The Emperor of Gladness

Nineteen year old Hai is standing on King Philip's Bridge above East Gladness, Connecticut, ready to jump, when Grazina Vitkus, an eighty year old widow with worsening dementia, calls out to him from her yard and talks him down without ever quite admitting what she has just witnessed. Hai, secretly battling an opioid addiction he has hidden from his mother along with the story that he is away at medical school rather than failing out of community college, moves into Grazina's cluttered house as her unofficial caretaker, drawn into her fragmented memories of fleeing Lithuania during the Second World War and into the daily, undramatic work of managing another person's failing mind. He takes a job at HomeMarket, a fast food chain that markets its reheated food as home cooking, working alongside his cousin Sony, whose own father's supposed war heroism turns out, once the family's stories are finally tested against the record, to be a misremembered accident rather than the wound anyone in the family ever claimed it was, and BJ, a manager who moonlights as an amateur wrestler and becomes one of the few adults in the book to actually look out for Hai without asking anything back. The novel follows a single, unhurried year of shift work, addiction, Grazina's slow decline as her dementia worsens, and Hai's own repeated, half sincere lies to his mother about the successful life he is supposedly building elsewhere. It ends with Hai on the phone to his mother, still telling her the story of the medical student he is not, the lie by now the most carefully built thing in his life.

Vuong, a poet publishing his second novel, writes in the same dense, image heavy sentences that made his poetry and his first novel distinctive, and readers who found that style extraordinary in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous will recognize it immediately here, applied now to fast food kitchens and a dying woman's disordered memory with the same close attention. It reads slowly and deliberately, more interested in the texture of an ordinary bad year than in incident, and some readers and critics have found the metaphors overworked for material this plain; Vuong has said directly that he wanted to write against the model minority story that only counts a life as a success or a failure, calling thirty years at the same job, in the same apartment, a decent life rather than a defeat, and the novel's refusal to give Hai anything like a triumphant ending is exactly that argument made in fictional form.