Hai is walking along the bridge over the river, he knows what he intends to do once he reaches the middle. However, just as he puts an uncertain foot towards its precipitous edge, a voice cries out from beneath him to come down this minute. It's an elderly woman living in a dilapidated house near the river bank. She is a Lithuanian refugee from the war, called Grazina, and she is about to save and turn Hai's life around. Hai's emotional resilience has reached rock bottom, his lover has died, only the UPS jacket he wears is a physical reminder. He's grown distant from his Mother, because he continues to perpetrate a lie to her, about being at university learning to be a doctor. Obtaining a job in the local Home Market takeaway through his cousin Sony, a whole bunch of characterful individuals become his oddball chosen family.
Ocean Vuong's second novel is notably more assured and steady in its tone, than his debut. The Emperor of Gladness has these astonishingly vivid runs of prose detail. Taking you on a compelling walk through the houses and businesses that constitute the town of East Gladness. Presenting you with a panoramic sense of the idiosyncratic and traditional nature of small town America. The ordinary straightforward people who live there, and their distinct ways of making the humdrum nature of their lives bearable. They may talk about leaving, but they belong here, they know who they are by living here.
The emotional core of the book is constructed around Hai's relationship with Grazina. She is prone to incidences of dementia, becoming lost in reliving her own nightmarish memories. Hai builds a rapport and learns how to play act alongside these distressing recollections, to help her escape from them. Most of the deeply heartbreaking scenes in this novel are between these two, as Grazina struggles to maintain here sense of reality and independence. Capturing the mutual need that both of them have, to reconcile themselves to their past.
Like his debut, The Emperor of Gladness casts an autobiographical shadow. In both novels the central character lives estranged from his Mother, with oblique foreshadowing references to him writing a book one day. Vuong has developed an easy satirical wit, that is kind but knowing, about the mildly eccentric absurdities of his characters lives. Painting a droll humourous picture of a downtown takeaway that has become slightly grubby and past it's best, with it's longstanding petty rivalries towards other fast food joints. The novel is a celebration of the plain ordinariness of these people's lives. In a place where few other options are available, they make the most out of whatever life serves them.
One vividly described scene is a side hustle a group of them go on. The psychotic effect on them of repeatedly shooting hogs in the head in a butchers abbatoir, is genuinely disturbing. From its opening pages this is a masterly written novel, seeming to drift into moments of uncertainty in the middle, that then recovers it's sense of direction with a heartbreaking conclusion. This structural unevenness was present in his debut. On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong appeared to suddenly discover the magical tone of his own authorial voice mid novel.
I've thoroughly enjoyed reading both of his novels. I find I feel much fonder of them in retrospect, than I often do when I'm reading them. The colourfulness of the world he portrays, lingers in the back of my imaginative recall. The struggles we all go through to create something out of our prosaic short lives, is presented through them with such an appealing and good natured fondness.
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8
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