Ridiculous extended metaphors are proliferating in PoC writing
But it's not Ocean Vuong's fault. It's the fault of tasteless critics.
I don’t think there’s any shortage of people from working class backgrounds who have written great novels. Writing isn’t like neurosurgery. You don’t need credentials or training. You can just open up your computer and do it.
Writing a great novel is difficult, but this country is almost unimaginably vast. Europeans sometimes criticize Americans for being monolingual and parochial, but America has half the population of Europe. If Germany had 350 million people, they’d also be loathe to look outside their own border. The number of hopes and dreams and talents penned up in this country is immense. Every literary agent in the business gets a thousand query letters a month, and each of them represents a full novel.
What’s rare aren’t great manuscripts from working class writers. The rare thing is a writer who knows how to convince the gatekeepers in the publishing industry that he or she is a genius.
Most editors don’t have great taste. And even if they do, they’re inundated with so much material, and of such low quality, that it’s hard to find the silence you’d need to honestly evaluate it. Imagine, for instance, someone sending you a copy of Swann’s Way. The style and subject matter are perfectly salable, even today: Knausgaard’s My Struggle is nothing more or less than a reimagining of Proust’s project in contemporary form. But if you’re going to publish a six-volume stream of consciousness novel of sense and manners about a neurasthenic youth growing into a neurasthenic man, then you need to be certain the book is great. And, moreover, you need to be certain others will think the book is great.
So where can you get this certainty from? How do writers convince other people that they are great writers?
When it comes to contemporary letters, few authors are discussed more frequently than Ocean Vuong. Successful as a poet by age 30, his novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, was acquired Penguin for a stunning 1.5 million dollars. The book almost certainly didn’t earn a sum comparable to this advance—literary novels are rarely called upon to perform commercially to the same degree as popular fiction—but it debuted on the New York Times Best Seller list and has probably sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Its author won the MacArthur Genius Award in 2019, the same year the novel came out: the citation spoke of his “tragic eloquence and clarity”. Jia Tolentino wrote for the New Yorker: “Reading ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ can feel like watching an act of endurance art, or a slow, strange piece of magic in which bones become sonatas, to borrow one of Vuong’s metaphors.” The LA Review of Books reviewer wrote: “There’s nothing obvious about the beauty of Vuong’s novel, however. It is a beauty that asserts itself against vociferous claims to the contrary and demands a different way of looking and valuing what is seen.”
But many reviewers were not convinced: Dwight Garner wrote “‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ is, at the same time, filled with showy, affected writing, with forced catharses and swollen quasi-profundities. There are enough of these that this novel’s keel can lodge in the mud.
Tessa Hadley for The Guardian, “[The story] is freighted with too much…an explicit commentary on the meaning of what’s happening, or a sort of choric lyrical lamenting between scenes. ‘In a world as myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.’”
If you keep looking for reviews, you’ll see they’re all complimentary, but many are mixed. Many praise the plainer, less adorned sections and call out the more overwritten portions. Almost all mention the lack of forward momentum in the narrative and a sense of the book not quite coming together. This isn’t a case of the critical establishment lifting up a writer; it’s more of a sleight of hand trick about the prose fiction world’s lack of sureness about itself. Vuong’s first book of poems won the T.S. Eliot prize and a number of other poetry prizes. It was an astounding reception for a poet in his twenties. These kinds of accolades gave Vuong the imprimatur of a great writer. Even the negative critiques for the novel are leavened with substantial praise, and they see him as merely overplaying his hand, deploying poetic techniques at too great a length.
But if you come at the novel without preconceptions, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that much of the writing is simply nonsensical and bad.
What’s most eye-catching are the extended metaphors that read like a word-salad, as in many of the passages on monarch butterflies.
“Migration can be triggered by the angle of sunlight, indicating a change in season, temperature, plant life, and food supply. Female monarchs lay eggs along the route. Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.”
