ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS - OCEAN VUONG

Another book I read because it’s trendy. I’m sure this one will get more likes than most of my boring, mostly for me, catch and release book posts. I saw Ocean Vuong on Seth Meyers. He was really charming and charismatic but you don’t see a lot of novelists/poets on late night TV. But actually that apperence helped clarify something that I would have found confusing (on purpose, for sure) otherwise. At the end of the interview, Seth Meyers invites Ocean to say something to his mother, who Ocean has explained is watching at home but doesn’t speak any English. Ocean looks straight into the camera and says something in Vietnamess with an incredibly ernest and intense look on his face. You can feel the intent across the language divide. Ocean’s work often traffics in this tension of languages. Several characters in the book speak only English or Vietnamese and are thus cut off from one another yet still manages to be in some form of communication. The narrator, Little Dog, speaks both and lets this in-betweenness act as a means by which to make the english of the novel strange and poetic. There was some rose/rose wordplay that I was particularly fond of, as well as several instances of short dives into the mechanics of Vietnamesse and how those linguistic relationships mirror human ones. I was thinking about how Ocean’s writing reminded me of Anne Carson, who also uses another language (in her case, ancient Greek) to infuse her English with strangeness and a bizarre poetic weight, but Ocean makes the connection himself, thanking her in the back of the book. The other thing that Seth Meyer interview does is complicate the genre of the book. The book really feel like a memoir, since the main character, like Ocean Vuong, is also a gay Vietnamese man who moves to the USA as a young child with his mother and grandmother, both of whom house horrific war/poverty induced traumas and neither of whom speak English. Parts of the book goes beyond simply being weighty and poetic in style to seeming poetic in form. There’s sections about Tiger Woods and his connection to the Vietnam War and American history that resemble the best sorts of essay writing and actually got me to think about Woods (a pop-culture figure I care almost nothing about) more deeply. I think he was smart to call the whole thing a novel though I would be shocked if the main love interest, a YT man named Trevor who dies tragically, a victim of the opioid crisis, wasn’t very closely based on a real person. Either way, worthy of the hype. Really, really heart-breaking and beautiful. Dirtier and sexier than I was expecting; always a welcomed surprise. The book is very shrewd and wise about the way traumas are passed on, about how people are trying to raise kids and keep it together and how all those experiences and feelings trickle down. If this is as close to real life as I believe it to be, Ocean is almost superhumanly perceptive about the dynamics and history and echoes in his family. If it isn’t then he’s an amazing fabulist. Either way, I’d love to get more Vuong. I hope he writes more “novels”. One endless ocean, connecting Vietnam and Connecticut.