Writing Against Expectations

Ocean Vuong's Novel "The Emperor of Gladness."

Ocean Voung‘s new novel, “The Emperor of Gladness” upends a number of reader expectations. Writers make a “contract” with readers that generally by the end of chapter 1, we know who the protagonist is and what the major conflict is. Then we expect the conflict will be resolved by the end of the novel, even if it’s only a change in the protagonist’s character. That is not the case with “The Emperor of Gladness.”

Based on Chapter 1, a birds eye view of the city of East Gladness, Connecticut, a town about 10 miles into the desolate tobacco fields outside of Hartford Connecticut, we might expect an extended prose poem. Vuong, after all, is a well known poet:

Look how the birches, blackened all night by starlings, shatter when dawn's first sparks touch their beaks. How the last crickets sing through fog hung over pastures pungent now with just-laid manure. In August, the train tracks blaze so hot the rubber on your soles would melt if you walked on them for more than a minute. Despite this heat everything green grows as if in retribution for the barren, cauterized winter, moss so lush between the wooden rail ties 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.

The sentence about the birch trees was the subject of a substack this week called Stunning Sentences by Nina.Schuyler (nina.schuyler.substack.com). She isolates a sentence, analyzes it into detail and invites readers to write a sentence using similar syntax.

If part of the project of a writer is to make the world new again, Vuong has accomplished this with his new novel, with pages filled with sentences that counter and disrupt the conventional way of seeing. In today's sentence, Vuong describes the transformation of the white-barked birch trees. At night they're blackened by the roosting black starlings. There are so many birds that they conceal the white bark. At dawn, when the sun rises, the birds awake and fly away, and like a magic trick the white bark of the birch appears.

Vuong turns to metaphor to create a new lens. Defamiliarization is the term coined by the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky for any method that bypasses reflexive knowing. “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life," writes Shklovsky in his essay, “Art as Technique." "The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar."

Although there are certainly other sentences in the book that rise to this poetic level, once the storyline begins, Vuong seems more involved with his plot than with his language, which is unfortunate. In my opinion, he has too many plot points and resolves too few of them.

The major characters in this novel are Hai, a 19 year old son of a Vietnamese immigrant, and Grazina, an 82 year-old Lithuanian woman living in the last inhabited house on a row of homes destined for demolition. When we meet Hai, he is contemplating committing suicide by jumping off a bridge; however Grazina, who is hanging out laundry, spies him, and talks him into coming off the bridge into her home and eventually into her life as a caregiver of sorts. This begins a relationship that is pivotal in the novel. Hai learns to cope with Grazina’s advancing dementia by creating a fantasy world in which he is an officer during World War II and she is in Lithuania.

But the caretaker relationship is not Vuong’s major goal for the novel. According to a number of interviews I’ve heard, his goal was to present a “family” of people who work at the Home Market, a fast food restaurant similar to Boston Market, where Vuong himself worked at as a young man, and to demonstrate the strong bonds between people working for minimum wage in a restaurant that holds its food out as “homemade,” but actually reheats large plastic bags of sweet potatoes, creamed spinach, etc., delivered from the home office. Hai and his cousin Sony both work at Home Market.

Vuong says in his interviews that he wanted to write against the cultural expectation of a “grand arc” in a story, for example rags to riches, the girl gets the guy, guy gets the girl, we find out who the murderer is. His goal was to write without “improvement arcs.” And although he wanted to claim the dignity of people who work for years for the same employer, as in fact, his brother has done at Dick’s Sporting Goods, by the end of the novel we get a flash forward two years in the future when none of the people working in Home Market are still there. So while Vuong may have wanted to honor people who continue working in the same job without hope of promotion or improvement, his plot did not fulfill this goal.

Another plot line that was raised and then abandoned was Hai’s addiction to pills. Hai enrolls at Pace University in New York, but drops out after his friend Noah overdoses. At Pace, Hai was “half a decade” into pills and spent most days in the library’s basement, nodding off. By Thanksgiving, he’s dropped out and spends the next year living with his mother jobless and perpetually high. Then one day he shows his mother a brochure from a school in Boston, igniting her hopes that he will make something of himself and become a doctor.

But rather than get on the bus to Boston, Hai checks into a rehab where we assume he is trying to get off taking pain pills. It’s not clear how serious he is about getting clean, but the minute he finds pills at Grazina‘s, he is off and running. And never mentions recovery again.

Vuong, who admits he did cocaine to make tobacco picking tolerable, paints Hai’s life on drugs as irresistible and poetic.

The thing about the pills was that he felt, once their magic seeped into him, like he was finally slipping, naked into a warm, dry bed with thick wool sheets after days of walking soaked to the bone in rain.

