A major literary writer has switched up their style entirely, and it's a huge improvement

For the last few months, friends have texted me about several viral takedowns of Ocean Vuong. These reviews have been occasioned by the recent publication of his second book, Emperor of Gladness, but they mostly are not about the new book—instead they attempt to settle scores with his successful first novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous.

I’ve skimmed the reviews, but I haven’t paid close attention, because I already know my thoughts on Vuong’s first book. This novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, was ubiquitous when it came out in 2019. It was an Oprah pick, and many of my friends gushed to me about it—one even pressed a copy upon me that I still own. Vuong was both extremely popular and critically acclaimed: surely he's one of the few people to have four hundred thousand Instagram followers and a MacArthur genius award.

I read Vuong’s first novel several years ago, because my book club selected it, and I found it quite annoying, because it was full of long, highly-involved metaphors that didn’t mean anything, like “What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?" or “If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin.”

The strange thing about Vuong’s first novel is that these metaphors are only maybe twenty-five percent of the content: the rest is full of extremely precise, well-written scenes and dialogue. When Vuong wasn’t trying to be good, he was actually quite good.

Nonetheless, as I wrote several years ago, I felt that the overall effect of this book had been pernicious, because these highly-involved nonsensical metaphors were easy to imitate, and they became ubiquitous amongst writers who wanted to seem literary and get large book deals.

Anyway, I assumed that Vuong’s second novel, Emperor of Gladness, would just demonstrate the same virtues and flaws as his first book, so I figured there was no need for me to read it.

Vuong’s second novel showcases a different style

But, while I was on vacation, I glanced at the opening pages of Vuong’s second novel, Emperor of Gladness, and I was surprised to discover that this book is completely different from his first book.

Seriously, the structure and voice are much more controlled, and it’s a major improvement.

Emperor of Gladness begins with a chapter-long description of the town of East Gladness, in Connecticut. The description moves back and forth through time, contrasting the town’s long history, stretching back to colonial times, with its modern-day poverty. For instance, here’s the third paragraph of the book:

Beyond the graveyard whose stones have lost their names to years, there’s a covered bridge laid over a dried-up brook whose memory of water never reached this century. Cross that and you’ll find us. Turn right at Conway’s Sugar Shack, gutted and shuttered, with windows blown out and the wooden sign that reads We Sweeten Soon as the Crocus Bloom, rubbed to braille by wind. In spring the cherry blossoms foam across the county from every patch of green unclaimed by farms or strip malls. They came to us from centuries of shit, dropped over this place by geese whenever summer beckons their hollow bones north.

People are free to disagree with me, but I feel like this is very good writing, no? The mix of high- and low, of metaphorical and concrete, is both concise and inventive.

After reading this chapter, I thought the book was going to stay in this omniscient, probing voice, but in the next chapter it changes again, and for the rest of the book the narration is rooted much more firmly in one point of view—that of a nineteen-year-old boy, Hai, who walks to the King Philip Bridge and ponders killing himself. He’s talked down off the bridge by an older woman, Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant, and he starts living in her house. They develop a routine, and he’s relatively happy.

It was in these moments that he thought this new life, if you could call it that, wasn’t so bad. That he could bide his time until something ahead of him lifted, like the mist rising each morning above the river outside his window, revealing what was always there. But he was wrong.

Unfortunately, Grazina has dementia. So there’s a time limit on their idyll, which sucks for him, but it creates something that Vuong’s previous novel didn’t have: stakes.

They’re happy now, but eventually they won’t be. How will things turn out? This basic suspense factor gives the book a lot of propulsion.

In addition to the big stakes of what will happen to Grazina when she can’t function independently, there’s the smaller stakes: how will they earn money? How will they live? She doesn’t have enough money to buy groceries for two.

As a result, Hai gets a job at a fictional fast-casual chain, HomeMarket.

The book alternates between scenes of him at home, with Grazina, whose memory is deteriorating due to Alzheimers, and scenes at this fast-casual chain, where he befriends a crew of loveable grotesques, including BJ, the manager, who is an aspiring professional wrestler; Maureen, a cook, who is quite elderly and believes in lizard-alien conspiracy theories; Sony, Hai’s cousin, who is autistic and obsessed with the Civil War; and Wayne, the fry cook, who is Black and who regards frying chicken as his ancestral calling.

