Ocean Vuong’s books are enormously popular but it’s hard to see why. He is often an incompetent writer of prose and his plots are sentimental mush. The Emperor of Gladness (note twee title) is set in a decaying Connecticut river town called East Gladness. A young man of Vietnamese descent, Hai, considers suicide, but is talked down from a bridge by an elderly Lithuanian woman named Grazina.
Grazina is in the early stages of dementia. Hai becomes her carer. Grazina possesses cranky Lithuanian wisdom. She helps Hai work through his issues. Around them, America decays. Your heart might be warmed. Mine was not.
The prose alternates between a flat accounting (“Back in the kitchen, he picked up her rotary phone”) and a shockingly ham-fisted lyricism. “Look how the birches, blackened all night by starlings, shatter when dawn’s first sparks touch their beaks.” Dawn, of course, does not spark. And Vuong does not appear to know that the subject of this sentence is the birches and not the starlings; so his grammar gives the birches beaks. (The publisher’s blurb praises Vuong’s “syntactical dexterity”, which must be an in-house joke – unless they really can’t tell.)
A paragraph later, we get a sentence that disastrously mingles the gross and the sub-poetic: “At the lot’s far edge lies the week-old roadkill, its eye socket filled with warm Coca-Cola, the act of a girl who, bored on her way from school, poured her drink into that finite dark of sightless visions.”
Vuong is so committed to his notion of transcendent pseudo-lyric prose that he doesn’t even tell us what animal he means us to see – all he gives us is “roadkill”. His prose wants you to feel; it certainly doesn’t want you to perceive. It is, of course, Vuong’s own literary vision that is sightless.
A few pages later, Hai sees a body floating in a river, “its limbs stretched and opaque”. But it is not necessary to describe a human body as “opaque”, since human bodies are not normally translucent or transparent. Did nobody actually read this book before it went to print?
Back in the 20th century American literary prose was the gold standard. In the 21st century it is starting to look like a grotesquely inflated currency.
Kevin Power is associate professor of English at Trinity College Dublin
