{"id":2286,"date":"2025-09-29T15:13:04","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T02:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=2286"},"modified":"2025-10-12T17:19:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T04:19:23","slug":"the-emperor-of-gladness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2025\/09\/29\/the-emperor-of-gladness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Emperor of Gladness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ocean Vuong<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Penguin<\/em>\/Random House<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, August 30th 2025<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The child of Vietnamese refugees and the first in his family to learn to read and write, Ocean Vuong\u2019s life exemplifies the American Dream. It is not a position he takes for granted, resting as it does not on illusory ideals of equality and freedom but acts of grace and chance, and The Emperor of Gladness<\/em> is the story of what might have been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set in East Gladness, Connecticut \u201cwhere high school kids, having nowhere to go\u2026look down one night to find a baby in their arms and realise they are thirtysomething and the Walmart hasn\u2019t changed except for its logo, brighter now, lending a bluish glow to their time-gaunt faces\u201d, the novel opens with 19-year-old Hai, newly discharged from rehab, standing on a railway bridge contemplating suicide. His plans are interrupted, however, by Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian widow who offers him a place get himself together in exchange for help around her slowly disintegrating home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the course of the following year Hai finds temporary reprieve from his past as both Grazina\u2019s live in-carer, Labas (Lithuanian for \u2018Hello\u2019, the transliterated name she bestowed on him at their first meeting), and Sergeant Pepper, who ushers her through the nights she slips back into her childhood in German-occupied Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Additional stability comes from a job at HomeMarket, a franchise diner marketed as \u201cthe taste<\/em> of the holidays without the pain of holidays.\u201d Here he finds a new family, and an identity \u201cmanifested only by his functional existence on the timecard\u2026contained an eternal present.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel\u2019s humanity leaps from the page through both through its characters, who represent the statis of a Middle-America looked down on and scorned by both sides of the political spectrum, and the compassion with which Vuong handles them. It is a motley crew: Hai, an addict since middle school when the local \u2018Candy Man\u2019 upsold him from Jolly Ranchers to opioids; Grazina, slowly and inexorable slipping into dementia; Hai\u2019s autistic, civil-war obsessed cousin Sony; Russia, working two jobs to pay for his sister\u2019s rehab; Maureen, with her bad knees, conspiracy theories, and a crippling medical debt from a son lost to leukaemia a decade earlier; Wayne, who works the rotisserie in honour of his pitmaster father and grandfather; and BJ, Manager, mater familias, <\/em>and aspiring amateur wrestler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than mock or romanticise their lives, Vuong writes with a clear-eyed honesty that eschews the ersatz satisfaction of the traditional redemptive arc. The Emperor of Gladness<\/em> recognises both the bleakness of the society it depicts and the solidarity that arises from \u2018kindness without hope\u2019, and the small, shared pleasures afforded by Corporate America. HomeMarket\u2019s Mac\u2019n\u2019Cheese, mashed potatoes, and creamed spinach may be industrially produced and thawed on demand, the cornbread\u2019s to-die-for taste due to the cake batter with which BJ adulterates it, but it\u2019s not about authenticity. What matters is \u201ctaking care of people, giving them happiness their shitty jobs suck out of them.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is a tragic and heart-warmingly beautiful vision.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ocean Vuong Penguin\/Random House Otago Daily Times, August 30th 2025 The child of Vietnamese refugees and the first in his family to learn to read and write, Ocean Vuong\u2019s life exemplifies the American Dream. It is not a position he takes for granted, resting as it does not on illusory ideals of equality and freedom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2298,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[498,370,513,18],"class_list":["post-2286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-498","tag-fiction","tag-ocean-vuong","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2287,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions\/2287"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}