A return to the sentimental novel

Longtime readers might remember that earlier in the year, I read several works of sentimental literature by Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susanna Maria Commins, and I came away with a strong appreciation of the form. The main thing about sentimental literature is that it’s almost always powered by some belief that suffering ennobles people and that goodness will be rewarded in the end.

Emperor of Gladness is very sentimental—everyone is good-hearted and comes together for each other. It’s a classic story of found-family, and it resembles any workplace sit-com you might be familiar with.

And, just like in most of these workplace sitcoms, there is some kind of complexity or ambiguity to the underlying situation. In this case, the restaurant’s manager, BJ, is heavily invested in selling some illusion of home-cooking.

This is all about home cooking. And you know what? Even Denny’s, which some people got the nerve to call a sit-down restaurant, has a goddamn microwave. Have you ever seen a microwave in this establishment?

But, in reality, everything at this restaurant is industrially processed and kinda gross.

When you take out the leftover tubs of mac and cheese or sweet potato pie, anything that was more than half full at last night’s closing, and peel off the Saran Wrap. Then you take a knife and scrape the grimy top crust away, dump what’s left into the food hoppers, give it a little stir, and after five minutes it’ll bubble and steam with a just-made glow…Hai wondered if anyone ever thought they’d be eating leftovers at a restaurant. Or whether they knew that the FDA allows mashed potatoes to contain up to 2 percent rat poop and up to 3.5 percent insect “fragments.” One time he spotted Maureen, out of sheer boredom, flicking a fly right onto a roasting chicken, where it sizzled and sparked before welding itself into a black nub on the crispy skin.

However, that kind of juxtaposition is very common for workplace comedies. There’s this sitcom I really enjoyed called Superstore, about people working at a big box store, and it trafficked in exactly this kind of humor. The workers at this store were a family, that genuinely cared about each other, but they were constantly being victimized by the store’s corporate owners—some of the employees (mostly those in middle management) identified with the owners, while others hated them and agitated for better conditions.

Sentimental novels require a villain. Both Grazina and the HomeMarket employees are good, which means there must be other people who are equally bad—and it’s the fault of these villains that the good people don’t have a good life. In the fullness of time, these villains make their appearance. They include Grazina’s son, who wants to put her in a home; they include the wrestling fans who jeer at BJ and mock her attempts at wrestling; they include the regional manager who insists that BJ fire one of her employees. And they also include systems, like the one that loads up Hai with student loan debt and which incarcerates Sony’s mother because she can’t make bail.

If there is any art to this book and to sentimental literature in general, it’s in how the book elides simple good/bad and deserving/undeserving dichotomies, and I think Emperor of Gladness does a decent job. At some point, the guys at HomeMarket order pizza, and the pizza delivery person throws the pizzas at them, because in her mind, they’re the villains who are undercutting their mom-and-pop pizza business. Similarly, while the deck is stacked against Hai, he doesn’t make things easier for himself with his drug use and his lies.

Structurally, I was quite surprised by how competent the book was—it moved respectfully through the appropriate beats for the story it was trying to tell. It even ended in the store coming together to go on a road trip to help Sony visit the spot in Vermont where his dad died. I usually expect literary novels to have fake endings where everything fades to black, and there’s no pay-off, but that didn’t happen here. The book is not too fancy or literary to deliver upon the promises inherent in its structure.

The theme of the book is that these people have some kind of dignity, even though they’re often thwarted in their ambitions and are unlikely to achieve any lasting success. That there is something very honorable in their willingness to soldier on through their lives and continue treating each other well, and with respect. This is a book that has a strong moral vision.

The dialogue is sometimes painfully bad

It’s a book that also has flaws. The dialogue in this book often feels very on-the-nose, people talk about exactly what they’re feeling. And as a result many of the conversations feel rote, like they’re placeholders, waiting to be filled by something more authentic. For instance, this conversation between Grazina and Hai.

