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Sydney Morning Herald
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Love, loss and found family among America's lower working class
FICTION The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, $34.99 Ocean Vuong achieved fame as a poet before his acclaimed debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, andthere's creative continuity in follow-up The Emperor of Gladness. Previously examined motifs undergo complex transformations so that it reads like the literary equivalent of a musical variation. Autobiography is grist to the mill for Vuong. His mother fled Saigon for the US, via the Philippines, when he was an infant. He was raised in Connecticut among an extended family of Vietnamese refugees. He's also openly gay. These experiences inspire but do not define his creative fiction, and if the vaunted lyricism of a particular style of American dreaming marks the opening of The Emperor of Gladness – a flashy choric invocation of a dead-end Connecticut town, its ghosts inviting suicidal 19-year-old, Hai, to escape by jumping off a bridge – it isn't long before sublime cadence and melancholy grandeur yield to a different kind of song. An old woman spies the boy in the rain, and roundly tells him: 'You can't die in front of my house, okay?' This is Grazina – a force to be reckoned with, having survived Hitler and Stalin in Lithuania during WWII, and now in a battle to preserve her independence against the onset of dementia. Hai moves in as an unofficial carer, to keep her out of a nursing home. Grim doesn't begin to cover their living conditions; the house is decrepit and built on a toxic contamination site and Grazina can't afford to feed them. So Hai lands a job (courtesy of his cousin Sony, named after the television manufacturer) at a budget restaurant chain. As Hai's friendship with Grazina grows, he bathes her, comforts her when decades-old war trauma resurfaces, and engages in role-playing historical battles with her to manage her sundowning. He reads Slaughterhouse Five and The Brothers Karamazov from her dead husband's library and, alas, stumbles across an unused bottle of serious painkillers … dire news for someone recovering from opioid addiction. At work, Hai rocks up to every shift pinned to cope with the drudgery. Genuine camaraderie and unlikely dignity are found among the motley crew who work there, despite some extreme weirdness. Long-serving Maureen evades grief in conspiracist thinking – she believes lizard men control the world, she speaks like a drag queen, and she harbours a Star Wars obsession. Manager BJ conducts herself with an almost martial pride – giving inspirational speeches, slipping cake mix into the cornbread to make it more appealing, and training to achieve her dream of making it on the commercial wrestling stage. Dreams are thwarted in this place – except perhaps for Sony; his unaffected desires, whether in crafting origami penguins or in his encyclopedic knowledge of the American Civil War, throw into sharp relief the miseries inflicted on other characters by unattainable ones.
The Age
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Love, loss and found family among America's lower working class
FICTION The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, $34.99 Ocean Vuong achieved fame as a poet before his acclaimed debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, andthere's creative continuity in follow-up The Emperor of Gladness. Previously examined motifs undergo complex transformations so that it reads like the literary equivalent of a musical variation. Autobiography is grist to the mill for Vuong. His mother fled Saigon for the US, via the Philippines, when he was an infant. He was raised in Connecticut among an extended family of Vietnamese refugees. He's also openly gay. These experiences inspire but do not define his creative fiction, and if the vaunted lyricism of a particular style of American dreaming marks the opening of The Emperor of Gladness – a flashy choric invocation of a dead-end Connecticut town, its ghosts inviting suicidal 19-year-old, Hai, to escape by jumping off a bridge – it isn't long before sublime cadence and melancholy grandeur yield to a different kind of song. An old woman spies the boy in the rain, and roundly tells him: 'You can't die in front of my house, okay?' This is Grazina – a force to be reckoned with, having survived Hitler and Stalin in Lithuania during WWII, and now in a battle to preserve her independence against the onset of dementia. Hai moves in as an unofficial carer, to keep her out of a nursing home. Grim doesn't begin to cover their living conditions; the house is decrepit and built on a toxic contamination site and Grazina can't afford to feed them. So Hai lands a job (courtesy of his cousin Sony, named after the television manufacturer) at a budget restaurant chain. As Hai's friendship with Grazina grows, he bathes her, comforts her when decades-old war trauma resurfaces, and engages in role-playing historical battles with her to manage her sundowning. He reads Slaughterhouse Five and The Brothers Karamazov from her dead husband's library and, alas, stumbles across an unused bottle of serious painkillers … dire news for someone recovering from opioid addiction. At work, Hai rocks up to every shift pinned to cope with the drudgery. Genuine camaraderie and unlikely dignity are found among the motley crew who work there, despite some extreme weirdness. Long-serving Maureen evades grief in conspiracist thinking – she believes lizard men control the world, she speaks like a drag queen, and she harbours a Star Wars obsession. Manager BJ conducts herself with an almost martial pride – giving inspirational speeches, slipping cake mix into the cornbread to make it more appealing, and training to achieve her dream of making it on the commercial wrestling stage. Dreams are thwarted in this place – except perhaps for Sony; his unaffected desires, whether in crafting origami penguins or in his encyclopedic knowledge of the American Civil War, throw into sharp relief the miseries inflicted on other characters by unattainable ones.
