The Emperor of Gladness

Ocean Vuong’s novel The Emperor of Gladness begins with an unlikely friendship. A 19-year-old-boy, Hai, stands at the edge of a bridge in Gladness, Connecticut, about to commit suicide. But he is impeded by Grazina, an elderly woman who lives nearby and suffers from dementia. Hai hears the words, “Come back. Come back now!” and mistakenly believes that someone has noticed he is about to jump. (In a comic vein that continues throughout the novel, Grazina is actually calling out to a bedsheet that has blown off her laundry line.)

Eventually, the elderly woman does see Hai and threatens him with the police if he doesn’t climb down. Grazina then commands Hai into her house, and that’s where he lives for most of the novel, occupying a role that is somewhere between confidant, lodger, and nurse—depending on Grazina’s state of mind. As the novel continues, we see that this latter role of nurse suits Hai perfectly—ironically, considering how Hai’s Vietnamese-born mother (who also lives in Gladness) believes her son is attending medical school in Boston, not living near the bridge where he almost ended his life.

Despite the growing friendship between Grazina and Hai—and later Hai’s coworkers at “HomeMarket”—the story continues to build on mostly bleak elements. Hai is addicted to pills and continues to be estranged from his mother. Grazina’s condition is degenerative and includes nocturnal episodes during which she relives traumatic moments of her escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. There is no reversal of fortune for Hai or Grazina in this book; life is going to get worse, and it gradually does. However, while the characters’ lives are bleak, the novel is anything but. The Emperor of Gladness is a book in which despair, addiction, unrelenting sadness, generational trauma, and poverty are simply no match for friendship, which renders this sublime novel into a work of art—a sort of literary kintsugi.

Vuong marks the opening of the novel with poetic prose as he describes the bleak Connecticut landscape: “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.” But despite the mesmerizing beauty of the language here, the narrative flow is swift, and the more poetic style eventually morphs into more traditional novelistic narrative—as if Vuong is moving us from the overture into the first act, where the characters take over from the author.

As the tender relationship between Hai and Grazina develops, Hai eventually gets a job through his autistic cousin, Sony, at HomeMarket, a liminal dining establishment which is not quite a restaurant, but also not a fast-food joint. It’s here at work that Hai becomes friends with characters that will be recognizable to anyone who has worked in the kitchens and factories of America. And yet, despite Vuong’s compelling assortment of people, perhaps drawn from his own early employment history, each one is developed with such Dickensian alacrity that, within a few chapters, we know each intimately.

Vuong never uses any of his characters as a mouthpiece to judge the world outside the book. Instead, he simply presents with fresh eyes a cross-section of America’s poor—and specifically the type of poverty prevalent throughout postindustrial New England. In the tradition of authors like John Steinbeck, Kent Haruf, and Stewart O’Nan, Vuong has courageously penned a novel about people who live in grinding poverty, with more access to drugs and alcohol than education and opportunity.

While Vuong writes with the literary prowess of these other chroniclers of America’s working poor, The Emperor of Gladness also features a sort of madcap, Chaplinesque comedy, with scenes taking place in unusual situations such as amateur wrestling matches and a temporary warehouse where hundreds of pigs are being slaughtered in a frenzied holiday rush.

And yet, no amount of failure, pain, disappointment, or porcine murder can usurp the sense of hope evoked by the characters’ attempts to care for one another and for the downtrodden people who come to HomeMarket for what is missing from their lives. In one scene, after being humiliated by an officious regional manager, Hai and his team retaliate with the only power they have—compassion—by focusing their energy on a family who has come in to celebrate a child’s sixth birthday.

Wayne, Sony (somewhat recovered), and BJ, her cap back on, her manager’s bow tie cinched up, led the procession, clapping as they staggered out from the kitchen singing “Happy Birthday,” their faces lifted into masks of glee as they crossed the rubber mats and onto the warm brick tiles of the dining room, where a family had gathered around a girl with a pink crown on her head, the wax number 6 hovering toward her as she shrieked with pristine delight, scanning the crew’s faces, then turning to her parents—no older than twenty-five—regarding them with what looked like the invention of gratitude, unbridled to the point of levitation.

The strange final scene in the book is of Hai sinking with garbage bags inside a dumpster. He has thrown himself away. And yet, this last page feels light, hopeful even. For while Hai might still hate himself, he no longer hates the world and is no longer the sort of person who will jump from a bridge. This reminded me of these lines in T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

In The Emperor of Gladness, it’s not humility at the heart of wisdom, but friendship between people in the cracks of society; people who, despite being trampled, continue to flower.