Today's Read Contributor Acclaimed author and poet Ocean Vuong returns with his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, a poignant and lyrical exploration of intergenerational relationships, emotional resilience, and the transformative capacity of human connection. Building on the themes of trauma, identity, and healing that defined his celebrated debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong’s latest work is both an emotional continuation and a bold literary evolution.
A Story of Second Chances and Unlikely Bonds
At the center of The Emperor of Gladness is Hai, a Vietnamese American man whose life is interrupted by a suicide attempt. Rather than ending his story, this act becomes the beginning of an unexpected journey toward healing. Hai is saved by Grazina, an 82-year-old woman living with dementia, who becomes both a catalyst for change and a mirror for his own struggles with memory, loss, and dislocation.
As Hai assumes the role of Grazina’s caretaker, their relationship becomes the emotional core of the novel. Vuong presents this dynamic not as a conventional rescue narrative, but as a mutual exchange of care—one that transcends age, language, and even cognitive clarity. Through Grazina, Hai learns to hold space for both tenderness and fragility, a lesson that deepens with the involvement of his cousin Sony, who helps him find work at a fast-casual restaurant. These mundane routines—scooping rice, wiping counters, navigating the rituals of minimum-wage labor—become acts of quiet endurance and subtle resistance.
The Lyrical Architecture of Memory and Identity
Vuong’s prose remains as poetic as ever, infusing everyday interactions with lyrical weight and quiet profundity. He crafts sentences that move like verse, capturing the liminal states of grief, longing, and fleeting joy. Language in The Emperor of Gladness is both refuge and revelation, a vehicle for processing pain and accessing the deep reservoirs of memory that shape identity.
Much like his first novel, Vuong draws from autobiographical textures—immigrant experiences, queer identity, familial trauma—but with a more seasoned narrative control. The emotional register of this novel is intimate yet expansive, interweaving Hai’s internal struggles with broader meditations on the human condition. Vuong’s background in poetry allows him to distill complex emotions into single, shimmering moments that linger well beyond the page.
Healing Across Generations
A defining theme of The Emperor of Gladness is intergenerational healing. Vuong is unflinching in portraying the echoes of inherited trauma—from war, displacement, and silence—but he is equally invested in portraying the potential for repair. Hai and Grazina, despite being worlds apart in age and background, find solace in their shared vulnerability.
The novel does not offer simple redemptions. Instead, Vuong honors the jaggedness of recovery, suggesting that healing is less a fixed destination and more a series of mutual acknowledgments. This layered depiction of care—physical, emotional, and spiritual—stands in contrast to dominant narratives that often frame aging or mental illness as burdens. Vuong reframes these as sites of learning, intimacy, and radical empathy.
A Testament to Resilience and Compassion
Critics have widely praised The Emperor of Gladness for its emotional resonance and literary craftsmanship. The Chicago Review of Books lauded Vuong’s ability to “translate grief into grace,” while The A.V. Club highlighted the novel’s “radical tenderness” in its portrayal of caretaking relationships. The book’s title itself, drawn from a metaphor within the narrative, speaks to a desire for joy not as a denial of suffering, but as its companion.
Vuong continues to defy traditional literary boundaries. As a queer Vietnamese American writer, his work resists the pressures of cultural legibility or neat conclusions. Instead, he embraces ambiguity, silence, and contradiction, crafting stories that are as much about the unsaid as they are about the spoken. This approach resonates deeply in The Emperor of Gladness, where joy and sadness coexist in delicate balance.
Conclusion
With The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong offers readers not just a novel, but an invitation to reflect on the quiet, everyday acts that sustain us. It is a work of startling beauty, uncompromising in its emotional honesty and generous in its vision of what it means to care—for others, and for oneself. Through characters marked by pain yet still capable of profound connection, Vuong affirms that even amidst loss, gladness remains possible.
