Book Review: Ocean Vuong takes existentialism to deeply intimate level in 'The Emperor of Gladness'
Hai is 19 and suicidal. Grazina is 81 and living alone with dementia. So when she strikes a deal to house him so they can keep each other company in exchange for his help as a kind of unofficial live-in nurse, this could spell their mutual salvation or destruction.
Ocean Vuong's new novel follows Hai as he takes care of Grazina and works in a fast-casual restaurant to help support them. Told in moments, 'The Emperor of Gladness' takes existentialism to a deeply intimate level, leaving the reader to contemplate what it is to live in a messy, complicated world of wars, addiction, class struggles and good people looking for second chances. The novel was immediately named Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick.
The author draws heavily on his own life — from Hai's family fleeing the Vietnam War to their jobs in the service industry that allow them to scrape by — so 'The Emperor of Gladness' is only a few degrees away from a memoir. And while it's told in prose, Vuong's penchant for poetry shows in patches of colorful, visceral language strewn with metaphors that run through the whole book, all the way back to its title.
The novel opens with a movie-like sweep through East Gladness, a tiny town outside of Hartford, Connecticut. The omniscient narrator zooms in on various scenes of decay and neglect until we land on Hai, at possibly his lowest point.
There's not so much a plot as a gathering of people and experiences. We piece together the characters' stories the way you would with real people in real life; through snippets that build atop each other until you can patch together a narrative of the relationships that left the biggest scars and the events that had profound impacts. Vuong achieves more by writing beside his characters than one would by writing a straightforward story about them.
True and gritty, 'The Emperor of Gladness' is almost voyeuristic in how it looks into the most intimate and human moments of people's lives, reflecting back on the reader and leaving plenty to ponder.
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Los Angeles Times
16 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
The week's bestselling books, June 8
1. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press: $30) An unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond. 2. Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown & Co.: $30) The bestselling crime writer returns with a new cop on a mission, this time on Catalina Island. 3. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (Berkley: $29) Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of an heiress. 4. Never Flinch by Stephen King (Scribner: $32) Holly Gibney is back on the case, this time facing both a serial killer and a stalker. 5. My Friends by Fredrik Backman (Atria Books: $30) The bond between a group of teens 25 years earlier has a powerful effect on a budding artist. 6. Spent by Alison Bechdel (Mariner Books: $32) The bestselling writer's latest comic novel takes on capitalism and consumption. 7. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.' 8. Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf: $30) Two Floridians are plunged into a mystery involving dark money and darker motives. 9. My Name Is Emilia del Valle by Isabel Allende (Ballantine Books: $30) A young writer in the late 1800s travels to South America to uncover the truth about her father. 10. Audition by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead Books: $28) An accomplished actor grapples with the varied roles she plays in her personal life. … 1. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins (Hay House: $30) How to stop wasting energy on things you can't control. 2. Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Press: $32) Inside President Biden's doomed decision to run for reelection and the hiding of his serious decline by his inner circle. 3. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $30) A call to renew a politics of plenty and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life. 4. The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad (Random House: $30) A guide to the art of journaling, with contributions from Jon Batiste, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem and others. 5. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer on how to be a creative person. 6. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (Knopf: $28) Reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its fundamental values. 7. Steve Martin Writes the Written Word by Steve Martin (Grand Central Publishing: $30) A collection of greatest hits from the beloved actor and comedian. 8. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow (Penguin Press: $45) The Pulitzer-winning biographer explores the life of the celebrated American writer. 9. Notes to John by Joan Didion (Knopf: $32) Diary entries from the famed writer's journal. 10. Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane (W. W. Norton & Co.: $32) The naturalist explores rivers as living beings whose fate is tied with our own. … 1. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $19) 2. Problematic Summer Romance by Ali Hazelwood (Berkley: $20) 3. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $20) 4. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press: $17) 5. Sandwich by Catherine Newman (Harper Perennial: $19) 6. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Vintage: $18) 7. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster: $19) 8. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books: $17) 9. One Golden Summer by Carley Fortune (Berkley: $19) 10. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury … 1. On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder (Crown: $12) 2. The Wager by David Grann (Vintage: $21) 3. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigee: $20) 4. All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley (Simon & Schuster: $19) 5. Cultish by Amanda Montell (Harper Perennial: $20) 6. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz (Amber-Allen: $13) 7. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17) 8. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18) 9. The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (Penguin: $19) 10. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $36)
Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
Alice Notley, poet celebrated for ‘restless reinvention,' dies at 79
Ms. Notley took traditional forms of poetry such as villanelles and sonnets and laced them with experimental language that fluctuated between vernacular speech and dense lyricism. She also created pictorial poetry, or calligrams, in which she contorted words into fantastical shapes. In her 2020 collection, 'For the Ride,' one calligram took the form of a winged coyote. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'The signature of her work is a restless reinvention and a distrust of groupthink that remains true to her forebear's directive: to not give a damn,' David S. Wallace wrote in The New Yorker in 2020. Advertisement As Ms. Notley herself said in a 2010 essay, 'It's necessary to maintain a state of disobedience against ... everything.' She wrote without restraint, saying that she never edited or revised her work. And she largely shunned academia; poetry, she said in a 2009 interview with The Kenyon Review, 'should feel hugely uncomfortable in the academy.' Advertisement Though often identified as a key figure in the second generation of the New York School of poets -- alongside Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Ted Berrigan, who became her first husband -- Ms. Notley shirked the labels critics gave her: feminist, expatriate, avant-garde provocateur. 'Each of these labels sheds a little light on Notley's work, but it's the fact of their sheer number that's most illuminating,' the poet Joel Brouwer wrote of her 2007 collection, 'In the Pines,' in The New York Times Book Review. 'This is a poet who persistently exceeds, or eludes, the sum of her associations.' Padgett praised Ms. Notley for her 'vastness of mind.' 'Alice's main influence was herself and her interior life,' he said in an interview, 'and by interior life, I mean both her conscious waking thinking and her dream life, especially.' Ms. Notley realized early in her career that, as she wrote in a 2022 essay for the website Literary Hub, her 'dreaming self was better at some aspects of poetry writing than I, awake, was.' Her dreamlike style lent a 'sort of seer quality' to her poems, Waldman said in an interview. 'There's this traveling through realms,' she added. 'There's a great fluidity in her poetry, a lyric quality -- these different voices and modes -- and then there's magic: dreamlike connections where it shifts and suddenly you're somewhere else.' In the 1980s, several of Ms. Notley's loved ones died: her husband, Berrigan, in 1983 from complications of hepatitis; her stepdaughter, Kate Berrigan, in 1987 after she was struck by a motorcycle; and her brother Albert Notley, a Vietnam War veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, in 1988. Advertisement Ms. Notley said their voices had continued to speak to her, so she translated them into poetry. 'At Night the States,' written two years after Berrigan's death, reflects on the absence of a person: At night the states I forget them or I wish I was there in that one under the Stars. It smells like June in this night so sweet like air. I may have decided that the States are not that tired Or I have thought so. I have thought that. The poem 'Beginning With a Stain' is an elegy for her stepdaughter. And 'White Phosphorus,' one of her most acclaimed poems, was written for her brother: 'He said, 'I've come home; I've finally come home' then he died' 'flowers' 'Magnolias & lilies' 'innocent now' 'I've come home. Who's there? at home? all the dead?" 'To come home from the war' 'years after' 'To die' Albert Notley's death also influenced Alice Notley's best-known work, 'The Descent of Alette' (1992). Mired in grief, she began riding the subway in New York City. 'I would go from car to car and imagine these fantastic scenes,' she said last year in an interview with The Paris Review. 'I conceived of the subway as being this place that no one could leave.' In 'Alette,' a story evoking the descents into the underworld in Greek mythology, a female narrator, banished to the depths of the subway, must kill an all-powerful tyrant. She imagined 'Alette' as a feminine epic that sought to reclaim the form from men; in 2010 she called it 'an immense act of rebellion against dominant social forces.' Painter Rudy Burckhardt, a friend, called Ms. Notley 'our present-day Homer.' Advertisement Alice Elizabeth Notley was born Nov. 8, 1945, in Bisbee, Ariz., and spent most of her childhood in Needles, Calif., on the edge of the Mojave Desert, where her parents, Beulah (Oliver) and Albert Notley, ran an auto supply store. The Latin lessons she took in high school would later inform the prosody of her poems, as did folk and country songs. Her childhood was happy, 'but I was very impatient to grow up, and I wanted to leave Needles,' she told The Paris Review. 'I knew I had to, because I was going to become a weirdo.' She moved to New York to attend Barnard College in 1963. After graduating, she pursued a master's degree in fiction and poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she forged a close relationship with poet Anselm Hollo, who taught there, and met Berrigan. They married in 1972 and lived nomadically, keeping afloat through Berrigan's teaching jobs. They briefly stayed with painter Larry Rivers in the garage of his home in Southampton, N.Y. In Bolinas, Calif., in Marin County, they resided in what she called a 'chicken house' that belonged to writers Lewis and Phoebe MacAdams. Ms. Notley's early work, in the 1970s and '80s, centered on new motherhood -- her sons, Anselm and Edmund, were born in 1972 and 1974 -- and her writing was colored by the intermingling voices of her and her sons. 'Mommy what's this fork doing?/What?/It's being Donald Duck,' she wrote in her 1981 poem 'January.' 'Notley wrote extensively about pregnancy, childbirth and child-rearing at a time when the poetry world was often inhospitable to women,' Wallace wrote in The New Yorker, adding that 'her influence for a later generation of poets exploring these same subjects is hard to overstate.' Advertisement In early-1970s Chicago, she edited Chicago, an important mimeographed magazine, and helped build the avant-garde scene there. In New York, she taught workshops to a generation of influential poets, including Eileen Myles, Bob Holman, and Patricia Spears Jones. Despite their prominence in the community, she and her husband struggled financially and lacked medical care; Berrigan's hepatitis went untreated. 'We had 20 dollars on the day Ted died,' Ms. Notley said. Throughout the 1980s, her poems grew longer and acquired more mythical tones. That trend continued in the 1990s, when she moved to Paris with poet Douglas Oliver, whom she married in 1988. They founded two literary magazines there, Gare du Nord and Scarlet. Oliver died in 2000. In addition to her sons, Ms. Notley leaves two sisters, Rebecca White and Margaret Notley, and two granddaughters. This article originally appeared in
