IMPERIAL PHASE

Acclaimed writer and poet Ocean Vuong returns with a sweeping novel about life in small-town America

- HENRY WONG

Ocean Vuong at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts.

A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THE PUBLICATION of Ocean Vuong’s first novel, 2019’s On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, his mother died from cancer. She had only just moved into the house that Vuong bought her with proceeds from the book. “I was a zombie,” the 36-year-old tells me over a video call, in a tone that suggests, while the shock is no longer fresh, disbelief lingers. We are speaking a month out from the publication of his second novel, and this time round, he is just doing his best to pay attention.

“I’m not an author that really understands my work clearly while I make it,” he warns me at the very top of our conversation. “And so it’s like I’m waking up from a dream, and now I have to make sense of it for people.”

The book Vuong is trying to make sense of is The Emperor of Gladness, which, to be fair to its author, is sprawling. It begins, after a seven-page description of growing grass (more compelling than it sounds), with college dropout and recovering addict Hai contemplating suicide. He decides against it, and we move through his humdrum life in the fictional Connecticut town of East Gladness as he befriends Grazina, an elderly woman with dementia, and endures/enjoys minimum-wage hours at a local fast-food restaurant. Vuong calls it his “slump book,” which I think is a joke until he enlightens me. While his first novel felt like a capital-M Moment—one marked by personal and very public success (Instagram grids and train cars alike were flooded with the title)—this one has felt a little more circuitous, slightly self-indulgent. “I’m learning that I’m not really great at writing for myself,” he admits, “or I don’t feel great writing for myself.”