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 Wonderful Life”: on the edge of a bridge, contemplating suicide. Rain pelts him rather than snow.
Hai is 19 in September of 2009, “in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light,” a Vietnamese-born college dropout who’s returned to a bleak Connecticut town called East Gladness, which fell far south of any gladness even before the recession.
His salvation, his Clarence the angel, arrives in the form of Grazina: an 82-year-old Lithuanian widow who, after a Who’s on First-like exchange, insists on calling him Labas, which means “hi” in her language. Mid-stage frontal-lobe dementia has not yet kneecapped her knee-slappers. “You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge?” she teases him. “That’s pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.”
But Vuong, named for the largest body of water there is, has been soaring. In an era when readers need to be gently coaxed to read poetry, his is widely heralded. His first novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (2019), told in the form of a letter to the narrator’s illiterate mother, was a best seller, though some critics found it disjointed and overcurlicued.
Like that book, the new one has some clearly autobiographical elements. But “The Emperor of Gladness” — its title echoing both Wallace Stevens (a habitué of nearby Hartford) on ice cream and Siddhartha Mukherjee on cancer — is a more conventional example of the form, divided into seasons.
Hai moves into Grazina’s dilapidated clapboard house, crammed with watchful owl tchotchkes, as a part-time caregiver and companion. The arrangement helps him maintain the fiction he’s told his mother, a nail-salon worker who numbs her own sorrows with endless games of Tetris: that he’s attending medical school in Boston.
These odd roommates are bonded by pills. Hai lost a friend to a fentanyl overdose and has been to rehab himself, but can’t kick oxy and codeine. Grazina has her senior regimen of Aricept, Lipitor and more. They are shadowed by familial war traumas (her little brother’s death; his uncle’s mysterious wound) and self-soothe by re-enacting ludicrous battle scenes, during which Labas morphs into “Sergeant Pepper.”
Grazina’s rich son is lurking in the background, eager to stash her in a nursing home, “the only true egalitarian wing of the American dream.”
Through a cousin named Sony (after the Trinitron television), Hai also gets a minimum-wage job at a lucrative franchise of HomeMarket, a “fast casual” restaurant higher on the food chain than Wendy’s or Dunkin. Though it’s “not so much a restaurant as a giant microwave,” there is a measure of community and dignity there.
Or at least, a fresh start. “He had become an employee and thus had obtained an eternal present, manifested only by his functional existence on the timecard. He had no history because one was not required of him, and having no history also meant having no sadness.”
As at “The Office,” one of Grazina’s favorite TV programs, HomeMarket is the stage for an array of diverse and daffy personalities: the 6-foot-3, buzz-cut female manager who aspires to the pro wrestling circuit; the diabetic “chicken man” on the grill who looks like a portly Al Green; the foulmouthed Irish cashier whose son died; the nose-ringed drive-thru guy known as Russia.
Food, its byproducts, processes and essential grossness, strafes this crew. They are doused in cheese sauce when trying to help a guest overdosing in the bathroom; pelted with pizza in the parking lot by an independent rival; offended by an asparagus festival packed with white people; and doused with blood and emotion during a freelance stint slaughtering hogs. (It is, of course, infinitely worse for the hogs.)
Much is made of the line between cornbread and cake, sugar being the opiate of the masses. Meanwhile, Grazina gleefully stomps dinner rolls and stockpiles Stouffer’s frozen dinners, reveling in American plenty after surviving Stalin’s purges. She claims her father invented fruit salad.
There is a terrific ripeness to the pages of “The Emperor of Gladness” that sometimes edges into bruising. The reader is forever being dragged along, metaphorically speaking, as someone slips slow motion on a banana peel.
For sure this is a book deeply attentive to oft-overlooked populations and simple survival; Hai may be reading “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “The Brothers Karamazov,” but he’s living out of “Fast Food Nation” and “Nickel and Dimed.” (That noted, Vuong should know that Medicare doesn’t cover live-in nurses.)
There are trenchant observations about even ambitious people being “soft and scared,” a species “mushy” like overcooked peas or spaghetti. The dialogue does a lot for the story — maybe too much.
Little incongruities have slipped past the poet’s sensitive ear, linguistic viralities from a more recent internet: an E.M.T. with a mullet saying “’preciate chuh,” which rose to prominence after “Ted Lasso”; a counselor in rehab marveling that Sun Tzu “doesn’t miss, huh?”; Hai asking his mother incredulously during an argument, “We’re really doing this?”
Comparing a bad case of acne on a young man’s face to “weathered cuneiform on old marble”? In an Ocean Vuong novel, we’re really doing this.
THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS | By Ocean Vuong | Penguin Press | 416 pp. | $30