My Hands in My Face

Something​ very strange has been going on. Picking up the paperback of Ocean Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which has now sold more than a million copies, you encounter blurbs the likes of which you’ve never seen before. ‘A marvel,’ Marlon James says. Daisy Johnson tells us that ‘Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be’ and – forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable first novel.’ Ben Lerner goes big: ‘Vuong … expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres.’ He must have thought this would be hard to beat. But he hadn’t reckoned on Max Porter, who declares it ‘a masterpiece … a staggeringly beautiful book’, and what’s more, a ‘huge gift to the world’.

Then you read the book and are confronted with such lines as ‘a bullet without a body is a song without ears.’ Or: ‘The most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on.’ Or: ‘The work somehow sutured a fracture inside me.’ Or: ‘I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season.’ Or: ‘The heart, like any law, stops only for the living.’ It’s obvious that Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be, but is it a privilege to watch?

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which was published in 2019, takes the form of a letter written by a young man, known only as Little Dog, to his mother, Rose. Little Dog’s life story, which closely maps onto Vuong’s, involves his coming to the US from Vietnam in 1990 aged two and growing up in deindustrialised, down-and-out, opioid-numbed Hartford, Connecticut. He is raised mainly by Rose, who has almost no English and is illiterate (so can’t read the story she is being told, which is in some sense her story), and suffers from mental illness. She beats her son between occasional bursts of tenderness. Little Dog’s grandmother, Lan, lives with them, and suffers from schizophrenia and night terrors. Both women have PTSD, a legacy of the Vietnam War. Rose and Little Dog are themselves a legacy of the war, since his maternal grandfather was an American soldier. Much of the book is taken up with describing the experiences of Little Dog’s family in Vietnam before his birth, and the way these bleed into their lives in America, especially into the life in America that has to be led by Little Dog.

It is a hardscrabble existence: Rose works long hours in a nail salon for little money, and as a teenager Little Dog takes a job at a tobacco farm, where he falls in love with a boy called Trevor. By the end of the book Lan has died of bone cancer and Trevor of an overdose. There’s no plot to speak of: the success of the book hinges on its presentation of a world, of particular forms of experience, and on its reckoning with an unasked-for but inescapable inheritance. Vuong’s recurring trope of describing people and things in linguistic terms – ‘the woman stands in a circle of her own piss. No, she is standing on the life-sized period of her own sentence, alive’ – advertises in block capitals his ambition to reconstitute, dignify, transmute. Addressing his mother, Little Dog observes that ‘I change, embellish, and preserve you at once.’

Vuong is also a poet. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous came out three years after his first collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, among others. Vuong considered himself to be reworking the traditional novel in a poetic vein (in interviews he overestimates the novelty of this attempt, and tends to speak as though modernism didn’t happen). What this actually means, since the form of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is conventional, give or take a few line breaks, is that the book is written in an extremely elevated register. This would be fine if well handled, but what strikes you at once about Vuong’s prose is its bludgeoning inexactness – not a fruitful, poetic ambivalence, but sheer clumsiness. Tenses slip: ‘We didn’t know everything yet … when we grow up, we’d know how the world really works’; ‘There are times, late at night, when your son would wake believing a bullet is lodged inside him.’ Constructions are off: ‘The milk poured with a thick white braid’; ‘Some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics’; ‘Who put my hands in my face?’; ‘Because I am your son, what I know of work I know equally of loss. And what I know of both I know of your hands.’ Descriptions frequently make no sense: a monkey has its brain scooped out of its skull, but Vuong refers to its ‘hollowed mind’; ants are ‘fractals of a timeworn alphabet’; a helicopter ‘dismembers’ air; a field of tobacco will ‘green itself to the height of a small army’; lawns are ‘suicidally pristine’; ‘You stared at the two holes in my face’ – by which he means eyes. Images are confused: ‘This is an old story, one anyone can tell. A trope in a movie you can walk away from, if it weren’t already here, written down’; ‘I … saw the coiled summer air, sputtering with heat, rise over the razed fields.’

