Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

A NOVEL

The Emperor of Gladness

Grace McCarter

“She wrote poems too, my little Lina. Better than Robert Frost, if you can believe it. 

What did he do, anyway? Look at trees and feel bad? That’s no way to live.”

Lindsay

He thought of all the people who once drank and ate from the cups, the wrappers and boxes now stuffed in black bags that buoyed him toward what he was always becoming: lifted by what this town refused. The trash was no longer just trash—but evidence. Because to discard is to move on. Inside the dumpster, he was pressed on all sides by human forwardness. Everything’s a room, he realized, too late. The cars on the interstate nothing but rooms with wheels. The endless prescription bottles. And the body, too, a room, and so is the heart. So is the cell in the blood spilling back to the world, only to be contained by more world, which keeps even the atoms that make up the Styrofoam cups and trays sloughed daily from the back of HomeMarket. The average lifespan of a take-out container is one minute and forty-two seconds. Lying on garbage was the closest to weightlessness he’d ever been, and he wondered if this was what it was like for the astronauts floating in outer space, their soft bodies held by their suits. We always belong somewhere, if only to whatever’s holding us, and shouldn’t that be a good thing? To have your uselessness become a marker of time, waste being the proof of having lived at all? He had successfully thrown himself into the trash, and the act was so complete, so total, it felt clean. He was a container inside a container filled with containers contained by space—and somehow this made him full.

“A soldier—” Sony winced and corrected himself. “A career soldier needs a foundation of courage, duty, and sacrifice.”

“But you don’t need that crap. It’s just bullshit the commercials say to convince you to go to war. Let me tell you something, okay?” Hai glanced back at the tracks to make sure a train wasn’t coming. “You say I’m so smart, right? Cause I went to college and all that? Then listen to me.” He put both hands on Sony’s shoulders. “Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart. From prison guards to teachers, to managers, psychiatrists, even fathers, anybody—even your stupid generals. People put on this facade of strength. They act like they have a purpose and a mission and their whole life is supposed to lead to this grand fucking thesis of who they are. But what happened, huh? Robert E. Lee sent all those people who believed in him across a half mile of hell because he was too scared to say he fucked up and had no cavalry. His generals told him to fall back to the mountains, but he wouldn’t listen. You told me that, right?” 

“He also had dysentery,” Sony mumbled.

Hai clutched Sony’s shoulders, as if steering a ship. “They’re just scared somebody will look at them bad and judge ’em. Scared somebody will see through the fake-ass armor they’ve wasted their whole lives building. And for what? To have fucking dysentery while a bunch of people who think you’re some god walk into a wall of bullets? Don’t you see it? We all want some story to make it bearable so we can keep living long enough to work our asses off until we’re in the ground, like Grandma. Like your dad. Like…” Hai sucked on his bloody lip. “Look, being fucked up is actually what’s most common. It’s the majority of who we are, what everybody is. Fucked up is the most normal thing in the world. You’re both fucked up and you’re normal, got it?” He searched Sony’s face to see what his words were doing, not sure if he even believed them himself. How come every time he said anything important, it felt like it was coming from somewhere else, from a cesspool collected from shitty movies at the base of his skull?

“Everyone’s scared,” Hai continued. “It’s just like those stupid corn breads we give out every day. They all have this thin golden-brown crust, but ninety-nine percent of those things are just soft, mushy cake with a shit ton of sugar. So you don’t have to be anybody’s soldier. You can be a person doing what you do every day and that’s fucking enough. Don’t you get it?” He was nearly doubled over now, his arms still on Sony’s shoulders, catching his breath, then pushed on.

“People aren’t so bad. They’re just wounded little kids trying to heal. And that makes them tell each other stupid stories,” he said softly. “Would you just stand in your skin with me and stay? Just for a bit, while I sort this out? Will you stay? Please? I can’t do this anymore.”

What does it do to your mind to see “your people” die so vastly that you can’t even tell that they are not, in fact, your people at all?

He wiped his nose with the sleeve of the nurse jacket as he thought about that time, a time he barely remembered. He had dropped out of school in New York not because he was getting headaches from reading too much, as his mother had thought, but because one day Noah stopped breathing and a week after that was lowered in the cold November ground. What could he have said to his mother about a boy she’d never met? To even tell of it would reveal how he had chosen his sadness over her joy, over her pride in him making it to college after everything, after the war, the refugee camp, the abusive husband, the dead mother and estranged sister. But he had come home—he had given up—only because he wanted to be near her, New York being unbearable in grief, its massive and unending throb of human magnetism making the vacant parts in him more vacuous than he could bear.