“…I want to climb inside the TV and just stay there.” She paused, her eyes searching. “That sounds crazy, yes?”

“You’re just clinically depressed,” he heard himself say. “Means you’re sad without a reason.”

Her forehead wrinkled at the idea. “No, I didn’t outlive Stalin to be depressed.” She shook her head defiantly. “You kids blame everything on feelings. Do you blame starvation on feelings too? Floods? Earthquakes?”

Or this conversation between Wayne and Hai when they take a side-gig at a ‘meat-packing plant’ that Hai eventually realizes is actually a slaughterhouse.

“There’s blood on your fingers.” Hai nodded at the purplish dust around Wayne’s knuckles.

“It’s called pork. Comes from a pig, you know? The one with blood and guts and brains?”

“This is a slaughterhouse, isn’t it?” Hai said.

“It’s an organic farm-to-store pork production facility,” Wayne said through shut eyes.

“Holy fuckers!” Maureen leaned back on the hood. “I’m not stabbing any pigs with a sword, dudes. I’m technically a senior citizen—you know that, right.”

The dialogue in Vuong’s previous novel was much better

The painful, stilted quality of the dialogue in this book is a bit confusing, because the dialogue in Vuong’s previous novel was often quite good and didn’t have this on-the-nose quality at all. The previous book had many meandering conversations between the protagonist and his friend, Trevor, and those conversations were usually very interesting and fraught with unspoken meaning. For instance, after the first time they hook up, they have this exchange:

We were just staring at the rafters, and then he said, casually, as if naming a country on a map, “Why was I born?” His features troubled in the waning light.

I pretended not to hear.

But he said it again. “Why was I even born, Little Dog?” The radio hissed beneath his voice. And I spoke to the air. I said, “I hate KFC,” responding to the commercial, on purpose.

“Me too,” he said without skipping a beat.

And we cracked up. We cracked open. We fell apart like that, laughing.

This seems really good to me. Very real, natural, revealing—the narrator knows how to talk to Trevor, how to amuse and deflect. And it’s also just a funny passage.

Here’s another scene from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, probably one of the most memorable in the book, where the narrator’s mother is trying to console a nail salon patron who has had a recent bereavement.

“…Your Julie,” you went on, “how she die?”

“Cancer,” the lady said. “And in the backyard, too! She died right there in the backyard, dammit.”

You put down her hand, took off your mask. Cancer. You leaned forward. “My mom, too, she die from the cancer.” The room went quiet. Your co-workers shifted in their seats. “But what happen in backyard, why she die there?”

The woman wiped her eyes. “That’s where she lives. Julie’s my horse.”

You nodded, put on your mask, and got back to painting her nails.

So I know that Vuong can write good dialogue, but in Emperor of Gladness he mostly doesn’t. I think it’s because the characters in Gladness are a bit underbaked. It’s fine that they’re not realist characters—they’re very broad types, like something out of Dickens—but even archetypes need their own style of dialogue, something that’s not quite realistic but is still capable of delivering surprises.

I don’t think Vuong is a grifter

Much of the criticism of this book and of Vuong in general flows from some sense that both his writing and his authorial persona are just a put-on, intended to flatter the prejudices of the literary reader.

Two reviews of Vuong’s work, by Andrea Long Chu and by Som-Nai Nguyen, have called him out for racial pandering. They claim he’s an orientalist fantasy, a kind of minstrel show for white people.

That particular issue isn’t a big problem with this second novel, because although the main character is Vietnamese, his racial identity is not a major part of the book. However, there is another form of authenticity at stake here. Vuong comes from a very working-class background, he was raised by a single mother who worked in a nail salon when he was growing up. In his college years, he also worked at Boston Market—an experience that inspired his depiction of HomeMarket in this book.

Emperor of Gladness certainly seems to portray working-class people as being inherently good and somewhat ennobled by their suffering—and one could easily say that this portrayal is flattening and reductive. Nonetheless, the idea that people are ennobled by deprivation and suffering has a pretty long history both in Western culture, religion, and literature. It’s true that many writers (Emile Zola comes to mind) have chosen to question and complicate these tropes, while other writers (Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance) have chosen to reify them. And some writers (e.g. Dickens) have done both.

