El emperador de Alegría

by Ocean Vuong, Daniel Saldaña París (Translator)

Una novela deslumbrante sobre la belleza y la esperanza que residen en los detalles más humildes de la existencia.

Es verano en Alegría Este, un rincón de Nueva Inglaterra en el que el tiempo parece haberse detenido y los espíritus del pasado se pasean entre coches abandonados. Alegría se alza sobre una costra de tierra a lo largo del río Connecticut; sobre el río se alza un puente de carga que lleva el nombre del jefe wampanoag que lideró una rebelión para recuperar su territorio de manos de los puritanos; y sobre el puente se alza Hai, de diecinueve años, pasando una pierna sobre la barandilla tras haber decidido lanzarse desde treinta metros de altura. Y entonces, de repente, algo interrumpe lo que parecía una voz al otro lado del río. Es Grazina, una anciana atrapada en los laberintos de la memoria, con recuerdos de una guerra lejana y de su Lituania natal.

En un microcosmos de pérdidas y sueños rotos, entre las calles polvorientas y los paisajes melancólicos de Alegría Este, ambos construirán un refugio efímero contra el desorden del mundo. En ese pasado laberíntico y difuminado de Grazina, Hai se convertirá en el sargento Pepper, personaje de una guerra imaginaria que les permitirá navegar juntos las turbulencias de la extrañeza. Unidos por una existencia vivida en los márgenes de lo social, se forjará entre esa dupla improbable un vínculo basado en la empatía y el reconocimiento; una relación tejida entre confusiones y momentos de lucidez que se convertirá en un viaje inesperado hacia una segunda oportunidad.

Tras deslumbrar a público y crítica con su primera novela, En la Tierra somos fugazmente grandiosos, Ocean Vuong regresa con uno de los libros más esperados del un relato conmovedor sobre las heridas que atormentan nuestra alma colectiva.

Haciendo gala de una extraordinaria destreza para la innovación formal y de una capacidad única para aunar la fragilidad y la esperanza a través de la belleza, Vuong nos regala una sobrecogedora epopeya sobre la capacidad humana para encontrar destellos de alegría incluso en los lugares más insospechados.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Audiobook, LGBT, Queer

462 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 13, 2025

About the author

Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the American Book Award and the MacArthur “Genius Grant," he has also worked as a line cook, tobacco harvester, nursing home volunteer, and fast-food server, the latter becoming inspiration for The Emperor of Gladness. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts and New York City.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

new ocean vuong novel? i used to pray for times like these.

his debut is one of my favorite books of all time.

this is one of my biggest disappointments in years.

i am not always a  poetry fan, but i do love how poets write prose: each word thoughtfully selected, each sentence beautiful and purposeful, the accumulation stunning.

i've since read some of vuong's poetry, and haven't felt that same way. and this book didn't do that for me either.

i can only describe this in creativity 101 terms: this felt like it was telling me, not showing me. i wanted depth. i wanted the searing emotion i found in the last book.

i didn't get it.

this felt (forgive the pun) like a lot of things on paper: a Moving And Affecting Portrait, an award-winner, a crossover bestseller.

but it didn't feel any deeper than marketing copy.

bottom line: this was a very long blurb.

[Sahil Javed · Rating 5 out of 5]

so 2025 is a year for crying then, yeah?

[Maddy ✨ ~The Verse Vixen {AFK} · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Sometimes you don’t just read a book, you bleed through it!"

My second five-star book of the year so far, and the magic of it still lingers,
like an unsolved riddle in the back of my mind.
One minute I’m revising Theory, the next I’m sobbing over a boy on a bridge..
I got the ARC mid-finals. I wanted calm. I got cracked open like a walnut.
I am unwell, I am in awe!!
📌 full thoughts pending emotional clarity.
until then: this book owns me!!

