The Emperor of Gladness: Oprah's Book Club: A Novel Hardcover – May 13, 2025

I adore Ocean Vuong. His poems are amazing, and his first novel was a good start. "The Emperor of Gladness" is a far better and more mature novel than "On Earth...". Ocean has an astonishing command of the English language and can combine humor, sadness, social commentary, and every other emotion in marvelous ways. If you question whether a young man and an older woman can have an emotional connection strong enough to help them both survive, here is your answer. I highly recommend this book. If you don't know Ocean's work, listen to his interview on the NY Times podcast called "The Interview" and read his NY Times essay from May 2025 to get a feel for the family life that is so perfectly represented in his characters.

“[I]t wasn’t that I was happy—but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.” (p318)According to the publisher’s official promotion, this novel’s anchoring storyline is an account of the deep, unlikely family-like bond between an 82-yr old Lithuanian woman and 19-yr old Vietnamese man, both down on their luck. Their relationship resembles a loving grandson caring for an ailing grandparent, and it changes them both in profound ways. But that’s by no means the only storyline, and it’s arguably not the most important one.More generally, this quiet, bittersweet novel follows the lives of a host of wounded characters struggling to get by in a world that seems to want to keep them down. Their friendship, generosity and empathy help them support each other as they suffer misfortunes and misadventures alone and together. At times the story meanders, but I think that's part of the author's point -- the story mirrors life itself. In some ways it all has a Dickensian feel to it. It’s nicely done.

When Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous was published, the book club group I was facilitating at the time wondered if the author would be able to make the transition from poet to full-fledged novelist---because the first novel flew primarily on the wings of poetry.His second novel---The Emperor of Gladness--- does seem to lack the poetry of his first book. Nevertheless, it is poignant and powerful---and it is at its very best when the author explores the profound and touching relationship between the central protagonist Hai and the demented old woman Grazina. Grazina is, in fact, the glue that holds this book together. And yet, the novel's other characters who live in the fast-food world of Home Market, are just as significant in their own way and connect powerfully to the mood, tone and themes of the author's book.The novel does seem pretty dismal, and I was reminded again and again of its epigraph from Act 4, scene 3 of Hamlet: the true emperor of the world is the worm. "We fat ourselves for maggots."So, the world is a wasteland of sorts in which, in the end, the American Dream ends most logically in a nursing home or in a dumpster where we sit contemplating stars in the night sky that we can neither reach nor comprehend. Where is the beauty in our lives? "What good is beauty if nobody wins?" The lies we tell ourselves and one another. The delusions we use to cope with trauma, with the brutality of war and the senseless slaughter of humans and animals. The numbing realities of our existences. It is all pretty grim.But the writing is breathtaking, and many of the scenes in this novel are unforgettable and brilliant, including a pill-popping Hai (as "Sgt. Pepper") sitting in a bathtub with the demented Grazina as they take a midnight ride in a "jeep" that sweeps them across war-torn Europe on their way to the battlefields of Gettysburg. And the final section of the novel (Spring) is so powerfully imagined and rendered that the last pages of the book might leave you in tears.What are we? Who are we supposed to be? Do we ever rise above the level of our own mediocrity? What happens now? The Emperor of Gladness provides much food for thought, and I can only continue to admire its sensitive and intuitive author who is so very young and yet writes with such compassion and wisdom.

I have bought 'The Emperor of Gladness", after watching Ocean Vuong'd interview on Oprah Winfrey's award show plus a couple of other rich interviews. Ocean is a poet of great talent. His generous character is attractive and his 1940's quote of Simone Weil that 'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity" is telling about himself.However, I have difficulty reading Ocean's novel. Almost every sentence of "The Emperor" is overloaded with poetic imagery. Reading this novel feels like trying to cross a room floor filled with flowerpots of all shapes and height standing everywhere, which you keep hitting at every step. I was tired after three chapters.Ocean Vuong still has a way to go before his prose reaches the powerful clarity and poetry that flows with the narrative and moves the reader forward of novels of Korean writer Han Kang, who won the Nobel this year.