BookBrowse Reviews The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

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The author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous presents a wide-ranging tale of love, loss, and family.

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Ocean Vuong's second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, opens with nineteen-year-old Hai about to jump off a bridge in East Gladness, Connecticut when he hears a voice demanding to know what he's doing. He tries to deny he was planning to take his own life ("I'm just inspecting the bridge") but the voice — which he can now tell belongs to an elderly woman — is having none of it. She insists that he come inside her ramshackle house. Hai learns his savior is Grazina, an 82-year-old widow with dementia who coincidentally just lost her live-in caregiver, and with nowhere else to go, Hai agrees to fill this role. He soon learns Grazina doesn't have enough money to even feed herself, so he gets a job at a nearby fast-casual restaurant with the help of his cousin, Sony, who also works there. The novel follows Hai's life over the next several months, narrating Grazina's worsening condition and the bonds he forms with the eccentric crew at the eatery, HomeMarket.

Vuong covers a lot of ground. Hai and Sony are children of Vietnamese immigrants who came to the US after the Vietnam War, while Grazina is a Lithuanian refugee from WWII; their lives illustrate the long-term impacts of such conflicts. (Hai thinks of his mother, grandmother, and aunt as "women spared by war in body but not in mind" and the same can be said of Grazina.) Hai's experiences involve drug abuse, and Grazina's represent the plight of America's aging population. Themes of loneliness and isolation, as well as family — both blood family and chosen family — pepper the story as well. One of the most impressive aspects of this author's work is his capacity for juggling so many complex issues without any of them overpowering the plot.

The novel is strongly character-driven, and Vuong's ability to fashion such a remarkable cast is astounding. In the hands of a lesser writer some of the personalities could easily have become caricatures. BJ, the HomeMarket manager, for example, is a 6'3 woman with a buzzcut who wants to become a professional wrestler (see Beyond the Book). This character could have read as cartoonish but she has so much depth that she feels real. Readers will love her for her dedication to her job and her staff, and agonize with her after a particularly cringeworthy audition. Each of the characters shows this level of complexity; they're all simultaneously broken and beautiful (to borrow a line from Kelly Clarkson). And while the book's overall storyline is somewhat nebulous, it is finding out more about these characters that propels the narrative forward, as the author chooses to reveal each one a little bit at a time. We find out early on, for instance, that Wayne, the head chef, is divorced, but only later do we learn he's rarely permitted to see his kids; the photo in his wallet is of his three dogs, with whom he has a closer relationship.

Vuong's writing, too, is exquisite; the novel reads almost like one of his poetry collections:

"Beyond the graveyard whose stones have lost their names to years, there's a covered bridge laid over a dried‑up brook whose memory of water never reached this century. Cross that and you'll find us. Turn right at Conway's Sugar Shack, gutted and shuttered, with windows blown out and the wooden sign that reads we sweeten soon as the crocus bloom, rubbed to braille by wind. In spring the cherry blossoms foam across the county from every patch of green unclaimed by farms or strip malls. They came to us from centuries of shit, dropped over this place by geese whenever summer beckons their hollow bones north."

He also has a gift for both dialogue and dialect; his characters have a wide range of backgrounds, from Hai's Vietnamese grandmother to drive-through attendant Russia, a second-generation immigrant stoner. The conversations between Hai and Grazina, in particular, seem realistic. At one point she asks his name:

"Hai," he mumbled.
"And hello to you, too. But –"
"No, Hai. It's –"
"Okay," she breathed, "but who am I saying hello to?"
"My name is Hai."
"Your name is Hello?"
He decided to nod. "Sure."
"Ah." She brightened and pointed a crooked finger at him. "So your name is Labas!"
"What?"
"Labas means 'hello' in my country." She extended her hand across the table for him to shake. "Hello, Labas. I'm Grazina. Means 'beautiful.'"

Tragedy makes up the core of the novel, and the characters' stories are often heartbreaking; all of the cast, without exception, have experienced profound loss. But it contains quite a lot of much-needed levity, too, and at times it's laugh-out-loud funny. The author strikes a hopeful note at the end, although not all the characters' threads are resolved.

The Emperor of Gladness is one of my top picks of the year so far; everything about it — from the writing to the characters to the way it tugged at my emotions — hits a home run for me. The novel will appeal to readers who enjoy character-driven stories more so than those who prefer a strong storyline, but it should find a wide audience.

This review first ran in the May 7, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.