Ocean Vuong’s new novel, “The Emperor of Gladness” (Penguin Press) is moving on a number of levels. It has characters you think about when you’re away from them. The writing is exemplary. New England both quaint and otherwise glows and glowers beyond its pages. But the most moving thing of all is that Vuong has written a big, juicy book.
Weighing in at a meaty 400 pages that sit nicely in the hand, “The Emperor of Gladness” is almost shocking in its embrace of what could be called a “traditional” narrative style. It has a plot you can follow. Except for the occasional, necessary flashback, that story is told front to back. The prose does not do tricks of its own or otherwise show off; it wants you to pay attention.
Regular readers of gay literary fiction might even be shocked by the conventions the novel follows. Characters’ words come within (double!) quotation marks. Paragraphing is standard. Sentences start and stop, with no contortions along the way and barely any verbal exhibitionism.
You could almost call it an ordinary novel, except that it’s anything but. It’s a ghost story without literal ghosts but rather fleeting remembrances of past persons, places, and things that spin through the present like dervishes. It is a story inhabited by members of the underclasses who bond against the implacable, likely menacing future, folks for whom things go on without improving. We’re at eye-level with all of them by the time this remarkable book has run its course.
The bridge
On first blush, the book’s title may sound suspiciously like a project abandoned by the early Edmund White. But from the start we’re told, almost in confidence, that Hai’s refugee family has brought them to Gladness, Connecticut. A geographical “armpit,” the town is not the kind of place that could support an emperor. It is populated instead by a family of “choice,” a crew of subaltern characters with no hope of a better life but one they together make livable.
At the end of the first short chapter, we are introduced to our protagonist, Hai, who is also the narrator of the story and the keeper of our point of view. A refugee from the horrors of the Vietnam War, we first find him “in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light.”
That is to say that he discovers himself on an unplanned appearance on a bridge in a driving rain, helplessly watching his leg go over the railing edge as he contemplates a watery death below.
He is literally called back to the world of the living (if rarely happily so) by the scream of Grazina, an 82-year-old, Lithuanian-born woman living in what amounts to a shack on the other side of the river. “Not now, not today,” she hollers. “Just get the hell down.”
You could say it’s implausible that the two would soon enough become housemates with highly individual ways of taking care of one another, except that it closely reflects a comparable, actual experience in Vuong’s own life. Their relationship becomes the novel’s principal driver.
Vuong has written elsewhere, also factually, about his struggle with addictive drugs. The matter that resurfaces here is Hai’s “management,” at Grazina’s request, of her “vitamins.” They are, of course, heavy medications for Grazina’s various mental illnesses.
Initially aghast at his host’s haphazard pharmacy, the “trough” of pills she feeds at, Hai goes quickly from horror at the size of the stash to an estimation of what the best of its contents might do for him, initiating his “sharing” of them.
Through a friend, Sony, Hai is brought into a company of fast-food workers at a place called HomeMarket, a grim kind of eatery run by marginal managers and staffed by psychologically compromised, seriously underpaid misfits whose chances of employment elsewhere are negligible. If gladness in the sense we usually mean it remains safely beyond their reach, or even hope, they find ways to fit with each other that makes their world, uninviting as it can be, ours.
The language
Vuong, who made his mark as a poet, made a previous venture into prose with 2019’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” (No one has better titles than Vuong.) A novel more in name than format, it investigated core Vuong themes but in a highly charged form soaked in poetic strophes.
Comparatively straight-laced formally, “The Emperor of Gladness” mines a deeper if quieter vein, creating a world that somehow distinguishes between hope and delusional thinking.
The poet in Vuong manifests in his close observation of the characters and their troubled world. Sometimes these details threaten to overwhelm the all-important story, but never for long. Vuong’s love of his subjects shortly becomes ours, and you sense his resolve to stick with them rather than spin beautiful verbal webs.
His mastery of the sentence enlivens the book throughout. None is more potent, and startling, than the novel’s first: “The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.”
There is nothing sentimental in any of this. The prose can become brutal to meet situations, nowhere more so than in Vuong’s depiction of the bloody horrors of a pig butchery. But the writing is integrated and all of a piece.
Fairness to the reader demands some word of caution from me about the novel’s beginning. The language there is dense, the tone and place setting vivid but more evocative than descriptive. New England itself becomes a character, the cauldron in which this brew is stirred.
It makes for a slow start, which resolves itself quickly. Some of my favorite one-of-a-kind novels –Malcom Lowry’s “Under the Volcano” and Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed” spring to mind– similarly begin with elaborate descriptions of their physical settings, hinting at what is to come and even its meaning.
Readers have famously found these passages off-putting, to the point that many have not ventured past them. That would be a misfortune here. Persevere like Vuong’s characters do, and you are met with a deeply rewarding story.
Ocean Vuong, “The Emperor of Gladness,” 402 pp., $30, Penguin Press.
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Ocean Vuong will be in San Francisco at Calvary Presbyterian Church, 2515 Fillmore St. May 30, 7pm. www.eventbrite.com and in Corte Madera May 31, 6pm at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd.
www.bookpassage.com