Vuong has a genius for the simile or image that baffles, that is in essence a non-sequitur, or series of non-sequiturs:

About seventy … with mined-out blue eyes, she has the stare of someone who had gone beyond where she needed to go but kept walking anyway.

The crows floated over the field’s wrinkled air … their shadows swooping over the land like things falling from the sky.

The liquid coming down in white strings like a tablecloth in a nightmare.

Blood so red, so everywhere, it was Christmas in June.

There was something about the way he looked when lost in thought, his brow pinched under squinted eyes, giving his boyish face the harsh, hurt expression of someone watching his favourite dog being put down too soon.

I wanted the word to fall, like a screw in a guillotine.

If this wasn’t enough, the book is intolerably busy with vatic, empty utterances of this sort:

Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold.

What if the body, at its best, is only a longing for a body?

It is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a foetus – that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more.

Isn’t that the saddest thing in the world, Ma? A comma forced to be a period?

I know. It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.

Only when I utter the word do I realise that rose is also the past tense of rise. That in calling your name I am also telling you to get up. I say it as if it is the only answer to your question – as if a name is also a sound we can be found in. Where am I? Where am I? You’re Rose, Ma. You have risen.

This language is not poetic, but ridiculous, sententious, blinded by self-love and pirouetting over a chasm. Vuong trivialises his subjects by refusing to look at them directly, to describe them patiently; he seems not to trust the strength of his own material, or the perceptions of the reader. The occasional effective scene is bloated with rhetoric. After the family goes to the supermarket in search of oxtail to make bún bò huế and, failing to make themselves understood, return home with a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of mayonnaise, we are forced to traverse Barthes and consider that ‘our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all, but an orphan.’ Following a description of her physical decline, Little Dog reflects on his grandmother’s illness:

I’m thinking now of Duchamp, his infamous ‘sculpture’. How by turning a urinal, an object of stable and permanent utility, upside down, he radicalised its reception. By further naming it Fountain, he divested the object of its intended identity, rendering it with an unrecognisable new form.

I hate him for this.

I hate how he proved that the entire existence of a thing could be changed simply by flipping it over, revealing a new angle to its name, an act completed by nothing else but gravity, the very force that traps us on this earth.

Mostly I hate him because he was right.

Because that’s what was happening to Lan. The cancer had refigured not only her features, but the trajectory of her being. Lan, turned over, would be dust the way even the word dying is nothing like the word dead. Before Lan’s illness, I found this act of malleability to be beautiful, that an object or person, once upturned, becomes more than its once-singular self. This agency for evolution, which once made me proud to be the queer yellow faggot that I was and am, now betrays me.

What is obvious elsewhere is the way this prose covers and distracts from an essential crudeness of representation. The bad guys in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – the racist, homophobic bullies – can’t be normal people, like most racists and homophobes. A nine-year-old has ‘jowls flushed and rippling’ and a ‘vinegar mouth’, and is capable of hissing ‘Say my name … Like your Mom did last night … Good little bitch.’ A six-year-old, ‘cheeks puffed red’, shouts: ‘Stop following me, you freak! What the heck is wrong with you?’ And Little Dog gets it, even though he’s six, too: ‘It was not the words but his eyes, squinted as if taking aim, that made me understand.’ The ten-year-olds who attack him for riding a pink bike are a ‘fat wet face wedged atop a towering, meaty torso’ and ‘a smaller boy with the face of a weasel’. Trevor’s father is another monster, ‘spraying’ liquor, with a cheek ‘white as sliced turkey’, a ‘third fat roll’ appearing on his neck, conveniently prompted to reveal of a relative who served in Vietnam: ‘He whooped them in that jungle. He did good for us … He burned up four of them in a ditch with gasoline.’

Little Dog’s affair with Trevor is a recapitulation of the traditional teenage gay love story: gay boy and pseudo-straight boy get it on after a period of glancing and lying shoulder to shoulder in the grass. Trevor is, of course, very sexy, with a ‘scar like a comma on his neck, syntax of what next what next what next’. And of course he goes great guns but remains capable of saying things like ‘I don’t wanna feel like a girl. Like a bitch. I can’t, man. I’m sorry,’ and ‘You think you’ll be really gay, like, forever? I mean … I’ll be good in a few years, you know.’ Even when Vuong gets into more interesting territory, he can’t help cancelling his effects with dodgy, dodging prose.

