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The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong review – heartbreak and hope

The follow-up to On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a tale of precarity and connection in smalltown ConnecticutOcean Vuong’s second novel is a 416‑page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception. It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise “as mist over the rye across the tracks” and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai –“19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light” – preparing to drown himself. There’s an almost lazy richness to the picture: the late afternoon sun, the “moss so lush between the wooden rail ties that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae”, the junkyard “packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia”.His poetic credentials established, the author of the bestselling autofictional On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous gives narrative its head. Instead of jumping from the...


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