The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong review – heartbreak and hope

Ocean Vuong’s 2nd caller is a 416‑page circuit of the edgeland between aspirational phantasy and self-deception. It opens with a agelong dilatory cookware implicit the fictional tiny municipality of East Gladness, Connecticut, opening with ghosts that emergence “as mist implicit the rye crossed the tracks” and ending connected a span wherever the camera finds a young antheral called Hai –“19, successful the midnight of his puerility and a beingness from archetypal light” – preparing to drown himself. There’s an astir lazy richness to the picture: the precocious day sun, the “moss truthful lush betwixt the woody obstruction ties that, astatine a definite space of thick, verdant light, it looks similar algae”, the junkyard “packed with schoolhouse buses successful assorted stages of amnesia”.

His poetic credentials established, the writer of the bestselling autofictional On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous gives communicative its head. Instead of jumping from the bridge, Hai crosses it, to beryllium adopted connected the other broadside by 82-year-old Grazina, a pistillate suffering mid‑stage prefrontal lobe dementia. He volition go her proxy grandson; they volition beryllium each other’s enactment successful a crap world. It volition beryllium a disordered but productive relationship.

Grazina, calved successful Lithuania, “an aged country, acold away”, lives connected a thoroughfare known locally arsenic the Devil’s Armpit, takes 14 pills a day, and ever eats Stouffer’s Salisbury Steak for dinner. She needs a carer; Hai, a pillhead successful remission but longing to beryllium backmost successful the arms of opioids, needs a much constructive communicative of himself. Between them they invent a role-playing crippled to bring her down from the destabilising hallucinations and insomniac panics of her disease. Then, arsenic she sleeps, helium softly ransacks her cupboards for medicine medicines.

Some of the themes of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous echo done into this novel. We recognise the familial landscapes of the Vietnamese migration to the US; the request to negociate partially assimilated, dangerously unprocessed generational tensions; the consciousness of beingness arsenic the pursuit of a 2nd chance. Complex relations betwixt communicative and backstory besides feature, but astatine a little demanding scale, producing little of a dense lyrical flicker astatine the condemnation level, much of a accepted juggle with larger communicative elements. This is simply a immense caller successful presumption of wherever it directs our attention: from cheery self-discovery to the uses of fiction; from the concern farming of animals to the thrust to constitute yourself escaped of the parental experience.

As good arsenic chosen family, The Emperor of Gladness is besides astir the brutality of work. Hai takes a occupation astatine HomeMarket, a fast-casual diner concatenation retired connected Route 4. There, beside “smoking vats of vibrant, primary-coloured broadside dishes” precooked “nearly a twelvemonth agone successful a laboratory extracurricular Des Moines”, helium makes much caller friends. BJ, the manager, “six ft 3 with a buzz chopped slice and shape-up”, whose ambition is to go a pro wrestler nether the pseudonym Deez Nuts; Russia, “a cuter mentation of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings”, who is really of Tajikistani origins; Maureen the cashier, an ageing conspiracy theorist who relieves her arthritic knees each evening with a battalion of mac and food from the freezer. Soon, they are his household too. Family outings see a sojourn to a slaughterhouse wherever the barbaric conditions are genuinely hard to read, and an evening of wrestling astatine Hairy Harry’s dive bar: experiences and situations which determination steadily towards surrealism arsenic the caller comes to its climax.

BJ’s unit are “just similar the radical anyplace other successful New England. Weatherworn and perennially exhausted oregon pissed disconnected oregon both.” The take-home from their authorities being that, immoderate else, the HomeMarket concatenation offers a tacky but undeniably sensual acquisition to the customer; and a living, nevertheless minimal, for the crew. Where they converge, these 2 basal socioeconomic goods promote the emergence of a third: a genuine if little glow of gladness formed implicit a beingness of hopeless situations. Versions of this glow go the existent taxable of the story. Dwellers successful precarity indispensable supply themselves with a communicative future. Some are amended astatine it than others. For Hai – who erstwhile told himself the communicative of “wanting to beryllium a writer” – specified enactment fictions aren’t maintenance-free: aft each defeat, each incursion of reality, they person to beryllium repaired and revised. It’s hard labour, carried retired successful summation to his regular struggles to manage Grazina’s unwellness and gain a living. He’s not bully astatine it.

We’re each writers now, Vuong seems to suggest. A inexpensive meal eaten astatine HomeMarket nether the kitsch but someway menacing airy of a Thomas Kinkade phantasy coating – “Beside Still Waters”, “Victorian Family Christmas” – is simply a communicative of reward. Two Dilaudid pills, crushed and snorted, are a communicative astir clip out. Any economical aspiration astatine each is truthful intelligibly a fiction. This information is depicted with the authenticity of experience. At the aforesaid clip Vuong takes it isolated with patience and an receptor for dialogue: “I similar Nasa – the existent kind, not make-believe similar Star Trek,” helium has Hai’s relative Sony – named aft the TV – say. “My ma likes make-believe, but I hatred it. It makes things wobbly.” Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic each astatine the aforesaid time, The Emperor of Gladness is astir conscionable however wobbly things tin become.