Spectator
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Misfits unite: The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed
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. Among them is Maureen, occasional performance wrestler hooked on the lizard conspiracy (underground dinosaurs feeding on human suffering) and Hai's cousin Sony, autistic, obsessed with battles, the film Gettysburg and his family's escape from Vietnam. Most dramatic and moving are the episodes when Hai joins Grazina in her dementia memories. Play-acting, he becomes a US Army Sergeant Pepper helping her escape Stalin's purges in Lithuania. The preposterous scene is the one in which Grazina's obnoxious son Lucas and a social worker arrive with a plan to put the old lady into a home. In dementia play, Sergeant Pepper and Grazina use grenades (the cruet set) and Grazina's pistol (her finger) to rout the Nazis (son and social worker), albeit temporarily. It's a terrific scene. You want to cheer. You know they won't win. Vuong has said that he wanted to 'charge' his characters with 'transformation without change'. This happens to the HomeMarket team, 'people bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen' when they bond with Sony in his grief for the loss both of his real and his fantasy father. And it's profoundly there in the tenderness that develops between Grazina and Hai. All the characters find dignity and fulfilment not by their achievements or aspirations, but in caring for each other. Hey! This is a love story! And the book's title? It would be a spoiler to tell.
Irish Times
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Did nobody actually read this book before it went to print?: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
The Emperor of Gladness Author : Ocean Vuong ISBN-13 : 978-1787335400 Publisher : Jonathan Cape Guideline Price : £20 Ocean Vuong's books are enormously popular but it's hard to see why. He is often an incompetent writer of prose and his plots are sentimental mush. The Emperor of Gladness (note twee title) is set in a decaying Connecticut river town called East Gladness. A young man of Vietnamese descent, Hai, considers suicide, but is talked down from a bridge by an elderly Lithuanian woman named Grazina. Grazina is in the early stages of dementia. Hai becomes her carer. Grazina possesses cranky Lithuanian wisdom. She helps Hai work through his issues. Around them, America decays. Your heart might be warmed. Mine was not. The prose alternates between a flat accounting ('Back in the kitchen, he picked up her rotary phone') and a shockingly ham-fisted lyricism. 'Look how the birches, blackened all night by starlings, shatter when dawn's first sparks touch their beaks.' Dawn, of course, does not spark. And Vuong does not appear to know that the subject of this sentence is the birches and not the starlings; so his grammar gives the birches beaks. (The publisher's blurb praises Vuong's 'syntactical dexterity', which must be an in-house joke – unless they really can't tell.) [ Inside judging one of the big literary prizes: searching for sinister outside forces, table banging and some gems of books Opens in new window ] A paragraph later, we get a sentence that disastrously mingles the gross and the sub-poetic: 'At the lot's far edge lies the week-old roadkill, its eye socket filled with warm Coca-Cola, the act of a girl who, bored on her way from school, poured her drink into that finite dark of sightless visions.' READ MORE Vuong is so committed to his notion of transcendent pseudo-lyric prose that he doesn't even tell us what animal he means us to see – all he gives us is 'roadkill'. His prose wants you to feel; it certainly doesn't want you to perceive. It is, of course, Vuong's own literary vision that is sightless. A few pages later, Hai sees a body floating in a river, 'its limbs stretched and opaque'. But it is not necessary to describe a human body as 'opaque', since human bodies are not normally translucent or transparent. Did nobody actually read this book before it went to print? Back in the 20th century American literary prose was the gold standard. In the 21st century it is starting to look like a grotesquely inflated currency. Kevin Power is associate professor of English at Trinity College Dublin
Washington Post
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
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 .
