Is there such a thing as a ‘poet’s novel’? If there isn’t, and if making up a category like that wouldn’t be a waste of time, then Ocean Vuong’s first novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous would rank as one of its shining examples. Vuong is a master of the light touch; On Earth is full of beautiful phrases, well-turned metaphors and short, powerful lines like this: ‘A bullet without a body is a song without ears’. The challenge of writing descriptively is always to get information across without overwriting and, as a guilty over-writer, I appreciate Vuong’s talent for summing up, in lines like these, ‘what it’s like to be awake in American bones’.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who can’t read, chronicling twenty-seven years’ experience as a Vietnamese immigrant in America. It’s a difficult portrait of love, trauma, and sacrifice, one that’s struck through with a commitment to find beauty even in these experiences. It’s a blend of autobiography and fiction, often in direct address to the reader. The narrator is writing to ‘reach’ his mother – even though she’ll never read his letter – and to unearth a family history stretching across two continents and thirty years, from the Vietnam war to Hartford, Connecticut.
The narrator ‘ha[s] had many names’ but here he goes by Little Dog, his grandmother’s name for him. The name is a form of protection: in the village where he was born the smallest children are given derogatory names like ghost, demon, or buffalo bead, so that evil spirits can be fooled into thinking they’re not worth abducting. The ways that we express love can be difficult to understand, and hard to explain to outsiders:
It’s true that, in Vietnamese, we rarely say I love you, and when we do, it is almost always in English. Care and love, for us, are pronounced clearest through service: plucking white hairs, pressing yourself on your son to absorb a plane’s turbulence and, therefore, his fear.
Language, or a lack of language, becomes a way for Vuong to explore the power dynamics of migration. Not being able to speak English in America leaves Little Dog and his mum powerless at first, as in a humiliating scene where his mother is laughed at because she can’t describe what she wants in a butcher’s. But Little Dog learns to use even ignorance as a tool for survival in America, as when school bullies daub homophobic slurs on their front door and Little Dog assures his mother that they’ve written “Merry Christmas”.
It isn’t long before Little Dog discovers his love of language, or the power that mastering words can give you. On Earth is often delightful to read – as in this passage, where Little Dog marvels at the power of language at church:
I was enamoured with the verve, torque, and tone of the pastor’s voice […] It was, to me, a new kind of embodiment, one akin to magic, one I’d glimpsed only in [my grandmother’s] storytelling.
I was reminded here of James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, where, in a community that places its church at its heart, the power of religious language is intoxicating to a young protagonist much like Little Dog. Baldwin called his first novel: ‘the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else. I had to deal with what hurt me the most’. I don’t want to presume too strongly on Vuong’s own life and motivations in writing, but On Earth certainly deals with what hurts. It’s a special gift – and a kind of translation – to make pain into poetry.
As Little Dog grows up, the focus of On Earth moves from the complexities of his relationship with his mother to those between him and Trevor, a white boyfriend from the countryside. Among poverty and violence, the love between the two boys is yet another ray of beauty that Vuong is keen to put on show. On Earth isn’t a tragedy, not entirely. It was here however where I felt Vuong’s anger most strongly – anger at the internalised homophobia and the outright bigotry of others, and anger at the caustic danger of America’s opiod epidemic. In short, On Earth is a powerful bildungsroman that is remarkably even-handed about injustice. Ocean Vuong hasn’t got time for your pity, or mine.
Vuong has stated that, to write about contemporary society, poets and novelists need to capture the sense of fragmentation that seems to characterise everything we do: fragmented politics, fragmented borders, fragmented identities. With the novel’s jumps between past and present, America and Vietnam, and frequent shifts between prose and poetry, Vuong is searching for a narrative form that’s true to these experiences, beautiful and traumatic. I haven’t yet read Vuong’s poetry but I’d like to see how he breaks and remakes poetic structures: his last collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, won the 2018 TS Eliot Prize. Take my money for the title alone!
To use a horrible cliche, reading Vuong felt like a breath of fresh air. I find a lot of canonical American writing can be a bit bland – and I’m excited that younger writers are coming of age and breathing life into literature. Some of the greats pale in comparison (can’t leave off with these cliches) – how could you rate a novel as immature as On The Road over the sober sentimentality of Vuong? But I feel such comparisons (that no one asked for) – who is “better” than who – aren’t helpful for me to make. Writers like Vuong seem to be agitating for a new hegemony of culture, one based around compassion and communication rather than some masculine hierarchy of taste. I shouldn’t talk so much about my critical process in a review of someone else, but reading On Earth has made me question how I think and how I develop my judgement. Telling you so is a way of celebrating the book. I feel like I’ve spoken a lot in this review but I’ve said little; all I can ask is that you read the book and see if you agree. Literature should make you grow and expand your thinking, and I’m happy that On Earth has given me that opportunity.
When On Earth was published back in June, Max Porter said: ‘it seems obvious now that a gay poet born in Saigon would write the great American novel’. I’m very skeptical of the idea of ‘the Great American novel’, – it’s even flimsier than ‘poet’s novel’ – but it’s a truth that’s undeniable: America’s story, if it has one, is a story that belongs to immigrants. It’s stories like these that are going to make America great again.
Read more about Ocean Vuong and his work at his website.
Sources
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (London: Faber, 2019)
James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain [1954] (London: Penguin, 2001)
Picture Credits
- Tom Hines / oceanvuong.com/about
- Amazon
Contact me for copyright claims.
Entertaining Mr Petre 