Book Review: 'Emperor of Gladness' Is Worth the Heartbreak and Pain

There’s something profoundly beautiful about a carefully constructed evocation of failure, despair, togetherness, and survival. When it’s unveiled sensitively, as it’s done so brilliantly in Ocean Vuong’s second novel The Emperor of Gladness, we are assured that the rough ride from the opening pages to the heartbreaking finale is going to be worth our trouble. Vuong’s debut novel, 2019’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, was a multi-generational coming of age story about a young poet understanding generational trauma and his place in the world, was a manageable 256 pages that set the table, served dinner, and cleaned up in time to go home and rest easy. With The Emperor of Gladness we are in similar terrain but the meal is a banquet and the writer is implicitly telling us one thing: Don’t get too comfortable. You’re going to be up for a while with this one. Some of it might not go down that easy but the rewards are immeasurable.

We open with a long, slow pan over the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut. This is William Faulkner, John Steinbeck Sherwood Anderson territory. “If you aim for gladness and miss,” the narrator explains, “you’ll find us.” There’s a “moss so lush between the wooden rail ties that…it looks like algae.” There’s a junkyard “packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia.” Vuong brings us through this stillness and resignation and fixes onto Hai, a 19 year old college dropout “in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light.” Hai is a young Vietnamese man burdened by his mother’s expectations that he become a doctor. In despair over that and a variety of other things (including coming to terms with his sexuality), at the last minute Hai crosses rather than jumps off a bridge, entering the life of an 82 year old Lithuanian woman named Graziana.

It’s at this point the cynical reader might see this as a formulaic ploy. It’s as if Clarence from “It’s A Wonderful Life” has come to save George Bailey. Graziana is in the late stages of dementia, Hai is in the early stages of fully realized clinical depression, and they do manage to find a purpose in and balance with each other’s lives. He will be her de facto caregiver in exchange for free room and board. Hai is introduced to a library of American classics at Graziana’s house and he immerses himself in them. Literature helps Hai make sense of the world. He had set off from home with his mother with the understanding that he’d be going to medical school in Boston, not that he’d be jumping off a bridge.

This life Hai creates with Graziana becomes fixed and comfortable, but he needs a job. Enter Home Market, a food store/restaurant where Hai gets a job and connects with his cousin Sony. “He had become an employee and thus had obtained an eternal present…” This is where Vuong introduces the most thrilling element of this novel. We’re not just in a “Midnight Cowboy” or Of Mice and Men framework, where unlikely couples find themselves tangled in each other’s lives and compelled to make things work (or not.) The Emperor of Gladness is a novel about work, purpose, the solidarity of found family and the dignity of a work ethic in late 2000s America, in the midst of a recession, where work was not about laying a foundation for the future so much as finding stability in the sinking ship of the here and now.

Hai’s found family at Home Market includes his manager BJ, an amateur wrestler with a heart of gold, a conspiracy theorist-minded woman named Maureen, and Wayne. Hai’s cousin Sony was born with autism and a hydrocephalic condition that left a literal scar down his face and a figurative one on his self-esteem. At home with Graziana, Hai reads the Russian classics and dreams of another life. The books are in horrible physical condition, and it’s here where one of the many powerful themes in this book is beautifully expressed:

“How strange to feel something so close to mercy…among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away…still somebody’s son.”

One of the more unforgettable seat pieces in The Emperor of Gladness takes place at the approximate halfway point. Hai and his Home Market colleagues find themselves helping out at a slaughterhouse as a way to earn extra money. Wayne explains that the so-called “organic” pig meat people think they’re getting isn’t exactly healthy but rather filled with sludge and fat. Vuong name drops Linda McMahon, then running for a Connecticut State seat and now inexplicably the US Secretary of Education. She’d ordered thirty hogs for a Christmas fundraiser and as a reader in this real world we have to wonder if we are also in the slaughterhouse, ready for the shot between our eyes. He hears the pigs screaming, “...more like preteen girls than pigs.”

Vuong writes:

"How many people actually know how a pig is killed? How much strength, adrenaline, it took- even a sinister kind of charisma?”

It’s a graphic and extremely detailed description that can stand with Upton SInclair’s The Jungle, but it’s not done in a gratuitous manner. In fact, Vuong does pay it off in a beautiful, graceful way in the final pages. Hai listens to the river’s rush but he hears something else. He hears the hogs again:

“Dragged by their hooves into the Emperor’s butchery, they were screaming from a galaxy far, far away, inside him. And they sounded just like people, who live only once.”

There really is magic and wonder on almost every page in The Emperor of Gladness. Vuong has Hai wonder about his friends and their multiverses, and he thinks about ghosts. “‘For most people, their ghost is inside them, waiting to float out when they die. But my ghost is in pieces.’”

Vuong focuses on battles known and unknown, lost souls forever in limbo as seen in Sony’s obsession with Gettysburg. For all the poetic grace included in this book, and it’s surfeit with stunning moments, Vuong is also extremely comfortable with the matter of fact moments. “Never cry in a diner,” Grazina warns Hai in the final pages. “They charge extra if they catch you.”

The “otherness” of this novel is less concerned about Hai’s racial identity than it is about loneliness, isolation, the desire for family and the need for definition. Hai is a young Vietnamese man born in a late 1980s world, approximately fifteen years away from the fall of Saigon but still suffering from the scars that will take a long time to heal. If everything that can break will eventually heal, it’s still going to take a long time for Ocean Vuong’s characters to be granted any modicum of tender mercy. This is real life. Sometimes we’ll always have loose ends and not every split strand is wrapped up in a beautiful bow. Ocean Vuong has been granted the Oprah Winfrey seal of approval, and there may be consequences to such clearly delineated mainstream acceptance, but nothing will take away from the power of this brilliant, masterful novel all about- as he so beautifully ends his final page:

“Soft, simple people, who live only once.”