Hai is 19 and suicidal. Grazina is 81 and living alone with dementia. So when she strikes a deal to house him so they can keep each other company in exchange for his help as a kind of unofficial live-in nurse, this could spell their mutual salvation or destruction.
Ocean Vuong’s new novel follows Hai as he takes care of Grazina and works in a fast-casual restaurant to help support them. Told in moments, “The Emperor of Gladness” takes existentialism to a deeply intimate level, leaving the reader to contemplate what it is to live in a messy, complicated world of wars, addiction, class struggles and good people looking for second chances. The novel was immediately named Oprah Winfrey’s latest book club pick.
The author draws heavily on his own life — from Hai’s family fleeing the Vietnam War to their jobs in the service industry that allow them to scrape by — so “The Emperor of Gladness” is only a few degrees away from a memoir. And while it’s told in prose, Vuong’s penchant for poetry shows in patches of colorful, visceral language strewn with metaphors that run through the whole book, all the way back to its title.
The novel opens with a movie-like sweep through East Gladness, a tiny town outside of Hartford, Connecticut. The omniscient narrator zooms in on various scenes of decay and neglect until we land on Hai, at possibly his lowest point.
There’s not so much a plot as a gathering of people and experiences. We piece together the characters’ stories the way you would with real people in real life; through snippets that build atop each other until you can patch together a narrative of the relationships that left the biggest scars and the events that had profound impacts. Vuong achieves more by writing beside his characters than one would by writing a straightforward story about them.
True and gritty, “The Emperor of Gladness” is almost voyeuristic in how it looks into the most intimate and human moments of people’s lives, reflecting back on the reader and leaving plenty to ponder.
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