Micah Webber’s Reviews > The Emperor of Gladness > Status Update

“There was so much space. That's what wealth is, he realized: to live in a house where all the tools of living are out of sight.”

This kind of insight—the precision of it, the sensitivity that affords it, the economical way of expressing it—is where I think I see the greatest difference in Vuong’s prose from “OEWBG” to “Emperor of Gladness.” He’s always looked closely, but here he’s zoomed out.

“It was one of those days where you work your skin off and have no desire, no strength even, to go home. There was a kind of luxury to be amongst this place of sweat and ache and yet sit and suck a cigarette down to its soggy nub and have no one tell you anything because you're off the clock. A dignified, defiant rest.”

I’ve smoked this exact cigarette, myself. Surely many of us have!

He. . .felt granted into a realm much greater than his sad, little life, which made his troubles seem suddenly ethereal and elsewhere. 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.

“He’s too bright to die, isn’t he?”

It's a town where high school kids, having nowhere to go on Friday nights, park their stepfathers' trucks in the unlit edges of the Walmart parking lot, drinking Smirnoff out of Poland Spring bottles and blasting Weezer and Lil Wayne until they look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realize they're thirtysomething…