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now Shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award 2026
Arrghhhh... I applaud Ocean Vuong for shining a light on the mundane lives of contemporary working class Americans, for giving them dignity and grace in beautifully rendered sentences, for evoking atmosphere with perceptive details. Also, for the life of me, I couldn't get into this meandering text. Our protagonist is 19-year-old Hai, a queer Vietnamese-American who lives in a small town called East Gladness, Connecticut. Standing on a bridge contemplating suicide, he is stopped by Grazina, a Lithuanian-born elderly woman suffering from dementia, and becomes her caretaker.

This lengthy novel features all kinds of topics, from queer awakening to the immigrant experience to drug addiction etc.pp., but to me, the most captivating aspect is the way Vuong renders the aspect of dependent work, so the kind where you rent out your body and/or skills to receive the necessary means to survive. Hai works in a diner, where different human relationhip dynamics play out, where work is hard and demanding. A visit to the slaughterhouse that produces their product points to wider nets of exploitation on which first-world living circumstances rest. Our protagonist builds a chosen family that gives him stability in a brutal, precarious world.

There is hope at the center of this text that starts with a new friendship between a teenager and a 82-year-old, and the poetic language sometimes ventures on the ethereal. Still, this is a novel for those of us who enjoy lingering in densely captured atmospheres and slow descriptive scenes, which means: It's not for me. Vuong's contemplative streak is clearly part of his strength though: It's not you, Ocean, it's me. You're a great, great talent.

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 5 out of 5]

for fuck's sake, man.

[Raymond · Rating 2 out of 5]

So far, one of worst novel/book I have read this year. This novel was on several best book lists & Oprah’s Book Club. However, I really did not enjoy reading it. The protagonist is a compulsive lying suicidal gay Asian boy name Hai who lived for a while with an old Lithuanian woman name Grazina who has dementia. The daily life of Hai & Grazina makes up the main premise of the book. Some of the interactions between them were touching & sweet. While most of their dialogue were quite boring, a little confusing, & even weird/uncomfortable. Most of the other characters in the novel worked at a local eatery. A lot of the subplots involving them really didn’t make a lot of sense. The stories involving women wrestling, diamond crusade, Miss Magician, etc. felt pointless & irrelevant to the storyline. I thought the ending was unsatisfactory cause it was sad & predictable. I really don’t feel like this novel deserves all the hype & no, I would not recommend it.

[Léa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ocean Vuong try not to make me cry challenge...

I'm endlessly astounded by the way Ocean Vuong is able to put the aching, joyousness and mundanity of being human in a way that feels as melancholic and raw as it does beautiful, and this was absolutely no different. The Emperor of Gladness is an astounding story on two people living on the fringes of society (the elderly and the young adult) and how their differences are exactly what make them similar. I'll be thinking about this one forever, please read it

[Ashley is in europe (permanent [?] semi-hiatus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

ocean vuong really said, what if i emotionally waterboarded you, made it hauntingly beautiful and poetic, forced you to spiral about your immigrant mom and grandma with dementia, and then quietly put you back together with just enough hope to make you want to keep living?

still deciding on my rating, but i am keeping it at 4 stars for now.
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WE'RE GETTING READY FOR SAD GIRL SUMMER WITH THIS ONE!! BR WITH BEST GIRLS ANH AND CHES!!

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OMGGG I FORGOT THIS CAME OUT TODAY 😭 i need to clear my crs asap now

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i’m ready to be destroyed again. almost one more month!! once i get my hands on this, i already know i will eat up those 416 pages in under 24 hours

[ELLIAS (elliasreads)]

ready for my soul to break open yet again....

