The Romance of Unreadable Being

In his debut novel, Ocean Vuong took pains to be illegible, then blamed the reader for reading. In his new book, he is finally ready to talk.

- By ANDREA LONG CHU

OCEAN VUONG’S 2019 debut, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, was an epistolary novel addressed to someone who could not read it. The book presents itself as a series of letters written by Vuong’s alter ego, Little Dog, to his mother, Rose, a mixed Vietnamese child of the Vietnam War who never learned to read. Her illiteracy allows Little Dog to admit things he never otherwise could, most notably his secret teenage romance with his all-American best friend, Trevor. But Little Dog also fantasizes about discovering a means of communicating with his mother through sheer proximity. “I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being,” he writes to his mother. “Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.” Little Dog seems to suggest that the language of every novel contains a kind of second, unspeaking “language,” one that resembles those prelinguistic signs (crying, suckling, babbling) the infant uses to communicate with its mother.

This was, in many ways, a convenient theory of language for a young writer who was a talented poet and an insecure novelist. Vuong was clearly uncomfortable working with the novel form. “What I hoped to write with this book was pieces of debris,” he said a few years ago, citing as inspiration Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s experimental novel Dictee. “I refuse to make it legible, cohesive. Refuse to perform a temporal linearity ... And because of that, a very common response to the book is that it’s pretentious.” But the fact that On Earth's best chapter was a very good love poem that had originally appeared on BuzzFeed suggested a much simpler interpretation: The poet was bad at prose.

Nonetheless, On Earth launched Vuong into the gauzy clouds of literary celebrity.