RaveThe Chicago Review of Books...you could say this is a poet’s novel, a bard’s work of fiction, but that misses one of the book’s underlying messages—that language is imperfect, fluid, and inconsistent, a malleable tool that will neither ever quite successfully expresses our joys and sorrows nor meets the idealized nature of its parameters. Regardless, Vuong harnesses the epistolary form to its full potential ... Each chapter illuminates the fragility of our working vocabulary and the weak common structures we rely on to make meaning ... Every bit of language is always ready to be flipped and reimagined, because it’s never been rigid or real at all. None of this struggle is easy to explain, but Vuong expertly dissects these moments of divergence and uses them to develop his characters.The novel’s more experimental elements, then, sometimes feel like a push to embrace the work’s own impermanence and ambiguity ... Little Dog’s introspections occasionally attempt to punch with a force beyond the limits of the novel’s structure. On the sentence level, there are a few too many haymakers, those bits of prose that really try to cut to the core. They can’t all be expected to land ... For all the talk of breaking boundaries, this is still a proper novel if you’re a genre stickler, but to limit On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to a singular category is a disservice to a work that so clearly can be seen differently from every angle. Vuong’s novel—I’ll say it, I guess: like a poem—packs as much force in the spaces it leaves vacant, the areas where each word can be turned over. It awaits the reader who can see the new it offers every time it is picked up again...
