Heartbreak and hope

A found family created from despair and dead-end work becomes a tale of connection

- By M John Harrison

Ocean Vuong’s second novel is a 416-page tour of the edgeland between aspirational fantasy and self-deception.

It opens with a long slow pan over the fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, beginning with ghosts that rise “as mist over the rye across the tracks” and ending on a bridge where the camera finds a young man called Hai - “19, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light” - preparing to drown himself. There’s an almost lazy richness to the picture: the late afternoon sun, the “moss so lush between the wooden rail ties that, at a certain angle of thick, verdant light, it looks like algae”, the junkyard “packed with school buses in various stages of amnesia”.

His poetic credentials established, the author of the bestselling auto-fictional On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous gives narrative its head. Instead of jumping from the bridge, Hai crosses it, to be adopted on the other side by 82-year-old Grazina, a woman suffering mid-stage prefrontal lobe dementia. He will become her proxy grandson; they will be each other’s support in a crap world. It will be a disordered but productive relationship.