[Shawn McComb · Rating 5 out of 5]

10 STAR BOOK !!!

[lex ngu · Rating 2 out of 5]

is this is a good book ? maybe . but did i enjoy reading it ? no

[George Fenwick · Rating 2 out of 5]

prose is beautiful, but the plot is so overly trite and forced that it all gets lost in the weeds. main character is unformed and inconsistent and plot is full of contrivances and logic leaps. pretty punishing experience

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a book about 19 yr old Hai, a Vietnamese American, college dropout, freshly out of drug rehab… living in Connecticut and at the start of the story he is standing on a bridge ready to jump.
An old lady living in a dilapidated house at the river’s edge spies him and calls out to him.. he goes to the house and is talked into staying.
She is 82 yr old Grazina Vitkus a Lithuanian immigrant who had raised her family there in that house and now deals with dementia… she asks Hai to stay and take care of her which is great for him .. he has nowhere to go as he is lying to his mother about being in medical school.
Hai also gets a job part time at a HomeMarket fast food joint where this group of people becomes family.. just like Grazina..
There is a lot of heartbreak here but also much humor
in the way Hai takes care of Grazina when she’s in the throws of dementia and also the workers at HomeMarket taking care of each other … so endearing.

[Donna · Rating 1 out of 5]

I tried to like this book. Mostly I just wanted it to end.

[ଘRory · Rating 4 out of 5]

IF READING MADE ME SUCH A CRAZY BITCH OCEAN VUONG SHOULD PAY FOR MY REHAB STAY ...AND THE PILLS .

[Angela M · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is the same beautiful writing in this novel that I found in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. I read the first 5 pages and then read them again because the prose is breathtaking. It’s almost hard to believe that English is not his native language, but it’s clear that Ocean Vuong was born to write . I should read some of his poetry.

The is the story of a young man, a Vietnamese refugee, trying to heal and discover himself, looking for salvation from the drug addiction he can’t quite recover from, suffering the pain of deceiving his mother and not quite being able to tell her the truth and hurt her again. Hai connects with an elderly Lithuanian woman named Grazina who is on the brink of dementia with her memories and grief, a survivor of war who saves Hai from taking his life. A beautiful and unexpected bond is formed between them as he becomes her care giver.

A group of coworkers at a chain restaurant, misfits in their own right carrying their own burdens become part of his make shift family along with his mentally disabled cousin Sony. Their lives are messy and miserable at times, but somehow they make do, as these ordinary messy lives are filled with the extraordinary will to keep on going everyday. They define what family is in a different light, yet exude the caring and love of what family means. Caring and connection, people touching each other’s lives in unexpected ways. The American dream isn’t always success in the ways we expect it might be. Sometimes it’s just surviving and connecting and knowing kindness.

The dedication at the end of the book “In memory of Grazina J. Verselis (1925-2014)” had me wanting to know more about the inspiration for this book. This NYT interview made the story more meaningful telling of the real Grazina and so much more about why he wrote this book.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/ma...

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hai, the protagonist of Ocean Vuong's sophomore novel, wants to write a book some day, one that safely holds all of his favourite things. He likely never will, caught amidst the drudgery of living, and making a living, at the superfrayed edges of American society. But Vuong can, and The Emperor of Gladness is his attempt at preserving Hai's memories and experiences against the erasure that awaits them, against the descent into oblivion despite which his people – poor, broken, infirm and neglected – continue to survive.

We first meet Hai teetering at the edge of a bridge in the backwaters of East Gladness, Connecticut, ashamed to return home to his mother, when he is accosted by an elderly woman. Grazina is alone and battling dementia, but in that moment she throws him a lifeline, and Hai agrees to keep on as her caretaker in exchange for food and shelter. The unlikely pair soon form a tender, life-altering bond, one that changes Hai's relationship with his himself, his family, and a post-industrial community beset by invisiblised crises.

This is a thematically complex novel: Vuong here refracts critiques of of labour, consumption, enforced precarity, late capitalism and the American empire against a study of human connection, using the space created by friendship and found family to fold the margins into the centre and remind us of who and what is left behind in our scramble for infinite growth and economic progress. His characters are people who have been written-off from the American dream: fast food chain gig workers, drug addicts, poor immigrants, the disabled and the elderly, none of whom are afforded a place in the veneered world they are enlisted to maintain. Though these connections are only transient – though these characters' very lives and livelihoods are rendered disposable by the systems that govern them – Vuong here tries capturing glimpses of the beauty they create despite a pervasive social, political, and existential stasis.

