The Vicious Review

Igroaned​ my way through The Emperor of Gladness. I writhed. I felt real despair every time I forced myself to open the covers. It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life. This is because, while it is bad in all the ways that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was bad, it is also bad in new and unexpected ways. For one, it is a more traditional, peopled novel, spends much more time with its characters and has a much higher proportion of dialogue, for which Vuong has no talent. It tries, and fails, to be funny. Hai’s co-workers at HomeMarket include his self-glorifying manager, a rapping wannabe-wrestler called Big Jean (BJ), with a magic recipe for cornbread and a heart of gold; his Civil War-obsessed cousin Sony; and Maureen, a conspiracy theorist with bad knees and a passion for Star Wars inherited from her dead son. Maureen gives Hai a model of R2-D2 that looks like a penis, which fact is frequently mentioned. A co-worker called Russia has a tattoo of Bugs Bunny eating a suggestive-looking carrot, excuse for further hilarity.

‘Who’s sick?’ BJ walked out from the back, her hands dusted with cornbread mix.

‘Russia’s dick,’ Maureen said. ‘I mean, his tattoo of a rabbit giving head.’

‘The fuck? Let me see?’ BJ tried to lift his sleeve but Russia pulled away …

‘Okay, since we’re sharing, I got something even better,’ BJ said.

Hai stopped stirring the creamed spinach.

‘Let me guess,’ Maureen said … ‘you got a Prince Albert.’

‘How the hell am I supposed to get that, Maur? No, man. Do I look like a penis ring person to you?’

‘I thought a Prince Albert was a type of tattoo!’

These are cartoon characters, immensely wearying to spend time with: the scene where they set off together for Vermont to find a diamond that may have been lost in the ashes of Sony’s father (don’t ask) is spectacularly embarrassing. The depiction of Grazina is no better. She is given lines such as ‘words cast spells … That’s why it’s called spelling.’ Vuong’s depiction of Hai and Grazina’s domestic life in her mouldering, chaotic house has the quality of a children’s book: new discoveries are always being made, in a corner, or a drawer, or through a secret door leading down into the cellar, as when Hai comes home and Grazina clears a path for him towards a shrouded bookcase:

Hai worked through the dust, one arm over his mouth, and peeled back the sheet. As spores swirled through the cone of light, he saw the books, all of them paper gold. Rows and rows of the perennial classics … ‘Holy shit,’ he said, breathless. ‘How did you do this?’

‘I didn’t do squat,’ she said. ‘I told you. My husband was one of those nerds. He read everything. He read so much his eyes dried up in his head. It made him blind, these damn books … He used to read me from that Vonnegut book you’ve been reading,’ she added in a fallen voice. ‘We were in Dresden at the same time, that little Billy Pilgrim and me. What a sham, all of it.’

This must be why her husband was obsessed with translating the book into their native tongue, he thought. It was an American novel that told their story, if only in brief, apocalyptic glimpses.

The Emperor of Gladness appears to have been edited from space, with the result that it is inordinately long and almost entirely filler. Just one of Grazina’s episodes of dementia-induced delusion, during which Hai presents himself as ‘Sergeant Pepper’ leading her out of a wartime scene, lasts for nine life-sapping pages. A recollection of Hai, Sony and family visiting Stonewall Jackson’s house in Virginia – introduced solely to highlight Southern historical amnesia and to offer the scene of Hai’s grandmother pissing in one of Jackson’s pots and wiping herself with one of Jackson’s furnishings – lasts for eight pages. We are subjected to several lengthy conversations with the conspiracy theorist, Maureen.

Vuong wants to show us American darkness – decay, neglect, drug dependence – and the forces that create it, as well as the other, brighter lives that are sustained by it (there is an epigraph from Hamlet, one of the sources of the book’s title: ‘Your worm is your only emperor … We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots’). In the book’s one nearly effective scene, before it too dissolves into sentimentality and lame humour, Hai and some of his colleagues take a job killing ‘emperor hogs’ at a supposedly organic farm. It proves a gothic, heavy-metal-soundtracked horror show (‘A spray of blood flew over them. Russia looked about wildly, then fixed a ghastly stare at Hai, his mouth half-open, the pig’s blood inside it and dripping down his chin’) that will ultimately furnish the table of a fundraiser for the politician and former wrestling promoter Linda McMahon, then running for Senate and now a member of Trump’s cabinet. But Vuong resists pessimism as much as he claims to resist catharsis. He wants to show that bonds between unlikely people are made in situations of labour (‘Can camaraderie … be enough to make you want to put your mouth to a kid with a busted face, to find him somehow more complete … Yes, Hai realised now – it was’). He wants to show the way two people rendered marginal – by youth and circumstance, or illness and old age – can form a loving family unit. He wants, ultimately, to show the beauty in the darkness of American life, to examine what he calls ‘kindness without hope’.

‘What I saw working in fast food,’ he told the New York Times,

was that people are kind even when they know it won’t matter. Where does that come from? I watched co-workers get together and dig each other out of blizzards. They could just dig themselves out and leave, go home sooner, hug their families, but they all stayed, and they dug each other out. What is kindness exhibited knowing there is no pay-off?

Vuong has repeated the same observation in other interviews. Something he insists on in this context, while declaring that it is out of fashion (another dubious proposition), is the literary value of his own ‘sincerity’ and ‘earnestness’. But the presumption that someone’s first impulse would be to leave their co-worker’s car stuck in a blizzard is that of a cynic (‘Writing became a medium for me to try to understand what goodness is,’ he has said. ‘I’ve been in dicey situations in my life where I realised early on, I just don’t have it’). This explains his strained attempt to communicate to the waiting world his discovery that people can be nice. V.S. Pritchett called sincerity ‘that quality which cannot be obtained by taking thought’. But Vuong’s sincerity is self-conscious and willed – he is constantly stoking it by shovelling on more and more words. It is why, despite his close identification with his characters and their class situation, he turns them into parodies (and their enemies into grotesques). He doesn’t imaginatively enter these lives, but stands outside them, waving for our attention so he can tell us what they mean.