Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Between his two indelible poetry collections — Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) and Time is a Mother (2022) — the Vietnamese American writer Ocean Vuong published a novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), which compensated for its unevenness with its lyricism and brevity. The same cannot be said of Vuong’s second novel The Emperor of Gladness which, at 400 pages, explores some of the recurring themes — family history, war, immigration to the US, loss, poverty — of his oeuvre on a bigger scale than ever before. It opens with a panorama of the fictional New England town of East Gladness, a kind of American Under Milk Wood in the age of the opioid crisis: “At the lot’s far edge lies the week-old roadkill, its eye socket filled with warm Coca-Cola, the act of a boy who, bored on his way from school, poured his drink into that endless dark of sightless visions.” This convoluted imagery may reflect the protagonist’s confused, pill-addled state of mind. We first encounter 19-year-old Hai — a Vietnamese American who was, like Vuong, raised by his illiterate single mother in Connecticut — on the edge of a bridge. Hai is preparing to plunge into the “black water churned like chemically softened granite” when Grazina, a nonagenarian Lithuanian widow, appears out of the mist, talks him down and takes him to her ramshackle home, where he lives for the remainder of the novel. The setting is a fictional New England town of East Gladness, a kind of American ‘Under Milk Wood’ in the age of the opioid crisisHai gets a job at a fast-food restaurant where his autistic cousin Sony also works. Hai’s colleagues and customers are a familiar mix of the addicted, destitute and left-behind that have become a staple in depictions of blue-collar America. Their dialogue sounds forced, with a profusion of expletives, and Vuong’s portrayals of these oddly named figures do not always make sense: “Russia was eighteen but still had the raspy timbre of adolescence, the kind of voice that makes you want to say yes even if he’s just asking you the time.”Hai has told his mother that he is studying medicine in Boston and, even though East Gladness is not a big place, his lie is never exposed. The narrator explains that Hai “rode his bike with his hoodie up just in case”, but anyone who has been a teenager in a small town knows it is impossible to get away with anything. That said, Hai’s phone conversations with his mother, in which she encourages him to work hard at college and triggers his guilt, are the novel’s most affecting moments. In Time is a Mother, Vuong wrote moving poems about the death of his own mother and he seems to channel those emotions into Hai’s story.Improbable deceptions, minimum-wage employees with hearts of gold, friendships between young men and elderly women — these things need not be implausible in a novel but here they ring false. There is little plot, other than the sense that Hai’s lies, Grazina’s descent into dementia and Sony’s quest to get his mother out of prison may converge in a denouement. Instead, Vuong’s desire to capture life in a diverse and decrepit town is writ large. It is a worthy aim but his execution is clumsy. Plenty of contemporary poets — Ben Lerner, Luke Kennard and Kaveh Akbar among them — write exhilarating fiction. But to see one of the most celebrated new poets of the past decade produce a novel as overwritten as The Emperor of Gladness is a reminder of the difficulty of moving between literary forms. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, Jonathan Cape £20/Penguin Press $30, 416 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
