PositiveThe Adroit Journal... a prose so vivid and sensuous that each word seemed to excavate some unknown meaning from itself ... The story is complex, electric, and heart-breaking, but the style may be more contentious: jam-packed with extended metaphors and penned in a turgid style, some will find it rich and rewarding; others, affected and indulgent ... Vuong’s portrait of mothering and shared family trauma, however, is genuine and raw, wholly untouched by affectation. The fragmented narrative of Little Dog’s mother is fiercely compelling—it’s hard to look away from her, and even harder to watch ... Disguised as the unlikely love story between two young boys, one a redneck and the other from an immigrant family, the romance in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is truly between a man—Little Dog, his voice a proxy for Vuong’s own—and his love for language. The novel is brimming with reflections on what it means to be a writer, each sentence pulsing with a casual poetry. It is an ode to language and grammar, reverent without seeming masturbatory, with descriptions that any logophile will obsess over ... With nuanced characters, difficult content, and a labyrinthine style, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous should by all rights be a complicated read. Yet it is a breeze. Each idea is carefully unspooled for the reader, creating digestible micronarratives with easily spotted theses. It seems as though Vuong is analyzing the text as he writes it, pointing out symbols and unpacking the subtext, chiseling the story’s complexity into something simpler, a hodgepodge of quasi-profound insights and overwrought motifs. The result is a bizarre hybrid of conventional narrative and lyrical essay—sure to make many readers roll their eyes, while making every English major and MFA student absurdly happy. I would recommend this book with reservation to the casual reader and tentatively even to literature lovers—but fervently to aspiring writers.