On a technical level, the metaphors here are very mixed. You have an extended metaphor comparing the monarch butterfly’s migration to an immigrant’s journey. But then within it, history is compared to a tapestry. Then children and their homeland are embodied as “future” and “past”. This makes the passage hard to read, but not nonsensical. What’s more important, is…what does this mean? How does “only the future revisits the past” add to the statement “only their children return”. The metaphor is a glib add-on to a perfectly comprehensible statement. “Every history has more than one thread” is a cliche, but because of that we understand the thought. But “each thread a story of division” merely repeats the cliche, nor is it literally true: the threads aren’t divided, in fact the opposite is true, they’re one thread, looped back on itself, over and over.
He follows it with his most famous extended metaphor: “What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?”
What does that mean? This refers to the two themes of the book: language and migration. His mother is rooted in Vietnam, he is rooted in America. She doesn’t speak English, he does. She is illiterate, he isn’t. But how is a country at all like a borderless sentence? Can a sentence be borderless? And how are a country and a border and a sentence at all like a life? This has neither logical nor figurative meaning. At the end he writes: “What is a country but a life sentence?”. This has a concrete meaning: you are forever marked by the country where you’re born or reside. But the whole book undermines this meaning. He has lived both in Vietnam and America, and he’s shifted and reconfigured the meaning of both places—neither was a life sentence!
A few sections later: “If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.”
This is so garbled, it’s hard to pick apart. The sentiment is the same, ultimately, as the monarch butterfly passage above: “Our language is akin to the primitive instinct that makes monarch butterflies return to their mother’s country.” But stated so badly, it simply makes no sense. Who doesn’t want the narrator to go home? Where is the conflict here? The monarch butterfly’s feat is precisely that they’ve never seen their point of origin, but they return anyway, across an immense distance. The narrator doesn’t have a strong connection to Vietnam—his mother never speaks of the war, and his Vietnamese is only at a second-grade level—but he is marked by it, through the damage it did to her mother. She imprints Vietnam on him through the abuse she inflicts on him, which is why he constantly returns, in his mind, to the country. What does this have to do with language? It’s not that you can’t extract some kind of meaning from the statement, but it’s so garbled. Everything could be stated much more clearly. Even metaphors have some responsibility to add, rather than subtract, meaning.
“Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.”
“Shifts in the narrative would occur—the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen.”
“Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.”
“It has started to rain; the dirt around the woman’s bare feet is flecked with red-brown quotation marks—her body a thing spoken with.”
Most of the worst excesses, like these, occur when referring back to the extended metaphors that dominate the the book. The idea of being hunted, the idea of being cut off from your mother tongue, the idea of harking back to a land you’ve never seen. Most of these metaphors are pithy and well-stated when they first appear, but their second and subsequent appearances are farcical and stink of false profundity.
Worse, as many critics have noted, they become a replacement for story. One can see, in the abstract, how the development of a metaphor can create the forward motion that pull a reader through the story, even if nothing changes or the narrator gains no new understanding, but at the end of the book we are no more educated about the linkages between migration, language, loneless, and losing your mother tongue than we were at the beginning. Most of these metaphors are simply loaded with far more meaning than they can bear.
Indeed, this is precisely why we resort to story, because there is meaning in the concreteness of things: in events, motivations, drives, and catastrophes. Facts are silent; we interpret them to create meaning. But this novel’s main structural issue is precisely the refusal to interpet the limited facts: the narrator’s mother is illiterate; she beat and brutalized the narrator, who is highly literature; she was herself traumatized by the war.
The key to all of this lies in the mind of the narrator’s mother—in her understanding of her own life, and what she’s suffered, and of how the narrator has lived—and it is precisely this which the narrator finds unable to imagine. All of the complexity of the metaphors is merely a covering for that inability. The narrator is unable to peer into his mother’s head, so he resorts to the monarch butterfly metaphor, or the language metaphor, or the idea of being hunted, all of which are attempts to strip her of agency and turn her into a vessel for something else (instinct, culture, or oppression). And she very well could be merely a vessel for those things, but she still has a mind and thoughts and words of her own—she still understands and makes meaning of herself in some way. And yet this book, while purporting to be an attempt to communicate with her, robs her of the ability to speak. If the narrator simply cannot understand his mother, that is fair enough, but then the focus should be on his actions and his own thoughts. And yet telling the story as a letter to her, with such a focus on her actions, robs him of the ability to tell his own story as well.
