Autumn 2025: The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

Oh no, what have I begun?  

That was my first thought upon opening The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. Turning the pages, I was faced with a chapter drenched in excessive lyricism and metaphor, all to describe a typicalNew England town. It reminded me immediately of Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a book that I admired for its beautiful language, but which ultimately left me bored because it distracted me from the story underneath. As I read through the second-person perspective of this first chapter, I nearly closed the book, thinking that Vuong’s idea of a novel and mine simply didn’talign.  

But I’m glad I didn’t. 

Set in the fictional town of East Gladness, the story follows Hai, a 19-year-old Vietnamese American who’s just out of rehab and already reaching for pills, deep in debt after dropping out of college,and trying to process his boyfriend’s fatal overdose. He’s in an impossible situation, and he tries to escape it through suicide. But Vuong denies him that exit; instead, he asks: what happens when you decide to die, but live another day? What does that day look like? And the day after that? 

So, as Hai stands on a bridge, he is interrupted by a bedsheet flowing down the river and Grazina, an elderly widow, struggling to hang her laundry in a rainstorm. She invites him into her home, shares a cigarette, and distracts him with conversation. By morning, they strike a deal: Hai can stay in her daughter’s old room if he helps her manage her dementia. The arrangement works, and they grow close as he tends to her episodes that pull her back to her memories of World War II. Money soon becomes an issue, and Hai has to take a job at an American fast-food chain called HomeMarket, where he grows closer and closer with his co-workers through long, gruelling shifts.  

The Emperor of Gladness revisits many of the themes explored in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, such as poverty, corporate exploitation, opioid addiction, war and violence, queerness, racism, and grief. However, the themes aren’t just repeated, the novel builds upon them. Where On Earth was concerned with biological family, personal trauma, and inherited memory, The Emperor of Gladnessshifts its focus to communities, studying found families, workplace intimacy, and the treatment of our elderly.  

Moreover, there is a philosophical shift in this novel. In an interview with Service95, Vuong described the act of writing in On Earth as an allegory for American success, and the loneliness and isolation that comes with it. “The further you make it,” he said, “the further you are from the people who brought you there.” However, during an interview with Fresh Air, he explains how his focus has changed with The Emperor of Gladness. He’s not interested in the American dream. He’s interested in the Americans who dream. 

Raised in a family of Vietnamese immigrants, Vuong saw stagnation more often than upward mobility. As he explains in his Oprah’s Book Club interview, the people around him didn’t rise through the ranks; they worked the same jobs all their lives. Vuong wants to tell their stories. Not to glorify struggle, but to show that there is dignity in perseverance.  

He does exactly this in The Emperor of Gladness, claiming the centre of the novel for the lives of people so often left out of American fiction. A woman sleeping in the kitchen because it’s the only room she can afford to heat as she pays off her late son’s hospital bills; an autistic boy, in a time and place that does not understand him, working each day to bail his mother out of prison; an elderly woman with dementia who treasures her independence, but isn’t granted the agency to keep it. None of these characters are chasing the American dream, they are merely trying to live. Vuong writestheir stories without condescension or spectacle, displaying a refusal of the myth that change is the only narrative worth telling.  

These stories can only be told, however, by letting go of the expectations of plot. In an interview with ABC News, Vuong explains: “Plot systems, traditionally, almost have a tyrannical impulse. It functions very much like corporate dogma: either you’re useful to us or you’re out.” If a novel is going to centre lives that don’t advance, no rags-to-riches or final transformation, it must also disobey the plot systems built to reward progress.  

In On Earth, the lack of plot made me feel distanced from the story, and now Vuong argues for a similarly plotless style in The Emperor of Gladness. However, what makes it work for me in this novel is that this ‘plotlessness’ has a specific and important function: it reinforces the novel’s focus on ordinary life. With no plot to rush the writing, the reader is forced to sit with the characters, to listen to everyday conversations that only occasionally offer small truths. The simpler prose style, with fewer metaphors and philosophical tangents, complements this beautifully, allowing the focus to be on the characters’ voices. Here, the language doesn’t conceal the lack of story, it reveals how the novel’s strength lies precisely in this lack.  

This is shown wonderfully in a scene where Hai waits for a bus with his autistic cousin, Sony. They talk about the future, about failure and memory, and then, when most novels would end the scene, Vuong adds this: 

With that Sony swiped his hand at the air in front of them—so fast that Hai jerked back. 
“What was that?” 
“A fly.” He brought his fist to Hai’s face, then opened his hand. “An imaginary one.” 
“Did you get him?” 
“No.” Sony shook his head, looking around the immense night. “He got away.” 

It’s such a simple exchange, yet it lingers in my mind. It shows Sony’s particular way of thinking, his quiet kindness that even imaginary flies deserve freedom. And it shows Hai’s willingness to join him there, to momentarily slip out of grief and into make-believe. These ‘filler-scenes’ are Vuong’s project at its most caring. 

