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?

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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 tje 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.