I don’t think this fantasy of working-class nobility is inherently without merit. But one does wonder if Vuong actually believes in it. I too was quite struck by the part from his interview with Oprah (it starts at around 5’ 30”) where he claimed that Oprah’s book club had given working-class Vietnamese people like his mother the courage to read books. It didn’t feel totally genuine—It seemed a bit much to ask us to believe that working-class Vietnamese women are reading The Corrections or Light In August or even Eckhart Tolle and Wally Lamb.

That’s the thing about Ocean Vuong. Sometimes you just get the sense that…maybe he’s pulling our leg. Like, maybe…none of the women like his mother were actually reading Oprah Book picks, maybe that’s actually false. And, similarly, maybe this book is dishonest, because although it is certainly possible for an author to genuinely believe in these working-class fantasies, I don’t know if Vuong is actually genuine.

On the other hand, if he’s smart enough to lie about his beliefs and experiences in order to manipulate the literary apparatus, then he’s smart enough to go into investment banking and make a hundred times the money. Like, if he is actually consciously dishonest in what he writes, then his achievement is all the more astounding! Usually bad writers aren’t dishonest, they’re just people who honestly believe in ideas that are simplistic or silly.

And Ocean Vuong is clearly not bad. Even his first book had many passages that were very good—its main flaw was that the average reader tended to love the worst thing in it, which was the overwrought metaphorical language in some sections.

This current book doesn’t have those lyrical excesses, but it also doesn’t have one of the strengths (the naturalistic dialogue) from the first book, which is puzzling. But the easiest answer is that Vuong is on some kind of literary journey, and that he hasn’t quite gotten there yet. Maybe in the next book he will have fully synthesized this sentimental form of storytelling with his strengths as a writer, and he will produce something truly great.

It really does seem possible.

It's not wrong to hate Ocean Vuong

There is a difference between a negative review and a takedown.¹ A negative review says that a book is bad, a takedown implies that the author is bad. As

Elvia Wilk

put it:

a Takedown…takes down an author’s whole project, not just the specific work in question. To do this, it reverse-engineers the book or books to find evidence of the author’s perspective on the world, politics, and latent agenda.

Honestly, I like takedowns. I have written them myself and will likely write them again.

But, in this case, I feel no urge to write a takedown. I feel like sometimes takedowns are motivated by some pent-up frustration, some feeling that you’ve been silent for too long and weren’t allowed to express your true opinion. But in my case, I already wrote my thoughts about the first novel several years ago, so I don’t have any lingering anger against Vuong that I need to work out.

And when it comes to the current novel, I am impressed. Vuong has learned and improved. It is a much better book than his last, and it gives me hope that his next will be better still.

With the wave of takedowns against Vuong, many people (including myself) have commented that there appears to be something of a political element at work. The politics of our nation have changed, and now people feel like they are able to critique authors of color in a way that, they feel, was previously forbidden.²

Don't take my word for it. On Substack, the most popular takedown of Vuong was this post by

Eris

, and they frame their post in exactly those terms:

The Vibe Shift has come cataclysmically for Ocean Vuong. Really, he should have seen it coming. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was an extremely pre-Vibe-Shift book—a queer POC diaspora novel about intergenerational trauma? Christ, Penguin’s data-crunching computers must have been sputtering smoke and lighting up like fucking Times Square when they saw that one! Of course they picked it up, and of course it sold like Vietnamese banh xeo,¹ moving over a million copies and being translated into forty languages.

Eris’s post, like many of the Vuong takedowns, is not really about this particular book, Emperor of Gladness—it’s about Vuong’s whole schtick, his image, his career. Personally, that also seems fine to me. In fact, Eris’s post is better than most of the takedowns, because it doesn’t even pretend to be about his new novel—it just launches into a direct attack against Vuong’s persona.

Writers of color are afraid

There’ve also been a wave of posts asking us to be nicer to Vuong. An example is

Haili Blassingame

’s response to Eris’s post. Haili writes:

Let’s just say outright what a big part of this discourse is about: people feel like Vuong doesn’t deserve what he’s gotten. He doesn’t deserve the MacArthur grant, the glowing reviews. The praise. The accolades. The money.

