Seeing Ocean Vuong at the Philadelphia stop of his latest book tour feels, in a kind of communal, spiritual affect, like going to church. Ironically, Vuong actually does give his talk in the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, speaking to pews of enraptured readers from beneath an enormous stained–glass window. For those who have hailed Vuong as one of this generation’s biggest literary superstars, the poet–turned–novelist’s words might not be scripture, but they land somewhere close.
Since the release of his wildly successful first novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, it feels as if the world has been lying in wait for what the author will write about next. The book launched Vuong into a stratosphere of fame few authors ever achieve—that same year, he lost his mother to cancer. The devastation was stark, especially given that the entirety of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in its vulnerable, autofictional nature, reads like a letter to her. In the aftermath of his loss, Vuong released Time Is a Mother, a poetry collection in which he traverses the emotional architecture of grief, family, memory, and selfhood. He has since returned, to notable fanfare, with his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness.
Vuong’s latest novel is, in many ways, a venture into new territory, one which is no longer anchored in his mother’s presence. In an interview with The New York Times, Vuong admits that, in the absence of his mother, he has been forced to reimagine his writing, questioning what it means to truly create for himself. In the First Unitarian Church on a rainy Thursday, I listen to him unpack the way this idea manifests itself in his latest release.
Despite the heftiness of his sentences, which come wound in the same eloquence as his poetry, Vuong is quiet, soft spoken. And just like his writing, he is unabashedly confessional. Over the course of his hourlong talk with Emma Copley Eisenberg, he tears up a few times. The subject matter of The Emperor of Gladness is deeply personal, taking root in Vuong’s own experiences with drug addiction, found family, and the forgotten fringes of American life in Connecticut.
The novel follows Hai—a Vietnamese American college dropout battling drug addiction—as he finds himself the caregiver for Grazina, an elderly woman who arrived in the United States as a refugee from Lithuania. During his talk, Vuong explains that he was inspired by his experiences with the real–life Grazina, whom he lived with after doing a short stint at Pace University, and, similarly to Hai, he dropped out. The nucleus of the story, Home Market—the fast–casual restaurant where Hai works—is, in a kindred fashion, based on Vuong’s experience working at Boston Market.
When asked how his latest novel differs from his first, Vuong talks about form. A foundational piece of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ enigmatic character is its unconventional structure, which he says employs fracture as a vehicle for storytelling. Rather than following a linear framework, the novel is told in disjointed bits and pieces, reminiscent of the Japanese kishōtenketsu structure as well as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s avant–garde novel Dictée. Critics of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous have questioned Vuong’s choice, saying that the book lacks a strong narrative. The novel is perhaps a bit like a limp body: all of the beautifully tender flesh of Vuong’s lyricism, without a skeleton of a plot for his words to cling to.
Vuong, however, explains to those in attendance that he wanted On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to be instilled with a refusal to tell itself easily. Although the book addresses American violence and generational wounds, Vuong says that he didn’t want it to simply be a “tour guide” of his community’s—presumably, the Vietnamese American community’s—trauma. In The Emperor of Gladness, however, Vuong seems to take a new approach to his writing, giving his audience a story that reveals itself more readily. The novel’s language is more concise than that of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, relying on dialogue for momentum while the earlier work leans much more heavily on description. While On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous feels like a hazy, cathartic exercise in introspection—a look into its narrator’s mind—The Emperor of Gladness feels more like an introduction into its narrator’s world.
Through Hai, Vuong introduces a substantive cast of characters who call the fictional town of East Gladness home. The idea of found family emerges not only in Hai’s relationship with Grazina, but also in his relationship with his coworkers at Home Market, who are described as “bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms.”
When asked about his approach to characterization in The Emperor of Gladness, Vuong tells us that he chooses to view people as doorways, each one opening up into a unique version of the world. Indeed, he gives his characters real depth, each seeming to come from their own versions of the world, only to be brought together by the brutal nature of food service. The patchwork crew of Home Market is messy and distinct, each employee impossibly human and quickly likeable. They refract many of the struggles of working–class American life—addiction, poverty, the unrelenting struggle to stay afloat amid incorrigible circumstances. Like many families, they are dysfunctional, loudmouthed, and quick to bicker, encompassing personalities that range from BJ, a six–foot amateur wrestler; to Sony, a teenage Civil War history buff; to Maureen, an elderly conspiracy theorist and Star Wars fanatic. But somehow, they just work, relying on each other in a world where there is not much else to count on.
In The Emperor of Gladness, Vuong strikes a delicate balance between tenderness, humor, and the harsh nature of survival and memory. Again and again, he depicts the way that life inflicts wounds on his characters—the disabled, the elderly, the drug addicts, the impoverished, the refugees—who are tied down to lives largely shut out from the class mobility promised by the American Dream. There is a rueful kind of laughter that tinges the novel’s storytelling, a surreal camaraderie which spawns from dive–bar wrestling matches and vats of cornbread and stomping on bread rolls in the backyard.
As for his aims in this novel, Vuong says he wanted a story of stagnation. In The Emperor of Gladness, there are no grand character arcs, no big breaks or miracles that transform its protagonists’ lives. There is only the reality, which, for most Americans, is characterized not by the metamorphic promises of the American Dream, but by stillness and simple existence.
“To be alive, and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all,” Grazina tells Hai in the book. I think that this idea is the crux of The Emperor of Gladness: the idea that there is both a resistance and resilience that comes with simply being alive and doing your best. In this latest evocative read, Vuong tells us that the stories worth telling aren’t necessarily those of grand heroism or dramatic change, but of people in their persistence, endurance, and quiet acts of humanity.
