"The Emperor of Gladness" Review: Ocean Vuong’s Second Novel Is a Quiet Epic
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By Quinn Kinsella
Ocean Vuong is the poet laureate of our time. His deeply empathetic nature and honest writing have won him the trust of readers worldwide and the best-selling status he boasts at 37 years old. His latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is a quiet epic, tackling themes of identity, addiction, and family, both found and born into.
Vuong’s prose soars and dips through the peaks and valleys of the human experience. Vuong is the author of two poetry collections, Night Sky With Exit Wounds and Time Is a Mother, as well as the best-selling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. With The Emperor of Gladness, Vuong offers the world a book that is incredibly important. Perhaps more important than the author himself realizes. As a CUNY graduate himself, Vuong represents the strength, resilience, and creative integrity that the City University of New York stands for. He graduated from Brooklyn College in 2008 with a B.A. in English and later obtained an M.F.A in poetry at New York University. He teaches there now, citing his professorship as a deeply meaningful vocation, and one he takes very seriously. This idea of imparting knowledge in the form of language is something that is apparent in Gladness.
The Emperor of Gladness is populated with characters as real as the paper they’re printed on. Our protagonist, Hai, acts as a surrogate for all Americans in their late teens, shipwrecked from adolescence onto the uncertain shore of adulthood. When the novel opens, he has dropped out of college, but his mother is under the impression that he is still attending. Hai’s cousin Sony works with him at Homemarket, a fast casual restaurant similar to eateries like Panera Bread and Boston Market. Hai and Sony’s coworkers at Homemarket offer a tapestry of experiences that reflect working-class America in a vivid and life-affirming way. Rounding out the ensemble is the 82-year-old widow, Grazina, the Lithuanian-American woman whose dementia leads her to recall graphic images of World War II, which leads Hai to become something of a caretaker and friend to her.
Ocean Vuong offers the reader an invitation to a post-industrial New England town teaming with people as relatable to his readers as they are to him. Vuong’s characters and settings offer the lived-in narrative an autobiographical feel, and his descriptions of these characters and the dreams they hold make you want to hug Vuong’s novel to your chest. This book makes you want to call up that coworker of yours at the fast-food job you had five years ago and tell them how much you appreciated their jokes during the lunch rush. This book makes you want to call your mom at three in the morning and tell her you love her. The Emperor of Gladness is a quiet epic, using underrepresented characters to create a narrative that feels endlessly personal. It’s the kind of book that can change a person for the better. The type of novel that can make someone feel seen.
The novel opens with Hai standing on a bridge, contemplating taking his life. Vuong’s description of a New England winter drips with the urgency his protagonist feels while standing on the unsteady steel of a decaying bridge. A swift Connecticut river flows beneath him as he thinks what he supposes are his final thoughts. A woman far off in the distance catches his attention, screaming, “Come back! Come back now!” This is Grazina, collecting drying laundry in the backyard of her small house in a deserted neighborhood. Later in the novel, it is revealed that Grazina was not at first aware of Hai; she was rather calling out to a sheet that had blown away in the wind.
All authors’ work is a product of their birthplace. For instance, Steinbeck’s work is imbued with Southern California’s majesty, and the Brontë sisters’ work is haunted by the moors they inhabited as children. Vuong’s work is reflective of a known environment, much the same as these other literary masters. His conviction of landscape and character are not aspects that cannot be manufactured; they must be lived. And Vuong has weathered these terrains and the characters that weave in and out of them in the beautiful fashion that his readers have grown to expect.
Gladness often fails to offer an optimistic and positive view of static American culture. Rags-to-riches stories sell because people buy into these ideals that career and financial success equal happiness. Hai presents a way of thinking that Vuong has supported in his worldwide book tour for the release of the novel: maybe okayness is a better and more sustainable way to live than happiness. In an interview with the Hindustan Times, Vuong has this to say about happiness:
Happiness is often so random and subjective. And in this culture, it’s been captured by commerce. You want to be happy? Take this pill, get this car, go on another retreat. The goalpost of happiness keeps being moved, so that we can keep funneling money into the system. So, I thought, what would happen if we reframe the obsession with happiness with a goal for contentment, fulfilment, “okayness?” Also “okayness” being dull is such a Western/American privilege! Because there are people in the world right now who would give everything to be “okay”.
We are sold this fake product of year-round happiness perpetuated by the materialistic integrity that keeps America’s shaky economy standing. The great myth of America is the American Dream. Sure, America is the land of opportunity, but in an age where immigrants are scrutinized more than ever, it no longer serves as a safe haven for those searching for a better life. Vuong’s novel can perhaps serve as a signal in the storm, a guiding light to cut through the fog of the uncertainty of growing up and navigating the increasingly confusing landscape of life.
Vuong’s novel is extremely political and also a patriotic piece of art that shows the oppression that immigrants in this country face. America’s contradictions feed into its one truth: You are free to be happy. You are free to be sad. You are free to be okay. But above all, you are free to be you. And that one truth that America has seemed to represent since its birth is in jeopardy now more than ever.
The Emperor of Gladness has all the makings of a literary classic. A critical analysis of a country in the throes of a midlife crisis with characters of moral integrity and emotional ingenuity, Gladness will find itself on future English Lit syllabi and will become victim to dog-eared pages and underlined passages in the homes of Stanford professors and McDonald's employees alike. And that is the true identity of a classic: the power to connect.
Quinn Kinsella is a film major in his senior year at The City College of New York. He is the Managing Editor at The Paper and covers pop culture and on-campus arts and culture. In his free time, he enjoys watching movies, reading books, and writing poetry.