This post is also very good, because it says what many authors of color are thinking, which is that the charges of racial pandering—the idea that Vuong only succeeded because he’s a person of color—is a charge that can be laid against every non-white writer. And eventually the people taking down Vuong will come for me.

It’s a thought that has the potential to inspire dread.

But I take a philosophical view. Yes, there is a chance authors of color will suffer under the new regime, but even if that happens…so what?

Personally, I have fallen out of love with the politics of representation. I, like every other millennial, thought that greater representation of marginalized voices would somehow result in political gains for oppressed people. This has not proven to be the case. Greater visibility for trans people has led directly to an intense backlash against trans rights. Our gains as writers and artists have come at the expense of the rights of ordinary trans people.

That doesn’t mean we are at fault or that we shouldn’t write, it just means that I cannot say that greater representation is unambiguously good for trans people or for our country as a whole.

It turns out that everyone cares about representation. White people and men and straight people—they really care about getting book deals, and they get really angry about the idea that their work might not be judged fairly.

And if this anger come out in the form of animus toward Ocean Vuong—well, that, to me, seems much healthier than the alternatives. Furthermore, it’s an animus that everyone can participate in. Most queer and Asian writers that I know—they’re tired of Ocean Vuong too. I recently learned that at some point during his career Black writers got tired of James Baldwin—in the same way, Asian and queer writers are now tired of Ocean Vuong.³

The nice thing about literature is that it’s not really that serious. Nobody gets hurt by a takedown review—oftentimes, even the author in question doesn’t get hurt. I would never have read Vuong’s book if it wasn’t for all these takedown reviews.

Is Vuong overrated?

Yes, definitely. But who could possibly deserve the amount of attention his work has gotten over the last six years? However, writers like Vuong serve a purpose. And that purpose is: you can select their book for your book club, and people will actually read it.

I help to run a book club for my coworking space, the Ruby, and when we select a hot, buzzy, short, hyped-up book that have heard of (e.g. All Fours or Headshot), then people actually come to the book club. If we select a book that’s difficult (e.g. Creation Lake) or less over-hyped (e.g. Julia Phillips’s Bear), then fewer people come, because they either can’t finish the book or don’t even start. The difference in attendance is quite startling. With a popular, accessible book, we get twelve people—with a difficult or obscure book, we often get nobody.

If you pick this novel, Emperor of Gladness, for your book club, people will most likely come.

The thing about book clubs is that some attendees always dislike the book. But when a book is popular and relatively easy-to-read then even people who dislike the book will finish it, and they will feel happy that they’ve read whatever book everyone is talking about this year.

Book clubs themselves seem to be in decline—I think the pandemic broke a lot of them, and the ongoing collapse in social ties has surely affected book clubs as well. And a bad or unpopular book can really kill a book club—all you need is one or two meetings where half the people don’t show up, and you’re done.

The Emperor of Gladness is a godsend to book clubs, because if you pick this book, people will actually come. And in 2025, there’s not many other new releases for which that’s true.

1. Not every negative review of Gladness was a takedown. I thought Brandon Taylor engaged thoughtfully with the text in his review for Bookforum.

2. As I’ve documented before, there was definitely an era when a reviewer could face an online backlash for giving a bad review to writer of color. Nowadays, it’s not quite the same. A review might occasion some online disagreement, but it’s doubtful there will be material consequences.

3. From Louis Menand’s excellent New Yorker article on Baldin (occasioned by the release of a new biography of Baldwin):

Baldwin’s “The Devil Finds Work,” a 1976 book on Hollywood, was described as “a rococo parody of his own work.” The New York Review of Books called his last novel, “Just Above My Head” (1979), “repetitious and inert.” When the Library of America issued two volumes of Baldwin’s work, edited by Toni Morrison, in 1998, the Times review was headlined “Trapped Inside James Baldwin.” The reviewer for this magazine wrote that, “by 1968, Baldwin found impersonating a black writer more seductive than being an artist.” All those takes were by Black critics.