This fiction novel is written in epistolary form by a son to his
illiterate mother. The story pulls back layers of generational abuse, trauma, sexual identity, and loss of
life in Connecticut. The letters follow a rough timeline tracing his grandmother,
mother, then his life, but in the sporadic manner of memory slowly recalled.
At it's worst: An atmospheric emotional experience, waxing poetic to a point it's nauseating, something akin to reading Jenny Holzer truisms for pages on end; a redundant stream-of-conscious.
At it's best: A poet's precision in detailing generational trauma, particular pain, and making meaning out of the mundane; raw emotion that will make sure you are as painfully aware of the brutality of the world as the narrator.
The stark diction and attention to details of Vuong's writing style grab you from the beginning. Details of domestic abuse are given as if they are commonplace, yet nothing much is predictable. It's an emotional upheaval of the life of a family who has survived war, racism, and working at nail salons - but only barely.
At some points he reminds me of Cormac McCarthy with normalized descriptions of brutal pain, and at others the panic of Richard Siken, whom the author Ocean Vuang credits in his Acknowledgements page. All three authors seem to say
"I am comfortable in this discomfort, so much so I will make it glaring. You, too, will hurt like me."
But the same style that tempts also repells.
The truisms are constant - and then exhausting. There is no climax. The closest we get is the scene where he comes out to his mother, but it was punctuated
by so many interruptions of background noise that I could feel my blood
pressure rise.
just write the scene, I thought.
I don't need to know the details of every person who walks into the store. I don't care how many kids there are, or what field trip they came from, or which ones are mourning a bad dream. Just tell me what you are trying to say.
Some moments wax so poetic it's nauseating. I want to take out the paragraphs about buffaloes running off of cliffs and diabetics selling Cutco, take out the lines of being "blazed in the blood of light" and a living room being "miserable with laughter" and replace it with something less cloying.
To lift my weighty review, I will share my favorite paragraph of the novel.
"I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don't get enough of one or the other. The have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American's sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, "It's been an honor to serve my country." (pg. 181).
The novel is chock-full of similar paragraphs that drop out of the novel and into a tumblr text-post seamlessly. Flip open the book, point to a page, and you've got your next clever photo caption. Here's an easy one:
"The truth is we don't have to die if we don't feel like it.
Just kidding."
As Dwight Garner of The New York Times puts it, it's mostly "filled with showy, affected writing, with forced catharses and swollen quasi-profundities." The pithy lines try to touch on everything; that is to say, they say nothing.