Ultimately, the book, while about language, seems to broadcast with its language a certain pessimism about the ability of words to ever get to the bottom of anything. Which is also fair enough, but it’s played out. We already had the entire eighties. We’ve read our John Barth. We know language is inadequate. Moreover, the book isn’t upfront about that theme either. It seems constantly to be gesturing to some meaning that it feels unable to grasp.
This lack of theme, lack of story, and lack of precision is most tragic because Vuong is genuinely a very talented writer. Certainly more talented than me. And where his writing is more plain, it is excellent. Virtually every page has an example of the narrative just relaxing into itself and describing a scene in clear, stripped-back detail, as in this early scene:
Those Saturdays at the end of the month when, if you had money left over after the bills, we’d go to the mall. Some people dressed up to go to church or dinner parties; we dressed to the nines to go to a commercial center off I-91. You would wake up early, spend an hour doing your makeup, put on your best sequined black dress, your one pair of gold hoop earrings, black lamé shoes. Then you would kneel and smear a handful of pomade through my hair, comb it over.
Seeing us there, a stranger couldn’t tell that we bought our groceries at the local corner store on Franklin Avenue, where the doorway was littered with used food stamp receipts, where staples like milk and eggs cost three times more than they did in the suburbs, where the apples, wrinkled and bruised, lay in a cardboard box soaked on the bottom with pig’s blood that had leaked from the crate of loose pork chops, the ice long melted.
“Let’s get the fancy chocolates,” you’d say, pointing to the Godiva chocolatier. We would get a small paper bag containing maybe five or six squares of chocolate we had picked at random. This was often all we bought at the mall. Then we’d walk, passing one back and forth until our fingers shone inky and sweet. “This is how you enjoy your life,” you’d say, sucking your fingers, their pink nail polish chipped from a week of giving pedicures.
This is beautiful writing, with a great mix of detail and interpretation. You can easily see the outlines of a great novel told in this voice. But it would need to be anchored in the detail of this mysterious woman: what does dressing up like this mean to her? What does the chocolate mean to her? It seems impossible that this isn’t some pleasure, some lesson, she is transmitting to her son—she is trying to teach him something, to impart him wisdom about the good life.
But those threads don’t get picked up. It is mere detail, because it doesn’t serve the overriding metaphors of the book.
This book is fine. It’s not a crime against humanity. When my book club read it, I actually liked it the most out of any of us! I was impressed with much of the writing, and the second half of the book (which details the narrator’s relationship with Trevor, his first love) is much stronger than the first. I remember reading the passages where they have sex inside a barn, and I was like, wow sex with men never felt like that to me. But no wonder, I guess I’m not a gay man after all.
And I have numerous PoC writer friends who say to me that Vuong is overrated, and he’s only gotten critical acclaim because he suits the liberal biases of editors and agents. But I don’t really think he got 1.5m just because he wrote a book about the Vietnam War being bad and harmful and inflicting generational trauma on Vietnamese people. Lots of people have written about the Vietnam War, and I’m sure even other Vietnam refugees have written novels (albeit ones that didn’t get picked up or got less attention)—after all, 2.2 million Vietnamese people live in America. That’s about the size of Uruguay, and there are lots of Uruguayan novelists. If something doesn’t exist in America, it’s not because people aren’t writing it or don’t want to write it. (It’s worth noting that Vuong’s isn’t even the only hit novel by a Vietnamese-American that’s about the Vietnam War to get critical acclaim in the last tenyears. The Sympathizer got the Pulitzer in 2016). Why out of all Vietnamese authors did Vuong get the huge book deal?
What I think is that it’s hard to write well, and it’s easy to write badly, but it’s very, very hard to write badly as well as Vuong does. It’s very difficult to make bad writing seem so good, and to create that feeling of meaning and profundity where none exists. Moreover, the fact that he’d already gotten the stamp of approval from the poetry community was enough to make editors think, this guy is a genius. Then, once 1.5m had been invested in the book, they had to market it and sell it hard, and the whole thing became self-fulfilling.
But everything began with that first editor opening this manuscript and just being blown away by the language. That’s what got them bidding on the book and started the auction that presumably ensued. They thought, “Wow, look at this monarch butterfly passage. That is really smart and beautiful.”