The trajectories of Vuong's characters intersect top with broader themes of memory and war: Grazina's dementia often transports her back to her fraught youth, while Hai contends with his in the present – East Gladness is a nowhereland stricken with a poverty-enforced drug crisis, an insidious war taking prisoners in his neck of the woods. Hai's cousin, Sony, meanwhile, finds solace and escape in the memorialisation of a different war, one whose seemingly distant spectre continues to haunt the state of their nation. Amidst these scenarios of conflict and forgetting, the author invites readers to pay attention to what draws his characters to each other and how it gives them the strength to keep going.

Though the book is brilliant in scope – expansive and intimate at once – something about it doesn't quite work. Vuong's prose, poetic, diaphanous and carefully cultivated elsewhere, seems here to have gome uncontrollably florid in a way that highlights rather than cushions the flaws of his storytelling. There are several points here – moments intended to be light, to afford grace and complexity to lives otherwise glossed over – where the writing goes from being the vehicle of narration to narrative itself, presenting itself such that its own form is difficult to look past; there are also sections that could be funny, or heartwarming, but which limit themselves in their corniness. And then the loose tiles in the floor – for instance, the way mother and son never run into each other despite coexisting in the same small town – make the whole feel somewhat unbalanced and uneven, somewhat rushed, a little inattentive in its attentiveness.

I'm certain many readers will wholeheartedly love The Emperor of Gladness. I too loved the premise and believed in the promise of it, but in the end there was no crossing over into what it attempted to create and couldn't quite deliver.

[ana (ananascanread) · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book said 'what if surviving felt like poetry?' and then ripped my ribs open in the kindest way possible.
it’s not a redemption arc. it’s a holding-on arc. a trying-anyway arc.
i kept stopping just to breathe. to grieve. to feel.
ocean vuong doesn’t write characters, he writes tenderness in human form.

[enzoreads · Rating 5 out of 5]

je suis en train de chialer comme une merde j’arrive pas à m’arrêter

[Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Emporer of Gladness is a story about so many things. It’s a story about grace, connection, the unexpected, second chances, found family and how the small moments in life are the most profound. It is also a story about working class Amerixa and the unattainable American dream, how the hard work we put in doesn't always pay off. With themes of generational trauma, the immigrant experience, addiction, mortality makes this truly a remarkable work of literature.

And of course, the lyrical prose that readers love Ocean Vuong for is on full display in The Emperor of Gladness. His words are profoundly deep and breathtakingly beautiful. The way he describes his characters and settings is a visceral sensory experience

Ocean Vuong is such a gift. This is my 3rd read by the author and it lived up to my high expectations. I listened to the audiobook version which is read by James Aaron Oh who did a fantastic job. If you decide to pick this one up, I highly recommend this format.

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong was published on May 13 so it is available now!

[Haley Graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

we found it, folks. this is IT.

[Marialyce · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok the main character is a gay Asian who is trying to quit drugs. He lives with an old Lithuanian women who has dementia. He works at a fast food restaurant where the workers are very low on the social strata. Lots of f bombs!

Playing imaginary games with the old woman of wartime issues
Flowery language
Don’t know if the author wants to be a poet or an author!

No discernible storyline.

I think I am done!

Oh and animal cruelty! 😡

[sigh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nobody writes trite flowery meaningless prose and narratives like Vuong

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

For a full spoiler version of this review, please check out my blog, spoiledbooks.blogspot.com

1.5 stars rounded up

The Emperor of Gladness follows Hai, a 19-year-old struggling with addiction and grief, who becomes the caretaker for an elderly woman with dementia after she stops him from jumping off a bridge. Which sounds emotional and compelling! And sometimes it is!

But wow, this book really tested my patience.

The prose is undeniably beautiful. Ocean Vuong can WRITE. The problem is that the story itself just kind of… wanders around aimlessly for hundreds of pages. I kept waiting for it to come together emotionally or narratively, and it never really did for me.

Also: major warning for animal cruelty in Chapter 9.