The pills were starting to take effect, vignetting most of his vision. He knew from experience that by the time thev made it to his limbic system, all that would remain of the world would be a pinhole of light at the center of his consciousness, like a makeshift camera, making it dark enough for him to retreat into a hole deep inside him, curl in a fetal position and rest.

Maureen, his co-worker who is frequently drunk, calls him on his pills:

“You don’t think I know you’re blasted, yourself, Mr. Pill Popper?” He was making his way fast through the bottle of Dilaudid, and lately needed two pills just to make the shifts float by a little smoother.”

But Maureen doesn’t tell anyone and Hai makes no second try at getting off pills. We wonder if the pills are a reason Hai can’t pursue education or a better job, but this plot point is abandoned. By the novel’s end, Grazina is gone and Hai has lost her pills, but we know he knows where to get more.

I didn’t expect a “recovery story,” but felt Hai’s addiction was pivotal to his character and that he would never change without addressing it. I didn’t believe Hai could keep working at Home Market while on drugs and homeless. As someone with 19 years sober in AA, I look for hope in addiction stories. And giving up illusions. Here is my poem about that:

How to Stop Drinking

No point in telling yourself that Chardonnay tastes like Windex. It doesn’t. It tastes like walking under waterfalls, like sinking backwards into bed with the guy you flirted with at the bar. It smells like a necklace made of daisy chains or the waft of Queen Anne’s lace on a summer Sunday. It always has. It always will. Even the fourth or fifth glass (and that, of course is the problem) tastes just as good as the first.

Don’t try aversion therapy. Even if they showed you livers corroded into cardboard, like those stone-black lungs of tiny Chinese men splayed open in an exhibit called “Bodies Revealed,” you wouldn’t stop. Face it, some smokers don’t get lung cancer. Some drinkers have livers pink as kittens’ tongues. You know that will be you. The one that gets away with it.

You didn’t get caught—no DWI, no blackout at the kids’ concert. You think of Robert Haas’ poem “Dragonflies Mating” where his mother comes to his basketball practice, weaving across the gym, lipstick smeared, reeking, and he admits: “I wanted to kill her.” No one wants to kill you.

But you know, don’t you? You know where this is headed because you grew up at the feet of “just how bad it gets.” Lift your gaze from the elixir swirling in your glass and take a look at what comes next.

The conflict between Hai and his mother has nothing to do with the Home Market or Grazina. Hai’s mother, like Ocean Vuong’s mother, worked in a nail salon in the novel. His lie about going to Boston to become a doctor, is such a preposterous idea that we can’t believe his mother accepts it. After all, she has clients at the nail salon who could have set her straight.

Inside those wide white hours, he often asked himself why he deceived his mother in the first place. In the end, there was no good answer – only the image of her face brightening when he told her he was going to heal the sick, the cancer-riddled, the broken, the maimed by becoming a Doctor… You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so he said it. And so he lied.

Ocean Voung said in his interview with Oprah that he believes Hai got to say to his mother at the end of the novel what Vuong wished he could’ve said to his own mother when she was dying of cancer in 2018. Unfortunately, by that point Vuong’s mother was hallucinating. So I went back and reread the last chapter. Hai didn’t tell his mother anything of importance, except to say that he was scared of the future, to which she replied: “Life is good when we do good things for each other."

Then he tells her “you are my friend” in the Lithuanian Grazina taught him and which means nothing to his mother. I don’t know what to make of that.

Vuong has said that kindness with no hope of being repaid is the highest form of being. I question whether any character did good things without expecting repayment. It’s true that Hai was kind to Grazina, but would he have taken care of her if he wasn’t homeless and needed a place to live? If she didn’t have all those prescriptions for Dilaudid? Perhaps the biggest act of kindness is Grazina calling out to a kid about to jump off a bridge to get him to come down.

I’ve mentioned that my book group often discusses whether there are scenes in a book that we think should’ve been deleted. I vote for the scene of butchering hogs. When Oprah asked him, Ocean Vuong said that when he was working at picking tobacco, he was making 9.20 an hour and was offered over $20 an hour to work at a slaughter house. He said he lasted 30 minutes. And given the way he describes the brutality and cruelty of the slaughterhouse, it’s easy to see why. I know that Ocean Vuong feels that the scene of the slaughter of the hogs was important because it returns in the last paragraph of the novel, but I’m hoping perhaps some of you readers can enlighten me as to the function it plays in the novel.

I don’t quarrel with Vuong’s decision to write a novel without a “grand arc.” And I accept open endings where we don’t know what will happen next to the protagonist. But I felt that too many plot lines bogged down Vuong’s intentions for this novel. He may have wanted to write about the dignity of working without hope of upward mobility, but for me, the story of a son on drugs lying to his mother about going to medical school felt more urgent of resolution.