Written by Ocean Vuong

The Emperor of Gladness is a linguistic triumph. Ocean Vuong’s sentences are dazzling and it’s hard not to get caught up in them, at times, even weighed down by them. They bear re-reading and re-reading again, slowly. This is a story of a young Asian man in crisis, who gets stopped in his tracks as he’s about to jump off a bridge by an old woman suffering from dementia who calls to him across the river. From there, an endearing friendship ensues. Hai ends up being the woman’s caretaker, encourages and takes part in her delusions, so that the book at times becomes like a twilight zone of the mind as the two engage in their pretending. Hai, a drug addict, gets a job in a fast food restaurant where he befriends several marvelous, quirky characters that come to represent a found family, all of whom are trapped by their lives but nonetheless find a community among themselves, and who move the plot to wild, sometimes slapstick places that nonetheless border on despair: to a bar wrestling match, a hog packing plant. We grow to love these characters and empathize with their hard lives, as we do with the protagonist who struggles with his addiction and the way to be in this world throughout the novel. “’I don’t know how to be,’ Hai said., his own harried plea scaring him. ‘How do you stay here? How does anybody stay here?’” The Emperor of Gladness is a character-driven novel, for sure, and the plot meanders from one scene to the next, not in any linear fashion. The characters, though bound by their poverty, are kind and generous, though living on the edge of crisis. It reads like a parable of America itself, about the working poor who labor without the promise of any prosperity. At the novel’s heart is a mastery of language: of syntax and metaphor and description and diction. This is a book to be savored, and read again.