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]]

Oh I am SO excited to sob along to this

[Celine · Rating 4 out of 5]

a devastatingly beautiful book, written very obviously by a poet, which lost a bit of direction towards the end.

there’s so much heartbreak, reflection and life injected into these pages. books don’t have to be perfect to change your life, and this one was a great example of that.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lacerating indictment of Trump's current anti-immigrant agenda versus what America once represented about being a haven for the huddled displaced, this is a devastating read about ordinary people trying to survive and be 'good'. Not in that order. Also, it's an elegy for Star Wars and it's impact on the American Dream. A New Hope, indeed. I had to stop reading in many places just to catch my breath, pause, and reflect how late-stage capitalism, the emperor of the title, continues to consume itself, until nothing is left. Vuong's register, cadence, dialogue, colloquialisms, humour, balanced against incandescent nature writing and omniscient overviews, transforns this eminently readable novel into a great work of art that also defines our current fucked up world. Urgent, necessary, empathetic, I cannot recommend this highly enough as a measured and effective antidote to the current anti-liberal, anti-humanist agenda being concretised by an increasingly fascistic America. Trump is doing his best to emulate America's version of the British Empire's 'red map'. But he forgets the import of BRICS, etc. and the growing influence of the Global South, which in all likelihood will bypass America as it implodes. And we won't give a damn.

[Jennifer Christie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This author is as strung out as the characters he writes about. As I slogged and skimmed my way through this meandering epistle, the only questions I had were, “What is this book about?” and “When will it end?” Mercifully, the second question, through Herculean effort, has now been answered but the first will never be. What a depressing, poorly written commentary. It is in dire need of the “goodest” editor, both for length and clarity of thought and subject matter. Ugh.

Trigger warnings: suicide, violence against animals.

Chapter 9 is a very long chapter that I skipped over because it contains horrific scenes of gratuitous animal cruelty. Who the hell needs or wants to read about that? 😡🤮 Like most of the author’s disconnected, seemingly stream-of-consciousness ideas, it adds absolutely nothing to the story. I’m taking off a star just because it’s there.

[cheska · Rating 3 out of 5]

⟢ 3.5 stars

the hardest thing in the world is to only live once. but it's beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.

reading this felt like standing beside someone through their undoing, watching them unravel piece by piece, only to gather themselves again. the emperor of gladness follows nineteen year old hai, who is quietly ready to give up on the world — until he meets grazina, an elderly widow on the brink of being forgotten and forgetting. what follows is not a journey towards fixing hai, rather a a year of bearing witness. his world is fragile, yet it begins to shift itself through empathy, small acts of kindness, and the refuge of a found family.

i adored this book, and i love that ocean vuong wrote it. however, something felt incomplete. despite taking my time with it, a part of me feels like i don't exactly know enough about hai. i spent so much time with him, yet he still feels like a bit of a stranger. which is not what i was expecting, especially in a character-driven book. the middle part also felt very long and repetitive, a bit gratuitously so. it almost felt stagnant. like it lingered too much in one emotional register without much momentum.

despite all these, i would still recommend this book. it promises something urgent: the permission to exist, to feel, to belong. and sometimes, that's more than enough.

how strange to feel something so close to mercy...that among a pile of salvaged trash, he could come closest to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, still somebody's son.

— br with lovely girls anh and ash 💓

[aubrey · Rating 1 out of 5]

this book pissed me off so fucking bad. if you're used to my funny little one-liners, then maybe ignore this one and just read these first two sentences because this deserves a full-blown rant review. vuong has managed to let me read the worst book i'm going to read all year in AUGUST! there's still four months left in the year and i don't think that anything is going to compare to this.

to summarize if you don't want to read all of this: i've never been more disinterested in a book in my entire life, like literally 50 pages in and i wanted to put this book down and pick up something else.

