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Associated Press
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
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. ___ AP book reviews:
The Guardian
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong review
Ocean Vuong's second novel is a 416‑page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception. It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise 'as mist over the rye across the tracks' and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai –'19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light' – preparing to drown himself. There's an almost lazy richness to the picture: the late afternoon sun, the 'moss so lush between the wooden rail ties that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae', the junkyard 'packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia'. His poetic credentials established, the author of the bestselling autofictional On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous gives narrative its head. Instead of jumping from the bridge, Hai crosses it, to be adopted on the other side by 82-year-old Grazina, a woman suffering mid‑stage prefrontal lobe dementia. He will become her proxy grandson; they will be each other's support in a crap world. It will be a disordered but productive relationship. Grazina, born in Lithuania, 'an old country, far away', lives on a street known locally as the Devil's Armpit, takes 14 pills a day, and always eats Stouffer's Salisbury Steak for dinner. She needs a carer; Hai, a pillhead in remission but longing to be back in the arms of opioids, needs a more constructive narrative of himself. Between them they invent a role-playing game to bring her down from the destabilising hallucinations and insomniac panics of her disease. Then, as she sleeps, he quietly ransacks her cupboards for prescription medicines. Some of the themes of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous echo through into this novel. We recognise the familial landscapes of the Vietnamese immigration to the US; the need to manage partly assimilated, dangerously unprocessed generational tensions; the sense of life as the pursuit of a second chance. Complex relations between story and backstory also feature, but at a less demanding scale, producing less of a dense lyrical flicker at the sentence level, more of a traditional juggle with larger narrative elements. This is a huge novel in terms of where it directs our attention: from gay self-discovery to the uses of fiction; from the industrial farming of animals to the drive to write yourself free of the parental experience. As well as chosen family, The Emperor of Gladness is also about the brutality of work. Hai takes a job at HomeMarket, a fast-casual diner chain out on Route 4. There, beside 'smoking vats of vibrant, primary-coloured side dishes' precooked 'nearly a year ago in a laboratory outside Des Moines', he makes more new friends. BJ, the manager, 'six foot three with a buzz cut fade and shape-up', whose ambition is to become a pro wrestler under the pseudonym Deez Nuts; Russia, 'a cuter version of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings', who is actually of Tajikistani origins; Maureen the cashier, an ageing conspiracy theorist who relieves her arthritic knees each evening with a pack of mac and cheese from the freezer. Soon, they are his family too. Family outings include a visit to a slaughterhouse where the barbaric conditions are genuinely difficult to read, and an evening of wrestling at Hairy Harry's dive bar: experiences and situations which move steadily towards surrealism as the novel comes to its climax. BJ's crew are 'just like the people anywhere else in New England. Weatherworn and perennially exhausted or pissed off or both.' The take-home from their state being that, whatever else, the HomeMarket chain offers a tacky but undeniably sensual experience to the customer; and a living, however minimal, for the crew. Where they converge, these two basic socioeconomic goods encourage the emergence of a third: a genuine if brief glow of gladness cast over a life of hopeless situations. Versions of this glow become the real subject of the story. Dwellers in precarity must provide themselves with a narrative future. Some are better at it than others. For Hai – who once told himself the story of 'wanting to be a writer' – such support fictions aren't maintenance-free: after every defeat, every incursion of reality, they have to be repaired and revised. It's hard labour, carried out in addition to his daily struggles to manage Grazina's illness and earn a living. He's not good at it. We're all writers now, Vuong seems to suggest. A cheap dinner eaten at HomeMarket under the kitsch but somehow menacing light of a Thomas Kinkade fantasy painting – 'Beside Still Waters', 'Victorian Family Christmas' – is a story of reward. Two Dilaudid pills, crushed and snorted, are a story about time out. Any economic aspiration at all is so clearly a fiction. This condition is depicted with the authenticity of experience. At the same time Vuong takes it apart with patience and an ear for dialogue: 'I like Nasa – the real kind, not make-believe like Star Trek,' he has Hai's cousin Sony – named after the TV – say. 'My mom likes make-believe, but I hate it. It makes things wobbly.' Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time, The Emperor of Gladness is about just how wobbly things can become. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong is published by Jonathan Cape (£20).To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply
New York Times
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Odd Couple Roommates, Bonded by Pills and Precarity
We first meet the hero of Ocean Vuong's second novel, 'The Emperor of Gladness,' as we did George Bailey in Frank Capra's 'It's a Wonderful Life': on the edge of a bridge, contemplating suicide. Rain pelts him rather than snow. Hai is 19 in September of 2009, 'in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light,' a Vietnamese-born college dropout who's returned to a bleak Connecticut town called East Gladness, which fell far south of any gladness even before the recession. His salvation, his Clarence the angel, arrives in the form of Grazina: an 82-year-old Lithuanian widow who, after a Who's on First-like exchange, insists on calling him Labas, which means 'hi' in her language. Mid-stage frontal-lobe dementia has not yet kneecapped her knee-slappers. 'You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge?' she teases him. 'That's pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.' But Vuong, named for the largest body of water there is, has been soaring. In an era when readers need to be gently coaxed to read poetry, his is widely heralded. His first novel, 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' (2019), told in the form of a letter to the narrator's illiterate mother, was a best seller, though some critics found it disjointed and overcurlicued. Like that book, the new one has some clearly autobiographical elements. But 'The Emperor of Gladness' — its title echoing both Wallace Stevens (a habitué of nearby Hartford) on ice cream and Siddhartha Mukherjee on cancer — is a more conventional example of the form, divided into seasons. Hai moves into Grazina's dilapidated clapboard house, crammed with watchful owl tchotchkes, as a part-time caregiver and companion. The arrangement helps him maintain the fiction he's told his mother, a nail-salon worker who numbs her own sorrows with endless games of Tetris: that he's attending medical school in Boston. These odd roommates are bonded by pills. Hai lost a friend to a fentanyl overdose and has been to rehab himself, but can't kick oxy and codeine. Grazina has her senior regimen of Aricept, Lipitor and more. They are shadowed by familial war traumas (her little brother's death; his uncle's mysterious wound) and self-soothe by re-enacting ludicrous battle scenes, during which Labas morphs into 'Sergeant Pepper.' Grazina's rich son is lurking in the background, eager to stash her in a nursing home, 'the only true egalitarian wing of the American dream.' Through a cousin named Sony (after the Trinitron television), Hai also gets a minimum-wage job at a lucrative franchise of HomeMarket, a 'fast casual' restaurant higher on the food chain than Wendy's or Dunkin. Though it's 'not so much a restaurant as a giant microwave,' there is a measure of community and dignity there. Or at least, a fresh start. 'He had become an employee and thus had obtained an eternal present, manifested only by his functional existence on the timecard. He had no history because one was not required of him, and having no history also meant having no sadness.' As at 'The Office,' one of Grazina's favorite TV programs, HomeMarket is the stage for an array of diverse and daffy personalities: the 6-foot-3, buzz-cut female manager who aspires to the pro wrestling circuit; the diabetic 'chicken man' on the grill who looks like a portly Al Green; the foulmouthed Irish cashier whose son died; the nose-ringed drive-thru guy known as Russia. Food, its byproducts, processes and essential grossness, strafes this crew. They are doused in cheese sauce when trying to help a guest overdosing in the bathroom; pelted with pizza in the parking lot by an independent rival; offended by an asparagus festival packed with white people; and doused with blood and emotion during a freelance stint slaughtering hogs. (It is, of course, infinitely worse for the hogs.) Much is made of the line between cornbread and cake, sugar being the opiate of the masses. Meanwhile, Grazina gleefully stomps dinner rolls and stockpiles Stouffer's frozen dinners, reveling in American plenty after surviving Stalin's purges. She claims her father invented fruit salad. There is a terrific ripeness to the pages of 'The Emperor of Gladness' that sometimes edges into bruising. The reader is forever being dragged along, metaphorically speaking, as someone slips slow motion on a banana peel. For sure this is a book deeply attentive to oft-overlooked populations and simple survival; Hai may be reading 'Slaughterhouse-Five' and 'The Brothers Karamazov,' but he's living out of 'Fast Food Nation' and 'Nickel and Dimed.' (That noted, Vuong should know that Medicare doesn't cover live-in nurses.) There are trenchant observations about even ambitious people being 'soft and scared,' a species 'mushy' like overcooked peas or spaghetti. The dialogue does a lot for the story — maybe too much. Little incongruities have slipped past the poet's sensitive ear, linguistic viralities from a more recent internet: an E.M.T. with a mullet saying ''preciate chuh,' which rose to prominence after 'Ted Lasso'; a counselor in rehab marveling that Sun Tzu 'doesn't miss, huh?'; Hai asking his mother incredulously during an argument, 'We're really doing this?' Comparing a bad case of acne on a young man's face to 'weathered cuneiform on old marble'? In an Ocean Vuong novel, we're really doing this.
