The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong’s much anticipated sophomore novel is a divergence from his previous works, but readers will be pleased to find the same core ethos that saturates Vuong’s oeuvre: the value of community and love.
The novel follows Hai, a young man at the end of his rope who is saved from suicide by the desperate calls of an elderly woman, Grazina, who offers him a place to stay when he has nowhere else to go. Recently returned from a university enrolment cut short by a traumatic event, Hai’s life has become a lie. In Grazina, though, he finds a vessel for the truth. Between her episodes of dementia, Hai and Grazina form a heartfelt and sincere bond that, it seems, cannot be severed.
Alongside Hai and Grazina, we are introduced to a wide cast of colourful characters who work alongside Hai at the local HomeMarket. BJ, Maureen, Russia, Wayne, and Hai’s cousin, Sony, create a landscape in which wealth is not in the hands of the workers, but in their souls. Each has a struggle to face, and each fall in love with the others.
War is a prominent backdrop for the residents of East Gladness, Connecticut. Between the railway lines and rain, Hai and Grazina spend her dementia episodes weaving a migration story where they cross Europe in a Jeep (which is really Grazina’s bathtub) imagining rolling fields and bombed-out cities. Hai’s cousin, Sony, is obsessed with the Civil War, and they spend several sleepless nights watching Gettysburg while Sony rattles off lists of battles, facts about the charges, theories about pride and warfare. Beneath this obsession is Sony’s adoration of his father, a Vietnam war veteran who came with the family when they emigrated to America and then disappeared to have a second family, leaving Sony and Hai to be raised by their grandmother and mothers. As with Vuong’s other work, the maternal presence is a central feature, bringing a softness to the history of war which runs through the novel. The figures of authority are all women who care for, protect, and support the young men in their charge.
More than anything, this is a novel about community. Every member of Vuong’s varied cast is battling their own lonelinesses, their own isolated struggles which cannot be combatted except, they believe, through individual action. Survival is expensive – paying expensive rehab bills, processing grief, raising money for bail – and these characters feel the weight of that survival as they go about their days; they spoon macaroni and cheese into polystyrene packets for customers, they take orders and ferry birthday cakes to families in celebration, and they help a homeless man indoors after hours and restart the grill to give him a proper meal. They spend days supporting the members of their community by trying to right the wrongs that life has dealt them.
Despite the honesty of emotion that runs throughout the novel, it is surprisingly resistant to giving away its secrets. There are many questions left unanswered, many facts to which the reader is never privy. Their full realisation makes them into living, breathing figures, and each exists on their own path which, for a year only, merges with Hai’s life before swiftly diverging once again and moving off into another future. Vuong has perfected the art of character writing, and his periphery cast appear not as vessels for the story being told, but as main characters in other stories not yet written. What is left unsaid is not only secrecy, but the simple truth that you can never know everything about another person because their lives exist outside of yours. Hai may stand naked in front of Grazina as her equal, but there are always stories left to tell for which they will never find the time. Loneliness is not defeated. Hai’s secrecy keeps him isolated from the rest, right until the final page where he stares up at the stars, exhausted and high and alone, and tells his eagerly listening mother over the phone all about a life he’s never lived.
Looking at the cover, the harsh sunshine blush and heat haze that obscures the boy’s face conveys the mood of the novel. Vuong continues to display a keen skill for capturing the specific melancholy that comes from loneliness, and asks a question with universal implications: what should you do with your life, when you only live once?
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