love for the rural northeast, and many-layered immigrant stories, The Emperor of Gladness may well be the first millennial Great American Novel.
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Jonathan Cape, £20 (hardcover)
