Ocean Vuong's Gorgeous Debut Novel

Contrary to current opinions coming from the White House, we have always been a nation of immigrants. One of the multitude of enhancements that our immigrants have given us is a treasure trove of glorious literature. The pain of assimilation is rife with possibilities and wordsmiths from such disparate countries as Ireland, Iran, Nigeria, or China have made their literary mark. Now, a new voice, only one generation away from his mother's homeland, Vietnam, speaks in a raw, painfully honest way about the lingering effects of relocation as the result of war. https://www.oceanvuong.com/about

Not as angry as Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen's "The Sympathizer," https://readaroundtheworld-sallyb.blogspot.com/search?q=the+sympathizer "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous," is deeply personal, barely skirting the border between fiction and memoir. Little Dog, our narrator, is writing a letter to his illiterate mother, a letter she will never read but one

that allows him to excavate the beauty and horror of his twenty-some years as a bi-racial child living in Hartford, Connecticut, with his mother, Rose, and grandmother, Lan.

Each of these women obviously suffers from PTSD. Rose works all day at a nail salon, having escaped a husband whose brutal beatings she now visits upon her little boy. Lan, when not plagued by flashbacks to the burning of her village by the Americans, is an epic storyteller who protects her grandson with words. And words, language in all its diversity and nuance is very much a subject of this work.

There is much violence in this novel yet it is tempered with an equal amount of love. Little Dog's memory and descriptive powers are acute, whether he's expressing his admiration for the strength of these women who raised him or his admission to his mother that he is gay. Like the poet that Vuong is (Night Sky with Exit Wounds), he soars when he writes of his first love, Trevor, whom he meets while working the fecund tobacco fields of the Housatonic river valley. He can also bring readers to their knees with his memory of the pink bicycle with training wheels that his mom picked up at a thrift shop. The older boys in the neighborhood have a field day with Little Dog, snatching the bike and scraping off the pink paint, only to have mom diligently dry his tears and repair it with small strokes of neon polish lifted from the salon. 

This is one of the most powerful books I've read this year and it will make my top ten, no doubt. Still, few reviewers have warned that some readers may be put off by the graphic nature of the sexual relationship between Little Dog and Trevor or, more disturbing to me, the desperately realistic portrayal of opioid and fentanyl addiction. Putting that aside, Vuong's novel is one more wrenching addition to the masterful writings from immigrants to America, made all the more remarkable when you understand that these masterful craftsmen and women are not even writing in their native language. An achievement indeed.