Review: The Emperor Has No Clothes (A Review Of The Emperor Of Gladness By Ocean Vuong)

 By Hugh Blanton

Ocean Vuong continues his quest to make the world fall in love with his sadness in his latest novel The Emperor of Gladness. Our main character, twenty-year-old Hai (a stand-in for Vuong himself), lives in Gladness, Connecticut (a stand in for Glastonbury, Connecticut) with his mother, with whom he has a tempestuous relationship. Like Vuong's previous novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, the mother shows a sadistic cruelty toward her son, but Vuong's toned it down to just mental cruelty here. (In On Earth the mother smashed a teapot on the boy's cheek and threw a box of Legos at him with such force it left blood spatter on the wall. Even threatened him with a knife once!) Vuong opens up Emperor with a long pastoral about the grimness of Gladness where even the lawns, with their quack grass and goose droppings, are sad. Hai seems a little resentful of the wealth and splendor of nearby Hartford where "The only things we share with the city are the ambulances, being close enough to Hartford for them to come fetch us when we're near dead or rattling away on steel gurneys without next of kin." One can't help but wonder if Vuong fictionalized the town's name out of fear of angering the real residents for speaking on their behalf and portraying them as a bunch of whiny mopes. (Even the potholes in Gladness are bigger and deeper than Hartford's.)

 

Vuong uses absurdly contrived devices to create conflict and plot twists. Characters have dementia, autism, or are compulsive liars. As the story moves along we find out that one thing after another have either never happened or wasn't true due to characters lying and deceiving each other—it's similar to reading a passage in a bad potboiler that turned out to be nothing but a character's dream. Early on in the book Hai is considering suicide and walks out onto a bridge intending to jump into the river below. An eighty-two year old widow, Grazina Vitkus, not only talks Hai down from the bridge, she invites him inside her home. She lives alone in the house and after warming him up (it was during a midnight rainstorm) she offers him cigarettes and asks him if he'd like to move in and live with her. Vuong explains away this absurdity by Grazina's dementia, and Hai, freshly kicked out of a three week stint in inpatient drug rehab, just so happens to need a place to live. Not because he doesn't have a home. Of course, his mother has an apartment. However, Hai can not return home—he had told his mother that he's away at college and it would expose his ruse. Vuong, however, overlooked that Hai's mother would have already known that Hai was in rehab—and not medical school—because the insurance that Hai had used to check in with would have been mailing her the statements. The whole novel is basically sunk by this one enormous plot hole without even bringing up the sundry other inconsistencies.

 

In addition to the two novels, Vuong also has two collections of poetry under his belt, Night Sky With Exit Wounds and Time is a Mother. Like all poets, Vuong loves his metaphor and simile, but his attempts at them are risible. There's some sort of odd affinity for torsos: he describes mini-TVs as "the size of human torsos" and the bags of frozen spinach at a HomeMarket restaurant (where Hai works) as "big as a torso." The junkyard in East Gladness has school buses "in various stages of amnesia." A coworker's skin, his "acne, which in the day resembled blueberry jam, was now blending with the smoother parts of his cheek, like weathered cuneiform on old marble." Hai lying on his bed: "he was warm as a blood cell being swept through the vein of a fallen angel." Hai wanting to get out of Gladness: "setting out like a spark flung from his mother's cigarette." A man "whose teeth were the grey of loaded dice." A restaurant manager tells an an employee to shut up and "gave him a look you could collect debts with." I can almost see Vuong tossing down his ink pen and leaning back in self-satisfaction after scribbling "a night in which he hadn't slept an inch." and exclaiming, I bet nobody ever thought of that! (I can't, however, see Crayola including "Loaded Dice Grey" in its sixty-four packs.)

 

The bane of the autofiction writer is repetitiveness, and in Emperor, only Vuong's second novel, it's already beginning to seep in. There just isn't a lot of material someone like Vuong, whose adult life has been spent mostly in academia or in in-patient rehab, to write about. The character Noah, here, was Trevor in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and the mentions of his mother's underwear in the last novel are mentions of Grazina's in Emperor. Vuong even recycles a poem title, "Beautiful Short Loser" from Time is a Mother to use here in Hai's self effacing description of his family. Vuong actually did work in a Boston Market for a short while and he makes ample use of the experience in Emperor (Hai takes a job in a restaurant called HomeMarket which is very similar to a Boston Market). However, it comes off as condescending praise and admiration for the poor working class people that he deigned to stand shoulder to shoulder with while shopping for experience and material for his novel. When the manager gathers the crew in the dining room to announce Hai has been hired "Something like warmth seemed to flow from Hai's fingers, which startled him. The room spun and then gleamed with colors....He had a job, which meant he had regained a real, quantifiable foothold in the world. He had a uniform, a cool looking visor with the logo stitched neatly in cardinal red....He also had coworkers—no, a team, one that was the third best at their job." This is the silly romanticizing of the working class that is often indulged in by people who are not working class. Vuong exposed his naivety when he talked about his working experience in a New York Times interview, saying that working class "people are kind even when they know it won't matter. Where does the come from? I watched co-workers get together and dig each other out of blizzards. They could just dig themselves out and leave, go home sooner, hug their families, but they all stayed, and they dug each other out. What is kindness exhibited knowing there is no pay off?"

