Where American Literature Went Vuong
The emperor of glibness
Note: I wrote this over a month ago on commission from a fairly big magazine, which mysteriously and rather unprofessionally ghosted me without explanation. I can only guess they did not want to be responsible for so unabashedly speaking the truth about a terrible book. It is typical of the mainstream press that they be frightened of candidness and honesty—and the honest fact here is that Vuong is the worst writer in the Anglosphere since the excremental Bulwer-Lytton (who, as it happens, was also extremely popular in his day). I was encouraged by critic friends to adjust and expand on this more, but I’m afraid that I have grown very tired of this topic and simply want to put it out there. Better reviews are sure to come.
This piece is hardly as good, funny or comprehensive as Tom Crewe’s wonderful pan of The Emperor of Gladness in the LRB, which I urge you to read also—but its composition did predate it.
On The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
The book world has been all too kind to Ocean Vuong. In the 2010s, he received breathless plaudits for his unremarkable early poetry and first novel before raking in a Whiting Award, Eliot Prize and a MacArthur "genius" Grant. His new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, about a young Dilaudid addict and restaurant worker named Hai and his various dreary adventures around the invented town of East Gladness, Connecticut, received the kind of gargantuan mainstream book coverage of which most writers may only dream. Yet after reading this and his other work, I have a question: What happened to our literature? How did American letters emerge from the riches of the Bible and Shakespeare, with Hawthorne and Melville in tow, then produce a 20th century of Faulkner, Bellow, Pynchon, Ozick, Kincaid and McCarthy, only to land us in an illiterate swamp of endless purple description and laughable metaphor? Bad popular writing happens. But literary writing this bad, this praised? This is a sign of some deeper malady.
Examples of what I mean abound in Gladness, starting with the storytelling. Weak writing inevitably produces weak plotting, and here there is not so much a story as a rising midden of melodrama whose striations eventually take shape as something book-like. At the opening, suicidal Hai meets and moves in with the feisty Lithuanian dementia patient Grazina Vitkus, then begins working at a chain restaurant with a ragtag cast of characters, including his mildly autistic cousin, Sony. Other characters are BJ, Russia, Maureen, Wayne—for sure these are people, and these are definitely names. Other then that they have precious little reality. Their cheerful engagement in kitchen work represents the central activity of the novel (for a less sentimentalized take on contemporary fast food work, see On the Clock by Claire Baglin), although there are various mawkish set pieces at a prison, wrestling ring, mental health center, hospital, and other such lugubrious places.
To attract our empathy, Vuong serves up airy poetic nothingnesses such as: