As a poet, Ocean Vuong has won every prize going. Now here’s The Emperor of Gladness, his second novel. His first, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a coming-of-age story, is currently being filmed. This latest oneis wild, unwieldy and too long. It is fiction/autofiction mixed with 19th- and 20th-century warfare, plus contemporary angst and craziness. It has one preposterous scene that you wish were true, and never has a title been so misleading. It’s a book of moral, imaginative ideas with gripping stories, wonderful characters and writing that’s poetic and witty. I loved it.
It opens with an introduction to the rural town of East Gladness, Connecticut, its citizens ‘not ambivalent to hope’. It’s like a tawdry Middlemarch until you meet the main protagonist, Hai, aged 19, who’s about to throw himself off a bridge. He’s coaxed down by a ‘kooky’ old lady who spots him from her home across the river and takes him in. Grazina, 83 and Lithuanian, has dementia. Hai, a gay Vietnamese refugee, college drop-out and painkiller addict, becomes her unlikely carer. There’s an echo of a children’s story when, in the basement of Grazina’s ramshackle house, Hai discovers the kind of library every budding writer might long for. But Vuong takes the novel beyond childhood in his exploration of the inherited trauma of war and violence.
A key theme is Vuong’s challenging of the idea that life without the impulse to change and improve (through work, education and marriage) is worthless. Hai and Grazina, lacking such impulse – one being too old, the other not ready – are pushed to the margins of society. As are the group of misfits whom Hai joins when he starts working at the fast-food diner, HomeMarket.
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