I don’t expect huge, popular books, even huge, popular literary books, to be works of genius. And I think that it’s good and fair for mediocre PoC books to get just as overhyped as mediocre white books. That, my friend, is what we call equality.
And I assume that Vuong has some inkling that the book is overwritten. It’s not possible for him to have written the good passages without knowing that the bad passages are bad. But maybe he doesn’t know, and that’s fine too. Good for him.
What I don’t like is that this book has created a structural incentive for PoC to lard their narratives with extended metaphors. The effect of an extended metaphor is usually comic, as in this famous passage from Gogol:
“This was not the old Chichikov. This was some wreckage of the old Chichikov. The inner state of his soul might be compared to a demolished building, which has been demolished so that from it a new one could be built; but the new one has not been started yet, because the infinitive plan has not yet come from the architect and the workers are left in perplexity.”
Gogol knows he’s trying to be funny here, by pressing the cliche of a demolished person as far as it can go. The purpose is mostly to make you laugh, and only secondarily to transmit meaning.
But I was recently scanning the Buzz Books compendium of excerpts from Fall/Winter releases and about a third of the literary books had a Vuong-like extended metaphor in the first few pages. I’ll quote here without naming the author, to avoid embarrassing people, but each passage is from a different book, and most were by PoC:
“Coral approached Il Fornaio feeling as if her throat were turning to steel, all of the veins and muscles hardening, the blood squeezing through clogged plumbing. It was the same feeling she had after eating a family sized bag of chips. She wanted to expel whatever it was in her body through every possible exit port, but relief was not possible. The thing inside her was not going to come out. It was hot.”
“I fled to that country because I would have gone anywhere, done anything, for one last taste of green sharp enough to pierce the caul of my life. I was twenty-nine, a hungry ghost, adrift. I hadn’t seen California in ten years, hadn’t tasted a strawberry or a leaf of lettuce in three. Hunger was simple, as the rest was not.”
“The Spanish verb bordar is derived from the Indo-European bhar, meaning point, bristle, hole. This, in turn, has an etymological association with the Latin fastus, from which we get fastuoso and fastidio (lavish and annoyance). In both Spanish and English, the verb has a common root in the Old French brouder, meaning “the side of a boat” (as in starboard). And this is how it relates to embroidery, which was used to decorate the edges of fabrics.”
“Attention was on me. I was aware of my body, my pose—which I’ve been told can read as defensive. Holding myself in, using my arms as a cage. But what is defensiveness if not a waving hand above a drowning body?”
“Jonathan Abernathy steps into the office and death is there. Death is not alone. A redheaded attendant named Kai looks up from her paperwork as Jonathan Abernathy walks through the automatic doors. Neither Abernathy nor the attendant feels death, sees death, hears or touches death, but death is there. Death is watching them both. Though it will take three years, from this moment, for death to act, Jonathan Abernathy will never live a life unmarked again. Death will be tethered to him as a shadow.”
“The heat is a living-breathing thing that climbs through windows and creeps into kitchens. It follows people to work and at queues in the bank and on trains home. It crouches in bedrooms growing restless until at night in fury it throttles those sleeping leaving them gasping for breath. It sweeps through the streets and bursts open pipes, smashes open green guavas and splits apart driveways. It burns off fingerprints and scorches hair and makes people forget what they are doing and where they are going so that they wander around beating their heads.”
The thing is, Ocean might know what writing is good and what writing is bad, but I’m not sure these authors do. A lot of them just seem to be guessing: picking their tenor and vehicle at random, like a manatee spinning a wheel.
Something editors don’t know: good writing isn’t something you do with your brain. It comes from some unspoken intuition: the same place your dreams come from. But, in contrast, a lot of people write entire books using bits of cobbled-together ideas; they’re like a real-life ChatGPT. They write by filling in the next sentence by rote, thinking what normally comes next in a passage like this. And these people often get a lot of attention. They sell books, win awards, get professorships, precisely because their books feel like other books. There is nothing about them that you can point to and say, “This is wrong and bad.”
The only clear sign someone isn’t in touch with the muses is when someone has picked up a bad habit from elsewhere and carried it into their writing. Now, in some of these examples, the metaphor might be justified by the voice, but in many of them it’s probably not. And nothing could be a clearer indication that inspiration isn’t really speaking through you.