 

Too often, multilingual authors like to let their English-only readers know they are over their reader's heads by including untranslated non-English prose. (Gabino Iglesias's 305 page novel The Devil Takes You Home has 125 pages that include untranslated Spanish.) Vuong lets English-only readers off fairly easy here by only including three instances of untranslated Vietnamese and one instance of untranslated Lithuanian. Hai recalls a time when:

 

"...one night, years ago, she had come home from work after a thirteen hour shift saying she was craving pizza. Being the sole wielder of English, he got on the phone and ordered one. He must've been eight or nine. After the pizza came and they were all eating, he looked up and saw that Ma had fallen asleep. But not only that—she had face planted onto a half eaten slice on her paper plate, making a greasy stain on her white shirt the shape of a warped heart. It was one of those images he could never shake loose from his mind, even though it held no meaning."

 

Hai lets his mother sleep, face down in the pizza. She worked as a pedicurist in a salon—a salon that apparently stayed open extended hours. The novel is of course an Oprah's Book Club pick, the emblem proudly displayed on the front cover above the picture of a slumped and dejected sad person that resembles Vuong. Emperor was undoubtedly a shoo-in for the elite club—an immigrant mother who struggles to speak English has a gay, drug addicted son in rehab.

 

Throughout Emperor there are frequent references to war and soldiers. It's almost as much of a theme as Hai's job at HomeMarket. Hai's younger cousin Sony aspires to be a US Marine, but fears he won't be admitted due to a surgical scar that runs the length of his skull after surgery for hydrocephalus. Grazina was a refugee from Lithuania during WW II and has flashbacks that are aggravated by her dementia. And it's here that we find the most implausible parts of the novel—Hai plays along with her dementia and flashbacks, even to the point of Hai and Grazina running and ducking around the cluttered home playing war with finger pistols. During these episodes, Hai has convinced Grazina that he is an American soldier named Sergeant Pepper and he's there to rescue her and get her out of Europe and into America. Readers are asked to suspend a lot of disbelief while Grazina is often cogent enough to remember things like to get the Pop Tarts from under Hai's bed for food to take as they make their escape, while she simultaneously believes she's dodging bombs from an air raid. Hai himself thinks the military is a sham:

 

"...even as most of his friends from high school joined, mostly skinny, pimply faced white boys from HUD housing with bad GPAs, swallowed up in fatigues and thrown into the desert, where they drank Red Bull and blasted Slipknot in their headphones while getting trigger happy. He had overheard Wayne mention that out of every five hundred soldiers, there were most likely ten mass shooters."

 

One of Hai's HomeMarket coworkers allows an Iraq war veteran with PTSD to live in the shed behind his home. The ex-soldier crawls around on his belly in methamphetamine-induced psychosis during a backyard barbecue.

 

Vuong also envisions himself as something like a modern day Upton Sinclair now, exposing the horrible conditions at a slaughterhouse and pork processing plant. Hai and a few of his coworkers are invited to take part-time jobs at a slaughterhouse that is understaffed for the holiday rush. Hai is given the job of knocking the emperor hogs unconscious with the captive bolt gun: "...these animals with faces so human, eyelashes blond and thick, so expressive it felt like they should have names, so much so that Hai had to look away as he pulled the trigger." The next step is the slashing of the jugular, which Vuong portrays as so violent the blood squirted into the mouths of the inexperienced holiday help. The pork is due to be shipped to none other than Linda McMahon, yes the Republican candidate for senate and wife of WWE CEO Vince McMahon. She's holding a fundraiser in her Stamford, Connecticut mansion where she's going to serve organic pork to the guests. The joke's on her, we're told—the pork is labeled organic for no other reason than they're fed exclusively organic corn which gives the hogs acidosis which in turn means they have to be shot full of antibiotics.

 

The implausibilities in The Emperor of Gladness are insults to the reader's intelligence; Vuong has one character, a divorced mother, writing letters to her son in the name of the boy's absent father for four years after the father had died—expecting her son to never find out that his father is dead. Hai telephones a jail where his aunt is being held and the compliant guards go get her to come and take the call. Even if Vuong really didn't know that jails don't allow incoming calls to inmates, surely the editors at Penguin Press would have. In a poor attempt at humor the HomeMarket employees are laughing and hooting at a coworker's tattoo of Bugs Bunny eating a carrot—they think it looks like Bugs is fellating. And of course omitting the insurance statements that would have been mailed to Hai's mother's apartment implies we could probably question Vuong's own actual biography. Gladness's emperor has no clothes.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.