USA Today
5 days ago
- USA Today
Need a new book? 10 new releases you can read right now from romance to thriller
Need a new book? 10 new releases you can read right now from romance to thriller What do a ghost-conjuring chef, a fast-food employee and a world-renowned dying artist have in common? They're the topics of some of our favorite new books from May, of course. Check out the titles we recommend this month, including new Stephen King, a swoony new romantasy bestseller and the book that Fredrik Backman said could be his last. Or, take a look at the titles we're most excited about this summer. Plus, there's still time to read for USA TODAY's Spring Book Challenge, where you could win a $100 gift card to just by filling out our bingo card. What should I read next? 10 new books from May Summer is just around the corner, and it's time to get your TBR ready for beach reading and vacations. From dystopian tales to steamy romance, here are the titles we think you should pick up at your local bookstore or library. 'The Emperor of Gladness' by Ocean Vuong 'The Emperor of Gladness' has all the poetic meditations and lyricism of Vuong's 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous,' but with a lovable cast of found family characters that practically leap off the page. In it, a young man about to commit suicide is stopped by an elderly woman with dementia. What results is an unlikely friendship, a fast-food job that reunites him with his cousin and a new supportive, quirky community. 'Aftertaste' by Daria Lavelle This dark comedy set in the culinary world follows a Ukrainian American chef who can conjure spirits of the dead by cooking their favorite foods. Haunted by the death of his father and yearning to use his powers for good, Kostya opens a restaurant where loved ones reunite over one last meal. With carefully crafted depictions of grief and mouth-watering culinary adventures, this is the perfect novel for the always hungry and for fans of 'The Bear.' 'My Friends' by Fredrik Backman Told in two timelines, Backman's heartwarming latest is about four childhood friends and one transformative summer. Their bond inspires a painting that eventually becomes, decades later, the most famous painting in the world. In the present, a teenager who cherishes that painting finds herself in unexpected ownership of the original. Her cross-country journey to learn how the artwork came to be connects surprising roads in her own life and the painting's subjects. 'Can't Get Enough' by Kennedy Ryan In 'Can't Get Enough,' ambitious, goal-oriented Hendrix Barry is thriving in most aspects of life, but caring for her aging parent means she doesn't have time for romance. But then she meets tech mogul Maverick Bell, and the one man she can't have seems to be the perfect match. 'Things in Nature Merely Grow' by Yiyun Li Writer and professor Li meditates on the loss of her two sons – both from suicide, seven years apart. Li searches for the words that might fill the loss of Vincent at age 16 in 2017 and James at age 19 in 2024. 'Things In Nature Merely Grow' is less of a book about grief and more a tribute to radical acceptance and the lasting power of memory. 'Immaculate Conception' by Ling Ling Huang Twisty dystopian horror 'Immaculate Conception' follows art students whose work and study are upended by artificial intelligence. Grappling with her artistic purpose and jealous of her friend Mathilde's global success, protagonist Enka comes across a new technology that would let her enter Mathilde's mind, inextricably linking the co-dependent friends. 'Never Flinch' by Stephen King King deviates from his terrifying horror to pen a detective novel in 'Never Flinch.' This mystery thriller puts beloved character Holly Gibney at the forefront, now working for a celebrity women's rights activist whose lecture tour is under threat by a violent mystery assailant. At the same time, Holly helps her police detective friend with a serial killer on a revenge mission. 'Along Came Amor' by Alexis Daria This steamy romance is the third and final installment of Daria's 'Primas of Power' series. When Ava Rodriguez's now ex-husband leaves her to chase dreams that don't include her, she tries to embrace her new singleness in a one-night stand with Roman Vázquez. Type-A Roman is laser-focused on building his empire, so he initially agrees to her no-strings-attached, no-feelings situationship. That comes crashing when the pair run into each other at Ava's family function. 'Shield of Sparrows' by Devney Perry This new romantasy series, billed for fans of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, sees a forgotten princess changing her fate. She's never meant to rule, only to obey her father. But after an encounter with a legendary monster hunter and a prince upends her life, she realizes she can make her own rules, becoming the warrior she was meant to be. 'How to Be Well' by Amy Larocca Everyone knows a 'well woman' – the spiritual, skincare aficionado who is just one cog in the machine of the multibillion-dollar wellness industry. Journalist Larocca touches on her own experience getting sucked into wellness culture before ripping back the curtain at the science behind it, as well as the standards of American womanhood driving the profits. Support AAPI authors all year: 10 new books by Asian authors to read Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
