On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

I’m always happy when friends recommend books, even, as in this case, when I don’t like the book. Reading a book is an intimate act. Reading a book recommended by a friend includes me in that intimacy. Recommending a book makes you vulnerable to judgments of taste. It says our friendship is worth the risk. And it says, I trust you to receive this offering graciously, whether you enjoy it or no.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a first novel by an author who has previously published poetry. I’ve not read his poetry. Like poetry, the writing slips into dream-like spaces. Images repeat and recombine: monarch butterflies, Tiger Woods. At times, the language drifts away from literal meaning. In several places the prose dwindles from paragraphs to a series of single, disconnected sentences.

“For summer. For your hands” (p.153)

“His hard lean arms aimed in the rain.” (p.154)

The affect is as though memories had become individual grains slipping through the mind.

Or this one from a later section, “A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future.” (p.190)

The story, apparently based on the author’s own life, is highly personal, and when the writing fades away into these opaque places I felt as though the author was abandoning his duty to communicate to the reader and was merely entertaining private mediations. As though his feelings had overwhelmed him in the telling and he had retreated behind his closed eyes.

It’s a dark story. The author is Vietnamese, immigrating to Hartford, Connecticut as a young boy with his mother and grandmother. The grandmother tells stories of the war and her harsh life as a girl. She married an American soldier, named Paul, who appears in the novel in a couple of places, now living in Virgina. The grandmother suffers from war trauma as well as schizophrenic episodes. Her daughter, the boy’s mother, had a husband who abused her, now out of the picture. She physically abuses the boy in turn. She works in a nail salon. The family is loving but very poor and overwhelmed by their challenges. The boy, nicknamed Little Dog, arrives in America young enough to learn English and strives to rise above the weight of the past. But he faces the challenges of his chaotic home, the displacement that all immigrants feel, and the further otherness of his awakening homosexuality.

The book is framed as a letter from the son to his mother, filled with secrets and painful feelings too difficult to be shared out loud. The device further distances the reader, though, as the author address the mother as “you.” The book is divided into three sections, and further divided into unnumbered chapters. In the first section, the author is a boy. In the second section he is a teenager. He finds work on a tobacco farm and forms a friendship with the grandson of the farm owner, a boy named Trevor. Trevor introduces his friend to sex and drugs, which consume Trevor, while Little Dog is able to keep his distance. In the third section, Trevor has died from an overdose. Little Dog returns to Hartford from New York where he has started college and where a new life seems possible.

It may be that my friend recommended this novel to me based on hearing me praise Shuggie Bain. That novel, too, centers on the relationship between a mother and her gay son. Both families are poor. Addiction, mental illness, absent men, are part of the milieu in each. But Shuggie Bain‘s pathos was relieved by episodes of brightness. There were moments where the mother pulled herself together, or where minor characters appeared to offer real hope. I loved Douglas Stuart’s clear and confidant story-telling. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous the darkness never breaks. I felt queasy at times. Even Little Dog’s friendship with Trevor and the sex doesn’t feel romantic, certainly not liberating. It feels bleak. It’s clear that doomed Trevor doesn’t have what Little Dog needs.

The other book this reminded me of, surprisingly, was Vonnegut’s Slaughter-house Five. Both novels continually slip away from a straightforward story into dream-like or fantasy episodes. Both stories concern war and its tragic aftermaths. Time slips between the present and memories. And in both novels the author occasionally interrupts the fiction to share facts from the larger world in a discrete paragraph written in a deadpan style: Vonnegut talks about the bombs and prisoners of war; Vuong shares facts about Fentanyl, opiod abuse, or this paragraph about Houdini:

“When Houdini failed to free himself from his handcuffs at the London Hippodrome, his wife, Bess, gave him a long, deep kiss. In doing so, she passed him the key that would save him.” (p. 189)