‘The Emperor of Gladness’: an intimate portrait of hope and darkness in hardscrabble New England
Ocean Vuong tells the intimate story of two immigrants in Connecticut searching for hope
★★★★★
The Emperor of Gladness
Ocean Vuong
Penguin Press
May 13, 2025
“It’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree.”
With those words, Ocean Vuong transports readers to East Gladness, a fictional forgotten town at the edge of Connecticut. It is 2009, and the opioid crisis has torn through New England, leaving thousands to die before the CDC even calls it an epidemic. Countless more are left haunted, including 19-year-old Hai, who stands at the edge of a bridge in East Gladness, ready to jump.
He is stopped by Grazina, an elderly Lithuanian woman who is experiencing early signs of dementia. Disregarded by her children and beginning to lose track of the present, Grazina offers Hai a place to stay if he takes care of her. The two begin a friendship that anchors them against the tides that rise around them.
To provide for the two of them, Hai finds a job at HomeMarket, a fast-food restaurant that imitates Thanksgiving-style home-cooked meals. Here, Vuong introduces readers to an array of unforgettable characters. Their stories are inconsequential and mundane to the rest of the world, but Vuong paints their lives with a brilliance reserved for the heroes of epic poems.
At HomeMarket, Hai reconnects with his cousin Sony as he begins to reapproach the past that drove him to the bridge. Vuong writes, “The hardest thing in the world is to live only once,” and we see his characters struggle to do just that as they dream, plan, and grieve in the edges of reality and sanity in East Gladness.
We get to know HomeMarket’s manager, BJ, an aspiring wrestler buoyed by her dreams; Maureen, a cashier wrestling with grief; Wayne, a coworker fighting for his honor and some extra cash; and Sony, a boy obsessed with the Civil War and his missing war hero father. Meanwhile, at his new home, Hai walks with Grazina through her labyrinth of memories, trying to keep her grounded.
In the beautiful and arresting language of his poetry, Ocean Vuong weaves a story in a voice that is both unflinchingly honest and lovingly tender. Vuong reveals his ability to write a longer form of fiction that is all at once gut-wrenching, soothing, and at times, unexpectedly hilarious. He has the singular ability to carefully balance grief, hope, and humor in a tone that uniquely belongs to him.
One of the many strengths of The Emperor of Gladness is its richly wrought setting. East Gladness is haunting, somehow rendered to be both mythical and undeniably real. Reading about this town on the outskirts of civilization feels like a memory; the experience is a mixture of reality, dream, and imagination.
The most impactful part of The Emperor of Gladness is its characters. The details of their lives are commonplace, and their hardships and joys are the sorts of things you have heard about countless times before. They are among the endless tragedies on the news that lose their meaning amidst the overwhelming onslaught. In Vuong’s writing, however, these everyday sorrows and simple delights, events our society has become desensitized to, regain a fiery vibrance. Vuong’s writing will break your heart and make you laugh out loud at anecdotes that you would have labeled as insignificant before. You will come out, like these characters, wounded but hopeful.
Thousands of people like Hai died unnoticed in the early 2000s from an epidemic that was then unnamed. But in Ocean Vuong’s new novel, Hai lives a searingly bright life in a story that is unforgettable.