Finding beauty in a forgotten American town

Ocean Vuong's The Emperor Of Gladness traces an unlikely friendship between a boy, 19, and a widow, 82

- Olivia Ho

American writer Ocean Vuong has an astonishing knack for the beautiful turn of phrase. The first few pages of The Emperor Of Gladness teem with such lines - it might be the most beautiful opening to a novel this reviewer has read in 2025.

The subject is an unlikely contender for literary grace. Vuong sets his second novel in East Gladness, Connecticut, a post-industrial town of pot-holed back roads and chain store carparks, week-old roadkill and murders that go unsolved for years. Its residents are "the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans," glimpsed briefly in the background of other American narratives.

Yet, Vuong renders this forgotten slice of the United States beautiful. In the mornings, he writes, its ghosts "rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing's mouth".

All this beauty funnels towards a single, devastating moment: a 19-year-old boy, Hai, standing on the only bridge out of town in the driving rain, preparing to jump into the river.

He is stopped by Grazina, an eccentric Lithuania-born widow, 82, who lives alone in a creaky house by the river and struggles with dementia.