THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS, by Ocean Vuong
We first meet the hero of Ocean Vuong’s second novel, “The Emperor of Gladness,” as we did George Bailey in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Fantastic Life”: on the sting of a bridge, considering suicide. Rain pelts him moderately than snow.
Hai is nineteen in September of 2009, “within the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first mild,” a Vietnamese-born faculty dropout who’s returned to a bleak Connecticut city known as East Gladness, which fell far south of any gladness even earlier than the recession.
His salvation, his Clarence the angel, arrives within the type of Grazina: an 82-year-old Lithuanian widow who, after a Who’s on First-like change, insists on calling him Labas, which implies “hello” in her language. Mid-stage frontal-lobe dementia has not but kneecapped her knee-slappers. “You wanna be a author and you wish to soar off a bridge?” she teases him. “That’s just about the identical factor, no? A author simply takes longer to hit the water.”
However Vuong, named for the most important physique of water there’s, has been hovering. In an period when readers must be gently coaxed to read poetry, his is widely heralded. His first novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (2019), informed within the type of a letter to the narrator’s illiterate mom, was a greatest vendor, although some critics discovered it disjointed and overcurlicued.
Like that guide, the brand new one has some clearly autobiographical elements. However “The Emperor of Gladness” — its title echoing each Wallace Stevens (a habitué of close by Hartford) on ice cream and Siddhartha Mukherjee on most cancers — is a extra standard instance of the shape, divided into seasons.
Hai strikes into Grazina’s dilapidated clapboard home, filled with watchful owl tchotchkes, as a part-time caregiver and companion. The association helps him keep the fiction he’s informed his mom, a nail-salon employee who numbs her personal sorrows with countless video games of Tetris: that he’s attending medical faculty in Boston.
