The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.
page 1, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
Table of Contents
Preamble
I first heard about this book sometime at the beginning of this year on a list of anticipated books coming out in 2025. I had it preordered but a few days before the book came out in May I cancelled my preorder. At the time my mental state was definitely not in the right place to read a sad slow-paced literary fiction novel such as this.
I placed a hold for this in the Toronto Public Library system in the summer and I got my copy a week or so ago. The book is quite popular, there are currently 460 holds on it with 137 copies in the library system. For once I am glad that the wait time for a book was quite long because I am much more mentally prepared for this book now than I was in May.
With that said, let’s get into the book.
The Book
The Emperor of Gladness is a slow-paced literary fiction set in the fictional post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut. When I say slow-paced, I mean it. Coming fresh off the heels off the very fast-paced Alchemy of Secrets I got a sense of whiplash when I first started reading this book. But once I settled into the story, I found the slow-pace comforting.
Vibes
The first thing I noticed about this book is the vibes. The vibes are immaculate and the author’s descriptive prose plays a big role in that. In a book like this, I think a worse author would have fallen into the trap of over description with very little action. Ocean Vuong strikes the perfect balance between description and action that allowed me to be both immersed in the world and also invested in the stories of our characters.
I’ll also give the author credit for not tripping over the rake that is purple prose. There is a sense of poetry to the writing which makes sense as the author is a poet. As soon as I started reading the book I could immediately tell that this was written by a poet (complimentary). I means when you get sentences like these…
We live on the edges but die in the heart of the state. We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams.
page 2, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
I could visualize the setting and scenes in this book very very well. The feeling of being in a small post-industrial American town came through in sharp detail. It felt like I was there myself and had lived through similar experiences (I have not). The worldbuilding is phenomenal here.
There’s a way an old Connecticut town feels when you pass through it at night. Hollowed out, blasted yet still into a potent aftermath, all of it touched by an inexplicable beauty, like the outside has suddenly become one huge living room.
page 287, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
While this book is mostly deeply sad, it also makes judicious use of dark humour that genuinely had me laugh-crying. The dark humour never felt out of place and the precision with where it was deployed meant that yet again I came away from this book thinking that I love the very deliberate way this author writes.
“You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That’s pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water.” She tried to laugh but started coughing. “My husband tried to be a poet, and you know, and all that gave him was Alzheimer’s.”
page 35, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
As a writer myself, I found this darkly hilarious in a way that I cannot quite explain. I feel very seen.
Characters
The Emperor of Gladness follows the story of Hai, a nineteen year old who is rescued from a suicide attempt by the elderly Lithuanian widow Grazina. Grazina is slowly succumbing to dementia and Hai agrees to become her caretaker and so the story begins. The story moves timelines between the “present” and vignettes from Hai’s childhood that are interspersed throughout to provide additional context to his life situation in the “present”.
There is also quite the colourful cast of side characters in the form of Hai’s co-workers at the HomeMarket where he starts working. Every one of these characters is very different from each other and I thought they were reasonably well fleshed out. I cannot do a better job of describing these characters than the book does so I’ll let a quote do it.
Before long Hai began to know which employee was behind him by their scent alone. The Johnson & Johnson baby lotion Wayne rubbed over the grease burns on his arms, the traces of whiskey coming through the Wrigley’s Maureen chewed, the bootlegged Tom Ford (Tobacco Vanille) BJ wore cut with the strawberry Starbursts Russia was always sucking on. Sony, whose clothes, due to a faulty dryer at his group home, had the faint but consistent muskiness of damp fabric. These smells altered in intensity with each cigarette break they took.
page 76, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
The character I ended up liking the most and the one that made the most striking emotional impact on me was Hai and more specifically his relationship with his mom. The story portrays the complicated relationship that children of immigrant parents often have with their parents with a kind of thoughtful nuance that I haven’t seen in a long time. I’ll let a quote do my work for me once again.
Inside those wide white hours, he often asked himself why he had deceived his mother in the first place. In the end, there was no good answer–only the image of her face brightening when he told her he was going to heal the sick, the cancer-riddled, the broken, the maimed, by becoming a doctor. After Bà Ngoạii died, his mother’s light dimmed, and seeing her shrivelled in the corner of the couch, her head down and lit blue by her Game Boy, playing endless Tetris day after day, her hair thinning, he figured he had to do something. You lose the dead as the earth takes them, but the living you still have a say in. And so, he said it. And so he lied.
page 97, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
I read that bit while I was in the library and had to stop myself from crying. Oof, I don’t think I can quite explain why this one hit so hard for me. I think unpacking my feelings about my relationship with my parents is best left for a therapist’s ears rather than a book review on my blog.
Themes
That brings me to the number of very heavy themes that run through this book. There is of course the aforementioned complicated relationship between immigrants and their children. There is also themes of drug addiction and recovery, mental health issues such as dementia and suicide, and most importantly an underlying theme of found family and second chances.
Generally, I think the author did a good job of handling the book’s themes in a nuanced and well thought out way. It mostly never felt that the author was using any of these heavy themes for shock value. With the exception of the scene in the pig abattoir. That felt perhaps a little bit too gratuitous with its descriptions and seemed to lack any particular thematic connection to the rest of the narrative. Or maybe it is supposed to be commentary on the gruesome things capitalism makes us do. Either way it felt a little Too Much for me.
In addition to the aforementioned bit about immigrant parents and their children, I also found the way the book developed the found family relationship between Hai and his coworkers to be very touching. The relationship builds slowly throughout the course of the book and culminates in a scene that again had me crying.
They who owe each other nothing but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time, now brought to their knees in a forest to gather around a half-burnt headrest of a Nissan Maxima on a Tuesday in mid-April, their bodies finally touching, a mass of labor cobbled together by a boy’s hallowed loss–on the clock.
page 366, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
Conclusions
The Emperor of Gladness is a very well written literary fiction novel with a big heart that tells a touching story filled with complex & colourful characters doing their best in a world that is content to abandon them. This book goes on my list of books of the year for 2025.
The only criticism I have of note a minor one. The ending of this book felt a bit underwhelming, I got the sense that the author didn’t quite know how to bring the story to a conclusion so a lot of threads from the narrative got tied up real quick in a jarring manner that felt out of place with the deliberate slow pace of the rest of the story.
I am glad I read this book when I did, just at the edge of autumn when my mood is at its best and before the seasonal depression of late winter kicks in. This is heavy reading but it is a book that more than earns its weight. I would very much like to read Ocean Vuong’s writing again at some point.
I interspersed this review with a lot of quotes from the book as I think the prose of this book deserves highlighting and I had a lot of quotes annotated because of that. So I’ll close this review off with a quote from Grazina that I found hilarious.
“No, I didn’t outlive Stalin to be depressed.“
page 234, Grazina, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
See y’all in the next one.
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