Ocean Vuong and Wallace Stevens share the mantle of being great poets of Hartford, Connecticut—where Vuong grew up and where Stevens spent much of his life. Vuong nods to this connection with the title of his second novel: The Emperor of Gladness, after Stevens’ famous, funereal poem “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” Though it returns to the Connecticut setting and many of the themes of his debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, The Emperor of Gladness represents an evolution of Vuong’s novelistic powers. Like Stevens’ poem, it’s magisterial, precise and mythic in its resonance.
The book opens with an almost cinematic view of the town of East Gladness with its strip malls and fields of corn and tobacco. It’s 2009, and 19-year-old Hai has just left a brief stint in rehab. Unable to face returning home to his mother, who thinks he’s attending medical school in Boston, Hai ends up on a rusted suspension bridge, ready to jump. But he’s stopped by an elderly woman who spots him from across the river. Grazina, who has dementia and lives alone, offers Hai a place to stay if he’ll help her around the house. And so, for now, there’s a way for Hai to go on.
Living with Grazina means following along when she descends into memories of her youth in Lithuania, caught between Stalin and the Nazis. But Hai learns to navigate her illness, and they become friends. When they can no longer afford Grazina’s favorite Stouffer’s Salisbury steak frozen dinners on her dead husband’s pension, Hai decides to get a job at HomeMarket, a restaurant chain where his cousin Sony works. There, he learns that Sony’s mother is in jail, and Sony is trying to earn her bail. Part of Hai wants to help Sony, but he has his own problems—much like the rest of the HomeMarket crew, each of whom is caught in their own seemingly inescapable bind.
War is a constant presence in these pages: in Grazina’s flashbacks, in Hai’s family history and in Sony’s obsession with Civil War history, especially the movie Gettysburg. Throughout the novel, characters search for methods of organizing and understanding this suffering. For Sony, the maxim “Everything bad always happens to the South” explains both the slaughter at Gettysburg and the fact that his father, who fought for South Vietnam, left their family when he was born. For Maureen, the cashier at HomeMarket, the explanation is that the world is controlled by reptiles who feed off our bad feelings.
The key to The Emperor of Gladness is that however they frame it, none of these characters see any hope of saving one another, or even of saving themselves. Instead, in being together, they simply find a way to continue. That, alone, is significant, Vuong reminds us. It may be the project of a lifetime—and if it is, that’s enough.
Read our interview with Ocean Vuong about The Emperor of Gladness.