Then, about ten minutes in, as Trevor went faster … something happened. A scent rose up to my head, strong and deep, like soil, but sharp with flaw. I knew right away what it was, and panicked. In the heat of it, I didn’t think, didn’t yet know how to prepare myself … No one had shown us how this was to be done. No one had taught us how to be this deep – and deeply broken.

After this, Trevor shows a softer side, and takes Little Dog to the river to wash, before making a grand redemptive gesture.

I was only a few steps ahead of him before I felt his palm push hard between my shoulders, leaning me forward, my hands instinctually braced on my knees. Before I could turn around, I felt his stubble, first between my thighs, then higher. He had knelt in the shallows, knees sunk in river mud. I shook – his tongue so impossibly warm compared to the cold water, the sudden, wordless act … I looked between my legs and saw his chin moving to work the act into what it was, what it always has been: a kind of mercy. To be clean again. To be good again. What have we become to each other if not what we’ve done to each other? Although this was not the first time he did this, it was the only time the act gained new, concussive power. I was devoured, it seemed, not by a person, Trevor, so much as by desire itself. To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptised by its pure need.

It’s hard to believe that, in the history of literature, an episode of rimming has ever been presented in such gauzy terms, made quite so desperately sentimental. It stands for the evasions – and confusions (‘concussive’) – of a desperately sentimental book.

Where​ could they go after ‘huge gift to the world’? Only one place: Vuong’s second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, has a blurb by Madonna (‘beautiful writing’). It resumes Little Dog’s story, beginning in 2009: Vuong has switched to a slightly unstable third-person past tense, and Little Dog is now called Hai, but we have the same geographic and social setting, the same family structure and the same backstory, though Trevor has been renamed Noah (‘that’s what Hai started calling him a week after he died. Because why shouldn’t the dead receive new names? Weren’t they transformed, after all, into a kind of otherhood?’). Vuong told his nearly 400,0000 followers on Instagram that ‘my books are all reincarnations, in the Buddhist sense, of one another, each one carrying the “debris” of the prior, the way we might carry our ancestors, whether broken or whole.’

He went on:

In this case, the prompt for myself while writing this novel was this: if On Earth was a private document (a letter from a son to his mother) ‘performing’ as a novel, what would Little Dog’s first – actual – novel look like? What parts of his life would he hide or amplify, which parts would he embellish, alter or transform? What would his attempt at a public facing work look like? In this way, The Emperor of Gladness is my second novel – but it’s his first. A kind of puppetry, if you will.

I encountered this statement after reading the novel and can’t say it added anything to my understanding. It could serve, perhaps, as an explanation for that slight unsteadiness of perspective: the first chapter is in the voice of a representative of Hartford County, who can be read (for what it’s worth) as Little Dog, introducing the fictional town of East Gladness (‘We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds, our faces mangled by wind and speed like castaway Munch paintings’), but other sentences in the book suffer from the same indeterminacy of tense that mars On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. In general, this idea of ‘puppetry’ serves as a justification for Vuong’s own practice, since Little Dog/Hai is an avatar for himself, and he is selectively reimagining elements of his own life in precisely this way.

The plot of The Emperor of Gladness is just as slight, and unimportant, as that of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. At the beginning of the book, Hai is prevented from throwing himself off a bridge by an 82-year-old woman, Grazina. She invites him to stay with her. We learn that he pretended to his mother that he was going to university in Boston, but instead checked himself into rehab; on finishing his three-week stay, he immediately and impulsively decided to attempt suicide. Grazina is Lithuanian but came to the US after the Second World War (which marked her in much the same way that the Vietnam War marked Little Dog’s grandmother), and now suffers from dementia. In order to support them, Hai, who has started using opioids again, but not in a way that causes much trouble, takes a job at a fast-food joint called HomeMarket. (Vuong once lived with an elderly woman with dementia called Grazina and worked at a fast-food joint called Boston Market.) That’s pretty much it, in terms of movement – and this is Vuong’s intention, since he claims (again, overestimating his novelty) to be doing something radical in breaking from the Aristotelian emphasis on catharsis, representing instead the great fact of ‘stasis’ in American working-class life.