“Because it’s like that when you’re fourteen,” he said. The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing—which is also the same as being very old. “You can ride a thought in and out of somebody, and it’ll do so little damage, you think anything’s possible. You can say things like I want to be a gay father with a wife and kids, or When I’m high enough I start to feel sorry for straight people, they always seem trapped on front lawns

And the water was so clear, so sweet, your skin looked truer than it did on the surface, warped and magnified by the tiny current they made from their scavenged laughter. He told of Noah’s barn, where they knew the wrong inside them was the only thing that made sense of where they grew up, where the gods, after flipping the table from losing their bets, left them alone to make a fugitive life. That a boy beside a boy could form an island called “okayness.” “With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy—but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.” He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. “Okay is underrated.

There are even doctors among them, lawyers, custodians, minor politicians, bureaucratic functionaries, pilots, bakers, and barkeeps, varied stations of life now equalized in the only true egalitarian wing of the American dream: the nursing home, where the past is nothing but what it’s done to you. Where “a home,” like this one, is often a place to hide the aging body, the crepe-paper skin, the wounds weeping with yellow sap, anemic bruises that stay for weeks, bloodshot brown eyes. How is it that we have become so certain that the sight of years, the summation of decades, should inflict such violence on the viewer—including family—that we have built entire fortresses to keep such bodies out of sight?

Below the scene was printed, in block letters, the command Don’t let your child be swallowed by depression. Underneath this was the name of a pill, Luminkind, that was to rescue your kid from this natural disaster of the mind. Hai wondered if he was too old to take something made for children. At what point does childhood sadness become adult sadness anyway? Does the tsunami get larger as the figure grows? Was his wave already twice the size of the one in the poster?

he was only alive inside pieces of mistakes that gravity had collected into a life raft called the present.

Because to remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering. The idea made him sick.

There was no shame, the boy thought, in losing yourself to something as natural as gravity—where one doesn’t jump but is pulled, blameless, toward the sea. If nothing else, this would hurt his mother least.

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.

 But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

I really wanted to like this more than I did. 

There were moments that truly stayed with me especially the story between Hai and Grazina, which I really loved. Their connection felt raw, intimate and beautifully written. Those sections kept me completely invested.

That said, I often felt pulled out of the story whenever it shifted to Hai at work with the other characters. Those parts didn’t pull me in the same way and sometimes felt empty, breaking the emotional momentum I had with the central relationship.

 is one of my favorites and I also loved 

 so I had high expectations for this book. 

While his writing is stunning and his exploration of human connection is deeply moving, for me this one worked best when it focused on the personal and emotional core.

Still, it’s worth reading if you appreciate delicate, heartfelt storytelling even if it didn’t fully hit the mark for me!

Essence

I really wanted to like this more than I did. 

There were moments that truly stayed with me especially the story between Hai and Grazina, which I really loved. Their connection felt raw, intimate and beautifully written. Those sections kept me completely invested.

That said, I often felt pulled out of the story whenever it shifted to Hai at work with the other characters. Those parts didn’t pull me in the same way and sometimes felt empty, breaking the emotional momentum I had with the central relationship.

I’ve read Ocean Vuong before, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is one of my favorites and I also loved Time Is a Mother so I had high expectations for this book. 

While his writing is stunning and his exploration of human connection is deeply moving, for me this one worked best when it focused on the personal and emotional core.

