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Between his two indelible poetry Collections – Night sky with exit injuries (2016) and Time is a mother (2022) – The American Vietnamese writer Ocean Vuong published a novel, On earth we are briefly magnificent (2019), which compensated for its inequality with its lyricism and its brevity. The same cannot be said about the second novel by Vuong The Emperor of Joy Who, at 400 pages, explores some of the recurring themes – family history, war, immigration to the United States, loss, poverty – of his work on a larger scale than ever.
It opens onto a panorama of the fictitious city of New England of East Gladness, a kind of American Under milk wood In the era of the opioid crisis: “At the distant end of the lot is the old man's roadkill of the week, his orbit filled with coam-cola warm, the act of a boy who, bored on his way to school, paid his drink into this endless obscurity of opposite visions.”
This convoluted image can reflect the confused state of mind of the protagonist. We first meet Hai, 19 – a Vietnamese American who was, like Vuong, raised by his illiterate mother in Connecticut – by a bridge. Hai is preparing to plunge into “black water turned like a chemically softened granite” when the Grazina, a Nonagenarian Lithuanian widow, appears outside the mist, speaks and takes her to her house, where he lives for the rest of the novel.
Hai gets a job in a quick restaurant where his autistic Sony cousin also works. Hai colleagues and customers are a familiar mixture of the drug addict, the deprived and on the left which have become a must in the representations of America of the blue passes. Their sounds of forced dialogue, with a profusion of explanatives, and the representations of Vuong of these strangely named figures do not always make sense: “Russia was eighteen but had the raucous stamp of adolescence, the kind of voice that makes you want to say yes even if you ask you for time.”
Hai told his mother that he studied medicine in Boston and, even if East's joy is not a big place, his lie is never exposed. The narrator explains that Hai “rolled his bike with his hooded sweatshirt in case”, but whoever was a teenager in a small town knows that it is impossible to run away with anything. That said, Hai's telephone conversations with her mother, in which she encourages him to work hard at university and triggers her guilt, are the most touching moments in the novel. In Time is a motherVuong wrote poems in motion on the death of his own mother and he seems to channel these emotions in the story of Hai.
Improbable disappointments, minimum wage employees with heart of gold, friendships between young men and elderly women – these things do not need to be incredible in a novel, but here, they sound false. There is little intrigue, apart from the feeling that Hai's lies, Grazina's descent into dementia and Sony's quest to get her mother out of prison can converge in a outcome. Instead, the desire for Vuong to capture life in a diversified and decrepit city is roughly. It is a worthy objective but its execution is awkward.
Many contemporary poets – Ben Lerner, Luke Kennard and Kaveh Akbar among them – Write Exalting fiction. But see one of the most famous new poets of the last decade produce a novel as overwhelming as The Emperor of Joy is a reminder of the difficulty of moving between literary forms.
The Emperor of Joy By Ocean Vuong, Jonathan Cape £ 20 / Penguin Press $ 30, 416 pages
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