Dwight Garner Reviews Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Vuong's debut novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, follows his much-praised 2016 poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. New York Times Book Critic Dwight Garner writes, "Like his first book, this one is semi-autobiographical and speaks solemnly to his experiences as an immigrant and a gay man." More: 

The narrator of “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” is known to nearly everyone as Little Dog. He’s a writer in his late 20s, but this story is told largely in retrospect. We learn about his troubled family and youth, and about some occasional ecstasies, sexual and otherwise.

Little Dog’s abusive father is absent. His mother works at a nail salon, smokes Marlboro Reds and has PTSD from the napalm and mortars that fell in Vietnam when she was a child. Her English is poor. She hits Little Dog too often, once smiting him with a box of Legos. This novel takes the form of a letter to her.

Lan, Little Dog’s elderly grandmother, also lives in Hartford. She has schizophrenia and is dying of cancer. Back home, during the Vietnam War, she worked as a prostitute, a bar girl, and was deemed a traitor for her dalliances with the enemy.

Little Dog’s ostensible grandfather, a former American Navy man named Paul, met Lan in Saigon. Paul and Lan are now estranged. Thanks to Agent Orange, he has cancer as well.

This is not Wallace Stevens’s decorous, button-down Hartford. Vuong pins the details of these marginalized immigrant lives, the food stamps and Goodwill stores and Thomas Kinkade images and expensive nighttime E.S.L. classes and trips to the corner store for “cigarettes and Hot Cheetos.”

Read more at the New York Times.