Still, it’s worth reading if you appreciate delicate, heartfelt storytelling even if it didn’t fully hit the mark for me!



ellie 💐💌⭐️

oh, this was so warm & delightful. the entire novel felt like I was slowly sinking to the bottom of a river—this, to me, is the heart of vuong's voice: the ability to conjure the sensation of muted, beautiful reverie despite cradling hard, spiky subjects. vuong's the emperor of gladness is a reminder of why tender, emotive language is important and necessary, regardless of form, as it is a reminder of why softness is vital and life-giving. vuong is always thinking through loneliness (and how it's still time spent with the world), and this novel is that meditation in longform. it's a novel that insists on itself and vuong's poetics, saying, it is in your self-interest to be very tender, and it is, it is. there was nothing surprising about this text—except maybe that it was uncharacteristically hilarious at certain points—but I really enjoyed that; there's a kind of comfort in knowing a writer's voice and knowing what move will be made (with great mastery) next. another book to throw into the pool of evidence that poets make the best novelists, but also hilarious the entirely loose position poets generally take on the fictive; I mean, the protaganist's name is hai, as in the sea, as in ocean. vuong has delivered yet another banger and no one but his haters are surprised 

biddy

“The hardest thing in the world is to only live once.” / “[...] the ubiquitous Mary Oliver quote hung on nearly every spare surface in the rehab—the communal fridge, the microwave, bathroom stalls, even the broken fire alarm by the detox: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

shen

„Er war neunzehn, in der Mitternacht seiner Kindheit und noch ein ganzes Leben vom ersten Tageslicht entfernt. Man hatte ihm nicht verziehen, so wenig wie dir.“

In diesem Roman geht es um eine zerrüttete Jugend und eine Freundschaft, wie ich sie noch nie in so einer Intensität und Schönheit gelesen habe.

Ocean Vuong zeichnet in seinem Roman ein Bild von Menschen, die aufgrund ihrer sozialen Herkunft, Krankheit und anderen Umständen ihr Leben in einer Kleinstadt führen, jeden Tag kämpfen und bleiben. Ein Bild, das nicht verzerrt ist, das die Wahrheit und Rohheit dieses Lebens zeigt – mit seinen ungemütlichen, hässlichen Details, von denen die meisten nichts wissen möchten. Oft wollen wir eine perfekte Welt sehen: sauber, ordentlich, voller Möglichkeiten. Vuong macht durch seine Geschichte eine Realität sichtbar, auf die wir hinschauen sollten.

Das Buch erzählt von einer intensiven Freundschaft zwischen den jungen Protagonisten und einer alten, alleinstehenden Frau. Beide verloren und mit ihren eigenen Problemen belastet, führen sie eine Beziehung, in der sie sich umeinander kümmern. Darüber hinaus geht es um den Fastfood-Laden, in dem der Protagonist arbeitet, und um das Team, das zu einer Familie wächst.

Feinfühlig, poetisch, manchmal auch derb erschuf Vuong ein kleines Meisterwerk, das bis ins Mark berührt. Seine Sprache ist ein Spektrum, das ich wohl nie in seiner Fülle begreifen werde

Zainab 

„Er war neunzehn, in der Mitternacht seiner Kindheit und noch ein ganzes Leben vom ersten Tageslicht entfernt. Man hatte ihm nicht verziehen, so wenig wie dir.“

In diesem Roman geht es um eine zerrüttete Jugend und eine Freundschaft, wie ich sie noch nie in so einer Intensität und Schönheit gelesen habe.


Ocean Vuong zeichnet in seinem Roman ein Bild von Menschen, die aufgrund ihrer sozialen Herkunft, Krankheit und anderen Umständen ihr Leben in einer Kleinstadt führen, jeden Tag kämpfen und bleiben. Ein Bild, das nicht verzerrt ist, das die Wahrheit und Rohheit dieses Lebens zeigt – mit seinen ungemütlichen, hässlichen Details, von denen die meisten nichts wissen möchten. Oft wollen wir eine perfekte Welt sehen: sauber, ordentlich, voller Möglichkeiten. Vuong macht durch seine Geschichte eine Realität sichtbar, auf die wir hinschauen sollten.

Das Buch erzählt von einer intensiven Freundschaft zwischen den jungen Protagonisten und einer alten, alleinstehenden Frau. Beide verloren und mit ihren eigenen Problemen belastet, führen sie eine Beziehung, in der sie sich umeinander kümmern. Darüber hinaus geht es um den Fastfood-Laden, in dem der Protagonist arbeitet, und um das Team, das zu einer Familie wächst.

Feinfühlig, poetisch, manchmal auch derb erschuf Vuong ein kleines Meisterwerk, das bis ins Mark berührt. Seine Sprache ist ein Spektrum, das ich wohl nie in seiner Fülle begreifen werde



The Emperor of Gladness A NOVEL

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