By Cameron Woodhead
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong.Credit:
FICTION
The Emperor of Gladness
Ocean Vuong
Jonathan Cape, $34.99
Ocean Vuong achieved fame as a poet before his acclaimed debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, andthere’s creative continuity in follow-up The Emperor of Gladness. Previously examined motifs undergo complex transformations so that it reads like the literary equivalent of a musical variation.
Autobiography is grist to the mill for Vuong. His mother fled Saigon for the US, via the Philippines, when he was an infant. He was raised in Connecticut among an extended family of Vietnamese refugees. He’s also openly gay. These experiences inspire but do not define his creative fiction, and if the vaunted lyricism of a particular style of American dreaming marks the opening of The Emperor of Gladness – a flashy choric invocation of a dead-end Connecticut town, its ghosts inviting suicidal 19-year-old Hai to escape by jumping off a bridge – it isn’t long before sublime cadence and melancholy grandeur yield to a different kind of song.
An old woman spies the boy in the rain, and roundly tells him: “You can’t die in front of my house, OK?” This is Grazina – a force to be reckoned with, having survived Hitler and Stalin in Lithuania during WWII, and now in a battle to preserve her independence against the onset of dementia. Hai moves in as an unofficial carer, to keep her out of a nursing home.
Grim doesn’t begin to cover their living conditions; the house is decrepit and built on a toxic contamination site, and Grazina can’t afford to feed them. So Hai lands a job (courtesy of his cousin Sony, named after the television manufacturer) at a budget restaurant chain.
As Hai’s friendship with Grazina grows, he bathes her, comforts her when decades-old war trauma resurfaces, and engages in role-playing historical battles with her to manage her sundowning. He reads Slaughterhouse Five and The Brothers Karamazov from her dead husband’s library and, alas, stumbles across an unused bottle of serious painkillers … dire news for someone recovering from opioid addiction.
Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong.Credit: NYT
At work, Hai rocks up to every shift pinned to cope with the drudgery. Genuine camaraderie and unlikely dignity are found among the motley crew who work there, despite some extreme weirdness. Long-serving Maureen evades grief in conspiracist thinking – she believes lizard men control the world, she speaks like a drag queen, and she harbours a Star Wars obsession. Manager BJ conducts herself with an almost martial pride – giving inspirational speeches, slipping cake mix into the cornbread to make it more appealing, and training to achieve her dream of making it on the commercial wrestling stage.
Dreams are thwarted in this place – except perhaps for Sony; his unaffected desires, whether in crafting origami penguins or in his encyclopedic knowledge of the American Civil War, throw into sharp relief the miseries inflicted on other characters by unattainable ones.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was composed through a series of letters to someone who can’t read. This novel might just be a novel composed to give voice to a writer who cannot write. Hai’s addiction and incapacity stem from two sources: the peculiar pressure on a refugee child to rise from the ashes of their parents’ trauma, and the tragedy of losing a first love to suicide.
Does the novel stray into misery porn? Vuong does lay bare the abjectness of conditions facing the lower working class, not to mention the lumpenproletariat, in the bleakest imaginable manner. Grazina winds up in a nursing home, after her bourgeois son intervenes with brittle pieties and outrage. And Hai himself doesn’t feel at home until he’s literally thrown himself into a dumpster, which is a hell of a way to end a novel.
But Vuong is too blazingly sincere a writer for heavy-handedness to overshadow the book’s virtues. From overheard dialogue to subversive set-pieces repeating the tragedies of US history as farce, the novel explores what the have-nots do have in contemporary America, and if its seriousness can lead to moments of unintentional camp, well, as Susan Sontag noted, that’s the highest form of it.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.