A welcome surprise. It is a sweet, charming, conventional novel whose ambition does not outstrip its ability ... What a pleasure to be given characters and a plot! ... The author finally seems to have accepted that prose, unlike poetry, will wither and die without a reader who can actually understand it: At last, he is talking to us.
Magnificent and melancholy ... Its opening pages are as melodic as a symphony ... This is a novel that percolates and simmers, provoking questions about the reader’s privilege while prompting awe at the writer’s singular empathy—and his subjects’ humility.
There is a terrific ripeness to the pages of The Emperor of Gladness that sometimes edges into bruising ... There are trenchant observations ... The dialogue does a lot for the story—maybe too much.
[A] miraculous lack of sentimentality .... Vuong's s gifts of writerly restraint also keep things real ... There are pages of wry and often compassionate catalogues here describing the routines of Hai and his fellow workers, as well as the drugs they take to get through the pain and exhaustion of those routines ... The Emperor of Gladness is a truly great novel about work—still an under-acknowledged topic in American fiction ... Vuong's achingly austere artistic vision leaves it to his readers to imagine the better world he won't let himself depict on the pages of this wonderful novel.
Marks a point of ambitious expansion in Vuong’s body of work ... At its best, The Emperor of Gladness resonates with the quiet, highly attentive energy of lush, secretive spaces. Marginal voices of numerous kinds seem to occupy its peripheries, offering us stories that could come only from the outskirts.
Takes existentialism to a deeply intimate level, leaving the reader to contemplate what it is to live in a messy, complicated world of wars, addiction, class struggles and good people looking for second chances ... True and gritty, The Emperor of Gladness is almost voyeuristic in how it looks into the most intimate and human moments of people’s lives, reflecting back on the reader and leaving plenty to ponder.
Ocean Vuong’s books are enormously popular but it’s hard to see why. He is often an incompetent writer of prose and his plots are sentimental mush ... The prose alternates between a flat accounting...and a shockingly ham-fisted lyricism ... The publisher’s blurb praises Vuong’s 'syntactical dexterity', which must be an in-house joke—unless they really can’t tell ... His prose wants you to feel; it certainly doesn’t want you to perceive. It is, of course, Vuong’s own literary vision that is sightless ... Did nobody actually read this book before it went to print? ... Back in the 20th century American literary prose was the gold standard. In the 21st century it is starting to look like a grotesquely inflated currency.
An admirable compliment to his resume of work and widens his stance as an artist that continues to provide irreplaceable commentary on American life, speaking not to his readers, but through ... This novel explores a variety of themes that fit together like puzzle pieces ... His prose often forces you to look up from the page to fully absorb them and remember where you really are, a different time, or whatever we’re calling America in 2025—a place that feels like a really long way from home.
Heartbreaking, heartwarming yet unsentimental, and savagely comic all at the same time, The Emperor of Gladness is about just how wobbly things can become.
We get cheesy generalizations and implausible portraits of little men and women shining bravely in defiance of shitty odds ... You can hear the swell of the violins on every third page. The novel, as a whole, is regrettably infected by cinema ... It is clear that some of the novel is meant to be funny, but the jokes are mostly crude, cartoonish or just a bit limp ... I have made this novel sound more coherent in the retelling. In real time, it often seems as if Vuong is making things up as he goes along
The novel’s prose strikes an impossible balance between tender and powerful. This book will make you cry, but it will at least hold your hand while you do ... Guaranteed to soften the hearts of even the coldest reader ... Between the steel countertops and vats of golden cornbread, there is a profound sense of human persistence: that humanity will persevere through corporate cracks and shape relationships beyond the 'what can I get for you today?' repeated ad nauseum ... Vuong expertly captures the conversations between rushes that build a breathing, beating heart at the center of food service. If you have worked in a service job, you will relive conversations in the alleyway with coworkers once known, feel the chill of the walk-in freezer at your back, and the sense of unity felt between individuals closest to you simply due to the amount of collective hours shared ... Hai and the HomeMarket crew quickly become one set of well-oiled limbs, and the kind of found family that accepts one another to a degree most unparalleled. It is there where a sense of belonging is born ... The Emperor of Gladness will remind us that being 'American' is not one singular story. It is a convergence of many, many invisible ones. Vuong honors the silent, persistent presence of the heroes just getting by. There’s a sort of adolescent victimhood to circumstance, but such a purposeful joy in the resistance of it all. This quiet defiance bleeds through the pages .... You’ll appreciate the almost unintentional love and appreciation with which Vuong describes his home state ... If you love Ocean Vuong, stunning prose, have ever stood behind a POS for eight hours a day (or haven’t), grew up in a forgotten town, or have a human heart, you should read The Emperor of Gladness. You’ll be better for it.
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.
A gorgeous testament to love, loss, and an undying hope for a second chance ... Vuong’s immense talent with words means a world tucked away in rural America becomes one that you can touch, taste, and smell. He navigates Hai’s family troubles, addiction, and mental health issues with grace, empathy, and passion. The literary formalities bend to his will; his brilliance dances across the pages. You will tear through this book, craving more of that specific reading experience that only Vuong can give you.
Previously examined motifs undergo complex transformations so that it reads like the literary equivalent of a musical variation ... If the vaunted lyricism of a particular style of American dreaming marks the opening of The Emperor of Gladness...it isn’t long before sublime cadence and melancholy grandeur yield to a different kind of song ... Does the novel stray into misery porn? Vuong does lay bare the abjectness of conditions facing the lower working class, not to mention the lumpenproletariat, in the bleakest imaginable manner ... But Vuong is too blazingly sincere a writer for heavy-handedness to overshadow the book’s virtues. From overheard dialogue to subversive set-pieces repeating the tragedies of US history as farce, the novel explores what the have-nots do have in contemporary America, and if its seriousness can lead to moments of unintentional camp, well, as Susan Sontag noted, that’s the highest form of it.
