PanLondon Review of Books (UK)It’s obvious that Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be, but is it a privilege to watch? ... Sentences in the book suffer from the same indeterminacy of tense that mars On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous .... Once again, the success of the novel hinges on its mode of presentation, and Vuong proceeds to exhibit all the same tendencies. Once again, there are hundreds of incoherent sentences and images ... Once again, we have the absurd similes and images ... Once again, the representatives of inhumanity are made inhuman, in a series of excruciatingly crass scenes. The reader’s intelligence is repeatedly insulted ... Igroaned my way through The Emperor of Gladness. I writhed. I felt real despair every time I forced myself to open the covers. It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life. This is because, while it is bad in all the ways that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was bad, it is also bad in new and unexpected ways. For one, it is a more traditional, peopled novel, spends much more time with its characters and has a much higher proportion of dialogue, for which Vuong has no talent. It tries, and fails, to be funny ... The Emperor of Gladness appears to have been edited from space, with the result that it is inordinately long and almost entirely filler ... Vuong’s sincerity is self-conscious and willed—he is constantly stoking it by shovelling on more and more words. It is why, despite his close identification with his characters and their class situation, he turns them into parodies ... He doesn’t imaginatively enter these lives, but stands outside them, waving for our attention so he can tell us what they mean.
Adam Haslett
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewHaslett has wisely concentrated his gifts, choosing to give only the perspectives of Peter and Ann, who have been estranged for many years. He has also embraced his predilection for back story by making the narratives people tell to explain themselves the subject of the novel itself ... Mothers and Sons is Haslett’s best novel. By limiting his area of inquiry, he achieves new levels of moral depth and narrative push. But he has not escaped old problems; in some ways he has entrenched them ... Everything fits, too neatly and tightly.
Garrard Conley
PanThe New York Times Book ReviewConley’s book is... short on action, but without a compensating depth of character analysis ... There is promise in the idea of two families growing and warping around the secret of queerness, in such a time and place. Yet its development here is circular and shallow ... Sensibly, Conley doesn’t attempt to recreate the speech of 18th-century Puritans ... The issue with his dialogue is that it’s undifferentiated, every character sounding the same. And what can’t be forgiven is his profligacy with verbal cliché.