the dust jacket synopsis says that vuong's signature "formal innovation" is in this book, and i'm sorry but since when did that mean writing that makes absolutely no sense. like zero sense. it takes a certain type of talent to make a book have writing that's both nonsensical and overwritten, and yet is the most boring, dry prose i've read all year. vuong is a poet and no editor has had the guts it seems to tell him that clarity is the most important thing when writing prose, at least in my opinion. your pretty, figurative language and Hallmark card truisms do nothing for me if i don't understand what it is you're trying to say. here's a quote when Hai, the main character, is trying to sleep:

"he lay waiting for the dark to be truer than it was. ever since he was little, it bothered him that you can never recall the exact moment you fall asleep, as though someone turns you off just before your mind fades, as if they knew you wouldn't choose it, that you'd stay awake if you saw sleep coming like the shadow of some colossal wave falling over you."

what the actual fuck is this? this is one of the many paragraphs in this book that are completely meaningless. not only does it come out of literal nowhere, but this sentiment is not revisited or expounded upon, although, i don't even know why this much space was taken up in this novel for vuong to pontificate about falling asleep. of all things you could possibly spend novel space pontificating on, we've chosen falling asleep. wow 😁

the prose in this book makes purple prose sound complimentary. maybe mauve prose would be a better term. there are a lot of metaphors and similes that do not make sense. in poetry, you can get away with this type of ungrounded, floating language. but this is a novel vuong. i have to understand what you're saying. so it doesn't make sense to me how a character's laugh could "cure depression in an elephant." drug users "trace the drug's ascent with their fingers like pointing to ruined cities on a map." even the good metaphor is killed by vuong's incessant need to overexplain, to really make sure you're getting what he's saying, and this mostly happens when the metaphor is plain and easy to understand. like how Hai doesn't like heroin because it "was more like drowning in his own blood, his neck craning to get above the tide." why do we need the second part after the comma? the metaphor is strong enough that i don't need you to further extrapolate on the ocean imagery because it's clear in the first part of that sentence.

it doesn't help either that some of the writing literally made me bust out laughing because of how maudlin it was, especially when the maudlin gets repetitive because apparently, no one edits books anymore. they just package first or maybe second drafts that have perused for minor typos and punctuation errors into a $30 hardcover and call it a day. this happens early in the book when Hai gets a job at HomeMarket, one of the laziest fictionalizations i've ever read in my entire life because, if you simply add 2 and 2 you realize that HomeMarket is meant to be Boston Market. yes, vuong quite literally just changed one part of the name and decided that changing nothing else about the restaurant would suffice.

"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. his name tag was on the way from the command center in Georgia. he also had coworkers - no, a team , one that was the third best at their job. never in his life had he been so included in something as to be swallowed by it, invisible among a visible human mass."

this is already pushing it in terms of my tolerance of cloying sentimentality. but then vuong pushes it a step further on the very next page:

"he not only had a position in the company - but the company had no idea what his past looked like because none of that mattered. he had become an employee and thus had obtained an eternal present, manifested only by his functional existence on the time card."

this book is that type of quiet literary fiction that tries way too hard to inject a lot of grandiose emotion and feelings into otherwise totally mundane events. vuong doesn't seem to trust his audience or think they're that emotionally intelligent so he telegraphs everything to the reader, leaving no room for the reader to make their own opinions or have the space to feel the emotions that the scene wants the audience to feel. the basic overview of everything that happens in this nearly 400 PAGE BOOK can be found in the three paragraphs in the dust jacket synopsis. i'm serious. one of the most egregious examples of this is that there's a pizza place called sgt. pepper.

sgt. pepper.

SGT. PEPPER.

hate to break this to you because even if you caught that reference the first time it was used, like i did, vuong is still going to hold your hand and talk to you very slowly as he says:

"he would learn only later that the sgt. pepper's pizza in town had been named after a Beatles album."

