Gen Z adore this novelist – but he has run out of road

Telegraph

04-05-2025

The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong 's second novel, begins with an exhortation to observe. Look, it says: in the fictional town of East Gladness, in Connecticut, lawns are overrun, roadkill is abused, and veterans are miserably glued to their TVs. It's the kind of place through which Vuong is poised to explore the pivotal issues of late capitalism – class, labour, race – and from which the book's troubled protagonist Hai would like to escape forever. But as Hai prepares to jump to his death from a bridge, he's saved by an elderly Lithuanian woman, Grazina. The next morning, Grazina offers him a job as her carer, a ludicrously ill-advised decision that's only somewhat explained by her dementia. Hai, having lied to his mother that he's studying medicine in Boston, accepts. Thus the novel's stage is set for the life-changing and unlikely friendship that will follow.
Vuong's 2019 debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, featured an autobiographical narrator, Little Dog. Through letters, Vuong excavated a tragic family history that moved from wartime Vietnam to a nail salon in New England. The book enjoyed a rapturous commercial reception, particularly with younger readers, and was marked by an earnestness and sincerity also present in his two poetry collections. 'Vuong refuses to be embarrassed,' said Viet Thanh Nguyen, admiringly. Critics were more mixed, but the novel's success was enough to see Vuong catapulted to literary fame, and expectations have since been high for his sophomore outing.
Fans of Vuong will be satisfied by The Emperor of Gladness, but it's unlikely to convert any sceptics. The novel's characters and structure are new – here, Vuong uses the third person – but core subjects remain, and the prose is similarly heartfelt. Like Little Dog, Hai (an aspiring writer) is the son of Vietnamese immigrants who moved to New England and soon found themselves battling grief and deprivation.
Aside from Hai and Grazina, the book is populated by a cast of downtrodden characters, each with their own personal baggage. Everyone is short on cash; everyone has been ravaged by drugs and alcohol, particularly opioids, and the novel's concern with the systems that facilitate those addictions is one of its strengths. The citizens of East Gladness work numbing, exhausting gigs, propping up a system from which they cannot benefit. Vuong is skilled at invoking the spirit and geography of East Gladness, and the book is at its best when Hai is working at HomeMarket, shooting the breeze with his motley crew of coworkers. In these moments, there's a sense of ease that I wished had been sustained.
Elsewhere, readers are asked to suspend their disbelief. Grazina's dementia forces her backwards into the shadow of her war-torn youth; Hai spends a good portion of the novel calling himself 'Sgt. Pepper' and acting out with Grazina the violent geopolitical conflicts of the Second World War. When Hai goes to rehab, he finds the same Mary Oliver quote – 'what will you do with your one wild and precious life' – pinned on every wall. There's an actual written rendition of 'The Parting Glass' towards the end, warbled tearfully by one of Hai's friends. Vuong is a skilled writer, but not a subtle one. In his work, it's as though the world can, and should, be constantly mined for sentiment.
This can be exhausting. 'You tried to locate yourself inside an immeasurable universe,' Hai tells Grazina. 'And no one knows where you are and you feel, for a tiny second, that you have no parents, that they never existed at all, which is impossible and shameful to love, but I did.' This declaration is shortly followed by: 'the superpower of being young is that you're closest to being nothing – which is also the same as being very old.' Barely a paragraph later: 'Somebody goes ahead and dies and all of a sudden you become a box for them, he thought, you store these things that no one has ever seen and you go on living like that, your head a coffin to keep memories of the dead alive.'
Each page contains some kind of epiphany that seems designed to have been underlined. Vuong allows for no breathing room between such breathless proclamations, and the reader is barely able to react emotionally before another is foisted upon them. Ultimately, the effect is claustrophobic. By the closing metaphor, I couldn't help wishing that Vuong had stepped back a little – and let the dingy, intriguing ecosystem of East Gladness speak for itself.