This writing tic, when picked up by PoC writers, serves dual purposes: it signifies to editors that you’re a “real” writer, while to people with taste, it signifies the opposite. It becomes a reason for dismissing you.
I don’t think any of this is Vuong’s fault or even the fault of these writers. Why would they not do the thing they’ve been rewarded for? They probably don’t even know they’re selling out, because the narrative of selling out doesn’t exist in literary fiction. Literary fiction is the good stuff, that’s definitionally what it is. We’re not sell-outs like those commercial fiction writers.1
But people don’t realize you can sell out line by line, page by page, by consistently making the easier decisions.
It’s the same with this substack, honestly. When I write something people interpret as being about “woke madness” it gets way more hits than when I write about Nietzsche. Over time it would be very easy to lean into culture war stuff. There is an audience for serious and honest cultural writing, but it’s a lot smaller than the culture war audience, and I could easily over time become the trans Thomas Chatterton Williams. But I won’t, not just because my influence on the world would be pernicious, but because it’d destroy my aesthetic integrity. It’s very difficult to cultivate the voice inside you that says “This is good and worth writing, and that is bad and not worth writing” and if you start ignoring that voice then you eventually lose it.
But if I sell out, a bunch of unwashed incels come out and say “SOMEONE IS FINALLY SAYING IT.” I know I’m doing wrong, precisely because I don’t trust the people who might praise me. Whereas if a literary writer sells out, they get a MacArthur Award. Vuong’s book sold, and sold for so much, precisely because it is overwritten. All of the books I quoted sold precisely because they contained self-indulgent longeurs that convinced editors, “Golly, this is a real writer!”
I think many PoC writers have avoided the sins of Vuong and these others. I think many writers from working-class backgrounds have retained their integrity. But you and I haven’t heard of them, because the market hasn’t lifted them up and pushed them on us.
When people talk about gaps and absences in the current publishing world, I always point to the airplane problem. During WWII, engineers were tasked with figuring out where to put the armor on airplanes. At first they noticed airplanes were coming back shot with more bullet holes in the fuselage and not so many in the engine, so they proposed armoring the fuselage. Then a mathematician realized, “If an airplane gets shot in the engine, it doesn’t come back. It crashes.” The areas where we see bullet holes are precisely the areas that don’t need armor.
Similarly, if there’s an absence in the market, it’s because someone is shooting down the planes that would fill that absence. And if there’s an absence of working class writers who lack showy markers of talent, like Vuong’s poetry pedigree and his overwritten metaphors, it’s not because those manuscripts are not being written, it’s because when an editor sees that manuscript they think, “This is nothing special.”
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Before you get mad at me, please note I’ve been writing commercial fiction for fifteen years, and I have three dozen sci-fi short stories and two young adult novels out. I’m just being facetious.
This essay made me think of one of my own pet theories. I am familiar with Ocean Vuong, but have not read him (and this essay makes it less likely that I ever will). But when reading those excerpts of his text, what struck me was not necessarily the poor quality of writing - as a stylist, he seems no less objectionable than other contemporary writers who go for Proustian-metaphor overload (Javier Marias, for example, did this, and I don't mind his novels). Instead, what bothered me with the passages you highlighted is that the writing did not appear to be "grounded" in anything substantial. When I think back to "Dream of Red Chambers," the technical writing (especially in translation) was not necessarily the best. But Cao Xueqin was deeply grounded in Taoist and Buddhist precepts, such that even rather banal metaphors were interesting for me to read because of the connection to a deep and rich body of knowledge. When I think of a few contemporary writers I admire (Coetzee, Ishiguro, Antonio Muñoz Molina), they are able to permeate their novels with a strong dose of humanism that makes them interesting and worthwhile to read. Molina in particular seems like he wrote a novel involving a quasi-similar theme in his novel "Sepharad." But Molina infused that novel with something that Vuong seems to lack. I suppose if one spends their entire time marinating in contemporary culture, something gets lost. And not just for PoC writers - I despise David Foster Wallace for more-or-less the same reason.
There’s so much that’s good here, I like the bits about bad writing line by line and especially the “trans Thomas chatterton Williams” point but honestly my main takeaway was “she’s read Barth!!”