Hai has apparently never listened to the Beatles outside of songs played on the radio, which sure is fine, but c'mon. do we really have to spend like four sentences in this book, literally interrupting a scene in which the dementia addled Grazina is reenacting her war trauma with him. this is supposed to be a tender moment marking a change in their relationship that's stopped repeatedly by moments like this, in which vuong has to step in and explain and/or give context to things that don't matter. even if you didn't catch the sgt. pepper reference like Hai, is it really necessary to explain it? i'm all for using extraneous details to flesh out your world, but in describing mundane shit like the color of the floor, whether or not there's scuff marks on the wall, what the art looks like, what books are on the shelves, details that won't come up again later but add texture to the scene, not a full-blown pause button while vuong tells you that the pizza place is named after a Beatles album. that sentence is also one of many sentences that start with "he would learn later" or some variation of it.

this also doesn't even begin to point out the fact that vuong cannot, under any circumstances, write dialogue. i have no idea why but this was an issue i had with on earth we're briefly gorgeous, a novel i gave 4-stars but couldn't go any higher because i just kept thinking about how unnatural the dialogue sounded. it's either stiff as a board or the characters are speaking like greeting cards. the first time we meet BJ, ostensibly one of two black people in this entire novel that I can remember, the manager of HomeMarket, we get subjected to an entire monologue from BJ about work ethic and the importance of this fast food restaurant, and blah-blah-blah, with Sony, Hai's neurodivergent cousin, acting as the peanut gallery. the whole thing reeks of a Lifetime dramedy in which the MC is thrown into uncharted waters so every character suddenly becomes founts of exposition to tell us all about this quirky little establishment they've found themselves in. it's made even worse because is how vuong, a 36-year-old man, attempts humor. i say attempts because in what world is BJ referring to Sony as "acoustic" funny? let's not even talk about vuong's maybe attempt at AAVE or a blaccent rivaling that of awkwafina when a throwaway character named Becky says:

"the hell i'm going into that busted-ass park with those busted-ass girls for? i work at HomeMarket now."

maybe she had some good hair and vuong was hypnotized by it in his mind's eye because what is this even here for? the most egregious dialogue i've read is when Hai's going in for his interview at HomeMarket and a stoner bro begins talking to Hai, casually, about busting nuts on people's faces. yes, you heard me. you can almost read this dialogue in shaggy's voice and it would work because that is how fucking goofy it is. has vuong ever actually interacted with a stoner, or someone who smokes weed regularly. i can promise you i do not talk like that and maybe i've just been lucky enough to not meet stoners who do, but i couldn't help but feel that this was a character yanked out of the 90s and transplanted into a novel in 2025.

racism and race in general in this book is kind of hand-wavy in a way that makes it feel pointless. early in the novel, the black chef in charge of the rotisserie chicken is subject to microaggressions that do not get addressed at all after they happen. it's just one of those things the book scoots by that makes me wonder why it's even there in the first place. when the characters try to comfort the chef, we get the worst dialogue i've ever read in my entire life:

"my father taught me this work. and he learned it from his own dad down in Carolina. and his dad before that. they were pitmasters. now i'm no master, but this is their work. and i get to do it."

the only response from this passionate soliloquy is for BJ to look at Hai and gruffly make him go "get a fucking lemonade." i get it, racism is very much alive and well. i'm a black, queer person living in the U S of A. racism appearing in books and just behaving as an incidental thing that's happening makes me feel like vuong had no idea what to put in the MASSIVE, SUMMARIZED TIME LAPSE paragraph - a writing technique i fucking hate - so he just threw in some casual racism, because nothing interesting is happening in this book or between any of the characters.

the characters are all flat and totally nondescript. Hai could easily be swapped out for Little Dog, Sony has no personality other than his hyperfixation on the Civil War, the employees at HomeMarket fit into a nondescript blob of working class stereotypes that propagate literary fiction, because once you get that far removed from that line of work, even if you yourself have worked it, you remain stuck in whatever it looked like when you were working there, despite the fact that the workforce has changed and is not homogenous. it wouldn't bother me so if these characters were people. if the dialogue was sharper and not occluded by vuong trying to fit philosophical musings into people's mouths. if you're going to do that, at least make the dialogue sound natural and not shoehorned in.

but you also have to be good at dialogue to be able to do that. percival everett is very good at it, so is rf kuang. either that, or vuong really needs a stricter editor.