Book Reviews

Those who can’t remember their dreams

Ever since Ocean Vuong brought out his stunning debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), many of us have been eagerly awaiting his next. It has arrived, and The Emperor of Gladness is very different. Where Gorgeous was slight, tight, and focused, a letter written by a young Vietnamese American man to his illiterate mother, Gladness is much longer and sprawling, almost montage-like in presenting a range of characters and their stories. Although an undercurrent of sadness runs through both books, the first had a sense of hope and promise. This new novel is almost unrelieved in its bleakness, its emotional tones painted with a palette of grays.

It’s set in the fictional East Gladness, a post-industrial blight in Connecticut, polluted and forgotten by the politicians and polluting corporations, and reflecting the characters’ lives (“everyone rushes past us…We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds.”) These are people who have become accustomed to living without hope.

Among them is Hai, a nineteen-year-old Vietnamese American, ashamed and drug-addicted, self-medicating to assuage the pain of living. He lets his mother believe he’s attending college, studying to become a doctor. Preparing to end his life, he meets the aging, slowly dementing Grazina Vitkus, and becomes her caregiver, living with her in her old, decrepit house. The pair bond, finding comfort in their mutual caring for the other.

To help support them, Hai gets a job at a franchise restaurant called HomeMarket (“We turn food into feeling, folks.”) To Hai, it “was not so much a restaurant as a giant microwave…‘made by hand’ meant heating up the contents of a bag of mushy food cooked nearly a year ago in a laboratory outside Des Moines and vacuum-sealed in industrial resin sacks.” The manager proudly boasts theirs is “the third-best-grossing HomeMarket in all twelve locations in the Northeast.”

Here again, Vuong, an award-winning poet, has some lovely images expressed in some beautiful language: In spring, the cherry blossoms don’t just blossom, they “foam” across the county, the soft rains “pebble” against the window, in the fall, the aspens are “coppering along the shores.” Kids from the nearby Catholic prep school come pouring in to the restaurant, “a sweatered sea of suppressed, unrepentant hormones.”

Ours has been called a second Gilded Age, with all the excess, inequality, and corruption of the 1890s. In every Gilded Age, there are the un-gilded, those barely getting by, whose lives are sustained by cigarettes, cheap booze and street drugs, or over-prescribed opiates, and this week’s lottery ticket. Vuong is giving expression to the forgotten in this current age of glitz, glut, greed and gloom, reminding us that for some—for increasingly many—the American Dream has gotten so far out of reach, they can no longer remember their own dreams. They no longer dream.