Once again, the success of the novel hinges on its mode of presentation, and Vuong proceeds to exhibit all the same tendencies. Once again, there are hundreds of incoherent sentences and images. The text on a wooden sign is ‘rubbed to braille by wind’; seeds from a bird-feeder ‘fall like applause’; a girl pours Coca-Cola into the eye socket of some roadkill, or rather ‘into that infinite dark of sightless visions’; we are given a glimpse of ‘moss so lush … that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae, like the glacial flood returned overnight and made us into what we were becoming all along: biblical’; fathers watching their sons play football ‘could be statues for what it means to wait for a boy to crush himself into manhood’; water churns ‘like chemically softened granite’. All these appear in the first eight pages. Please take my word for the remaining 389 – though I can’t help noting, for its medical interest, the moment on page 33 when Grazina’s ‘bones unbuckled from their stiff joints’. Once again, we have the absurd similes and images: ‘[he] lent his face to the overcast sky, a bowl so emptied it was hard to imagine it held anything at all, let alone entire flocks of geese’; a scream is ‘like someone falling through air without ever touching ground’; a man has ‘a laugh that could probably vanquish depression in an elephant’; the world is ‘vignetted at its edges’; heroin users trace ‘the drug’s ascent with their fingers as if pointing to ruined cities on a map’; ‘he was warm as a blood cell being swept through the vein of a fallen angel, finally good’; ‘there’s a way an old Connecticut town feels when you pass through it at night. Hollowed out, blasted yet stilled into a potent aftermath, all of it touched by an inexplicable beauty, like the outside has suddenly become one huge living room.’

Once again, there are the dreaded pronouncements, somehow even worse than before:

To remember is to fill the present with the past, which meant that the cost of remembering anything, anything at all, is life itself. We murder ourselves, he thought, by remembering. The idea made him sick.

No matter how many years the body wrecks itself on the shore of living, the mouth stays mostly the same, faithful through its empty, eternal void. Some call this hunger. Others call it loss. He knows it only as the law. Whole nations have burned from this little oval ringed with teeth.

A thousand sons must have been where he was now and turned back from their horses, wagons, rickshaws, cyclos, buses, schooners, trains, even dusty, sandalled feet. They must have offered a face reacting to their mother’s shrinking form, a final enactment of separation, revealing to each other the cost this leaving imprinted on their brows.

In this novel, many more such profundities take the form of dialogue: ‘Do you think a life you can’t remember is still a good life?’ ‘Yes … Because someone else will remember it.’ Once again, the representatives of inhumanity are made inhuman, in a series of excruciatingly crass scenes. The reader’s intelligence is repeatedly insulted, as when, after his first tiring shift at HomeMarket, Hai’s thoughts drift ‘for some reason’ to his mother, and the time she came home from work so exhausted that she fell asleep, ‘face-planted onto a half-eaten slice’ of pizza: ‘It was one of those images he could never shake loose from his mind, even though it held no meaning.’

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.

Defending himself against the (generally indulgent) criticisms that have so far been made of his prose, Vuong has attributed his style – he claims, blasphemously, that it is a ‘19th-century’ style – to his sincerity, expressed as an opposition to ‘dogmatic values about clean lines, minimalism, restraint, control, rigour’. On the podcast Talk Easy, he suggested that these qualities ‘are the privileges of the wealthy’, whose sanitised, smoothed way of life ‘denies the corporeal reality of the body’. By contrast,

my mother would serve a black and brown community at the nail salon. And you look at the nails, these women are so proud and sincere and earnest about their beauty. The nails would be extravagant, the church outfits, the hats, overblown sequins … And that is my model for the sentence. I don’t see that as too much. I see that as power, extravagance, and possibility.

An extravagant sentence can certainly be a thing of beauty; style is often by its very nature excess. But no writer can expect to be taken at their own self-estimation, and this emperor is wearing no clothes.