Vuong’s evolution in narrative style is not only visible in his language use, but also in his tone. As he told Fresh Air, The Emperor of Gladness is the first novel in which he allowed himself to be funny.On Earth is sombre, and for good reason: it tells the story of his ancestors. He didn’t want their pain to become a punchline, especially because Vuong knew the readership would be primarily white. But The Emperor of Gladness, he explains, is his story, which allows him the freedom to explore humour alongside grief.  

This freedom is noticeable. There’s a distinct wit hidden all throughout the novel, not there for easy laughs but functioning as a layered narrative tool. Vuong’s humour lands best when it’s carefully planned, absurd and deadpan, but leaving an unignorable urge to reflect on what is actually being laughed about.  

Take, for example, a flashback to Hai’s time in rehab. His roommate, a sex addict “strapped to the bedpost with bungee cords,” turns to him and says: “How come I never see any Asians in rehab?” Hai, feeling crazy, responds: “MSG. […] It absorbs all the poison. Why do you think the government hates the stuff?” When pressed on why it didn’t work for him, he says: “I was adopted. Ate mostly waffles my whole life and now I’m fucked.”  

At times, however, Vuong’s humour misses the mark. At one point, we’re dropped into an amateur wrestling competition where Hai’s manager, BJ, performs under the name “Deez Nuts”, dressed in an“unhinged Big Bird” costume. Meanwhile, their co-worker Maureen plays the banjo in suspenders, her bad knee making her performance look like a “walking seizure”. This isn’t absurdism, this is silliness. It dilutes the emotional weight of the chapter and creates a sense of second-hand embarrassment, either for the characters or for the novel itself, for including the scene at all.  

There are other misfires, many of which Tom Crewe points out in his much-discussed review for The London Review of Books. For example, the recurring joke about a homemade R2-D2 that “looks like a penis” is ruined by repetition, especially when you remember the paper-mâché robot was made by a child who died of leukaemia before he could finish it.  

Yet, these moments are offset against Vuong’s quieter humour. Hai naming his war character “Sergeant Pepper” during Grazina’s dementia episodes, unaware of the reference to the Beatles’ album, is endearing and sharp. It reminds us that cultural context can’t always be assumed, especially across generations or immigrant experiences. These hits and misses make the novel’s tonal experimentation feel like a process of trial and error. Vuong is still learning how to integrate humour into his fiction, but this first attempt already reveals skill. 

This skill, however, is lost in the ending of The Emperor of Gladness. After nearly four hundred pages of resisting conventional plot, of just observing life and its harsh conditions, the novel suddenly turns towards resolution. In its final pages, Vuong offers a neat summary of what happens to almost all the supporting characters: who leaves town, who gets his own business, who ends up okay. It’ssatisfying, yes, but it also feels like a betrayal of the novel’s central goal. 

This kind of closing montage is a familiar device in romance fiction, designed to reassure the reader that the characters’ lives continue in that classic happily ever after. But here, it risks undermining everything Vuong spent the novel working towards: the dignity of staying in place, the refusal to force life into a narrative arch. Is it a lack of trust in the reader? A fear that we won’t believe these lives matter unless we’re told they turn out all right? And why, in a novel that insists there is meaning in not moving up, do so many of the characters leave East Gladness? 

The first chapter poses a similar problem. As Vuong explains in his interview with Oprah, he wrote it by hand during the 2020 U.S. elections, isolating himself to escape the national politics. The result is a lyrical, image-heavy reimagining of the town he grew up in, addressed in the second person. The poetic style clashes with the novelistic voice that comes next, and readers who struggled with On Earth may abandon this book too soon, assuming it’s more of the same. Meanwhile, the readers who do stay may be left wondering what this chapter contributes beyond mood and atmosphere. 

Taken together, the novel’s first and final pages feel like remnants of a first draft. Darlings that refused to be killed. In interviews, Vuong has said he plans to write only eight books in his lifetime. The Emperor of Gladness takes the middle position in that limited canon, and hints at a consistent improvement towards an ultimate literary novel. However, these chapters are his past style haunting him in this transitionary work. Additionally, the novel is still grounded in autobiographical elements, repeating most of the same concerns and themes of all Vuong’s published works. I wonder what Vuong could do if he wrote not from memory, but from pure invention, imagining something beyond himself. Something new. 

Still, Vuong has found a way to write the repetition and stagnation of ordinary life without it becoming boring, and to integrate humour without undercutting grief. There are flaws, of course, but this is a writer experimenting, and a poet slowly becoming comfortable in the suit of a novelist. 

Ultimately, I keep seeing that moment on the bench, of Hai and Sony, the imaginary fly, and the love in the interaction. A novel doesn’t need a climax to land. Sometimes it just needs two people, sitting still, swatting at nothing, and letting it go.