The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
Review of The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (2025). Published by Penguin Press.
If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.
For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.
So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.
Today’s blog post comes from a special place in my heart. As a writer and poet myself, who has professionally published for several years, I remember fondly when Ocean Vuong was just getting started with his own publishing career. I was a young writer then in high school, so Ocean was one of the writers I really looked up to. I felt like a proud mom when seeing his success, and I’ve eagerly awaited every book since Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
Throughout the years though his work recently hasn’t been my favorite, not since he put out On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It’s still solid work when it comes to craft and has beauty in its lines and structure, but his work hasn’t been something that appeals to me personally. I can see how others might love his newer work, though.
So when The Emperor of Gladness was announced, I was a little bit weary at first because I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it or not. I wasn’t given an advance copy for this one, which is a bit of a relief as well because I have so many advance copies in my backlog, so I dutifully put my hold in the local library system and was one of the first people to get a copy when it came in.
I read the book in two days, which meant I was stretching it out in some ways. I couldn’t read this book in one sitting, that’s for sure. I had to take breaks because it’s a little dense for me, even though the writing itself was not difficult to read at all.
Let’s get into the review! I can feel myself rambling a bit.
A young man named Hai comes across an elderly woman, changing his trajectory and life in little ways.
As I wrote in the little heading above, the main character in this novel is Hai. The novel is split into seasons across a little over four hundred pages, and when we begin this tale, Hai is nineteen. He tells his mother he is going to enroll in medical school in Boston, and has booked a Peter Pan Bus to fulfill this dream.
But this is a lie: Hai isn’t going to medical school, and he even dropped out of college in New York after the overdose of someone important to him. He doesn’t get on the bus, nor use the ticket he bought. Instead, Hai goes on the edge of a bridge and decides whether to jump into the water below.
Before he can do so, he hears someone shouting at him across the river. This is how he, and we, meet Grazina for the first time. She’s a widow living in a tiny rundown home she lived in for fifty years with her husband, and she might be the reason Hai doesn’t end his life that night.
He goes home with Grazina, who has dementia, and becomes her caretaker over the course of the novel. She has dementia and her kids have moved on, her son having a wife and a nice apartment, her daughter having become an alcoholic. It’s up to Hai to make sure she has her meds, and he adopts the persona of a sergeant when she begins having episodes about the war and her escape out of Lithuania.
Hai also gets a job at a local food joint, HomeMarket, which sounds disgusting from the way Hai talks about this place. People sure do love the food though, especially at Thanksgiving, and Hai’s relationship with his coworkers (which includes his cousin Sony) becomes a focal point for his story throughout this novel.
The highlight is certainly the relationship between Grazina and him. He sees her in some of her most vulnerable moments, but they learn to rely on each other emotionally and physically in many different ways. He can’t go home to his mother and tell her what is really happening with him, so he learns to lean on Grazina on many different ways.
And Grazina, too, is someone who is alone in the world. She pretty much lives in this tiny shack and has nothing beyond the four walls of her home, even if she wants to connect with her children. I would say the characters in this book are flawed, but Vuong does an incredible job of fleshing them out and making them real people.
I suspect this main relationship may mirror his time in New York City, as he lived with his friend’s elderly Lithuanian grandmother when he was homeless and attending school there. I’ve read his interviews about that in the past, so I could immediately identify where inspiration might’ve come from for this book, as Vuong’s work tends to heavily borrow from his own life in a myriad of ways.
Overall Thoughts
As expected, the writing in this novel is superb. It’s a drastically different style than when he wrote On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which leans a lot more lyrical and abstract. This novel comes across as more traditionally structured and feels like it was written by a fiction writer who may read poetry.
There’s nothing wrong with that; I liked the writing style in both novels, and I feel they fit their tones appropriately. I will say I did like this novel more. Maybe it has something to do with the fact he has had more practice with novel writing and fiction, so it feels like it’s more satisfying when it comes to structure and how it unfolds in a technical sense.
It’s not a perfect novel, but it has a lot of heart. I can see people crying after reading this one for sure, or reflecting on their own lives and the relationships that Hai has and how they manifest in our daily lives.
I think I’ll be returning to this in the near future. I liked this novel a lot! Go pick it up from your local library or indie bookstore if it intrigues you or sounds right up your alley. I think it’ll be worth it if so.
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