On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
I read the book On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong and it was voted as our choice last month at my book club.
Here is a link to the interview of Ocean Vuong with Krista Tippett that first made me aware of him as a writer.
And here is a link to a New Yorker article which contains the beginning of the book, so you can get an idea of the writing. Vuong reads again in the YouTube video I reference below and one sentence brought home to me the poetry of his writing, “Night surges by from the car like sideways gravity.”
As you can read and hear from the interview and article, the book is a novel written as if it is a letter from a son to his mother. My dad served in Viet Nam so Vuong’s story naturally caught my eye. Having grown up, as many of us did, when the Viet Nam war and the peoples' responses to it were in the news constantly, I thought it was interesting to read about the story of people who were a product of that war. Even though it is a novel, the book is, from all I've read and heard, quite autobiographical. The main character in the novel, is writing to his mother who is the daughter of a Vietnamese woman and an American soldier. Like Ocean Vuong, the main character came to America as a refugee from Saigon along with his mother and grandmother.
The book has several quite graphical scenes. I did not feel they were gratuitous but they were disturbing--which I believe was intentional. I thought the writing was beautiful--lyrical. You can tell he's a poet.
I often say I like "straight stories" and don't appreciate several books I've read where the story seems to bounce around rather than having a clear timeline. This book, written as if it is letters, is not a straight narrated story, either. Somehow it is different, though, and I found I was not at all distracted by that.
I very much enjoyed this YouTube video of a reading and talk that Ocean Vuong gave. In it he says that the book (and his writing) “is ultimately about how far we are from each other.” He said that a first person narrative (as this book has) can turn into a black hole, all about me, myself, and I. He wanted to turn the eye outward, who he is through how he looks at the world rather than how he presents himself. He spoke of many interesting things:
The mother & grandmother in the book (based on his own) suffer from mental illness, having experienced the Viet Nam war.
Viet Nam is similar to the South in the US—civil war, agrarian. He recognized the similarities and thought of writers like Flannery O’Connor and Toni Morrison.
He spoke of genetic memory, what gets passed down from generation to generation. Interesting concept.
A novel is like a town square—you meet characters, and you go home with hopefully a little extra
There’s hope in the book. He never considered it a tragic story, rather it’s a book that finds joy & delight without forsaking the characters’ trials & tribulations. The difficulties informed the joy. You see why they laugh.
He talked about “queer tragedies.”
Some folks don’t survive in this book but their demise was not necessary for the survival of the protagonist. We’re not here because of a linear plot. We’re here because of proximity, being with others.
The letters comprising the book are like little “vignettes.” He said he didn’t have to bridge the vignettes of the book, they could live in proximity.
A novel is expansive, and becomes an ark. Take everything you love and put it into a vessel that will keep it until everything else is gone. The book is me (Vuong) loading the ark. Multiple voices - Joan Didion-like, New England dialect, lots of things. What would happen when a queer Asian-American writer allowed anything he wanted into the ark?
Many in my book club did not like the book. Some quite vehemently criticized the book for its vulgarity and felt it was completely unworthy to be read. Some conceded the writing was beautiful but they still disliked the book. Some commented that they did not find any of the characters loveable. Some felt the violence and sex was gratuitous. One person said that they felt Ocean Vuong’s youth was a big factor. They felt the book reflected hopelessness about life (although Vuong himself said there is hope in the book, as I listed above) and that it will very likely change as he gets older.
One questioner in the YouTube video asked about the graphic sex described in the book. I was intrigued by Vuong’s answer.
The way sex is treated and desire is treated in a lot of novels is as a plot point. Either we orchestrate people who want to possess each other or they fall in love and they possess each other in order to do X Y Z. They propel the story forward. They were thresholds, and I think as a queer person often we feel desire that society and our family tell us that we shouldn't feel. You can walk by that person, you could pass them on the street, or at a reading, and you would never know. You would think they're just sitting there, but when that person looks at something that they want and they're not supposed to want, there's a whole hurricane of feeling inside them.
I think I wanted to turn desire and sex not as a plot point but a climate, to turn that into weather, and part of that is a refusal to move on. Often in sex, particularly in coming-of-age novels, when you achieve it, it's a moment prerequisite to something else, but queer folks we very rarely have modes. We never have instruction manuals. We don't have “the talk,” you know, from our parents about the birds and the bees. So a lot of our way towards desire is also a way towards self-knowledge. Not on a psychological level but on an anatomical level, we learn on the fly and I wanted to honor that tradition of learning through failure because I think in this country we shame failure. When people fail, we cast them aside but for queer folks failure becomes a necessary practice towards success, so we fail forward. I think I wanted the book to keep returning to failure until it triumphs in spite of its bumbling which is what being queer feels like to me.
I had never thought about any of this, especially the part about how queer folk don’t have “the talk” or “instruction manuals.” I wonder if now there is material like that in some contexts. But what a contrast to what I had, with sex education at school and books and things to read given to me by my mom. I suppose it’s also common for heterosexual kids not to get any of that the way I did, but Vuong’s point that queer folk “learn through failure” and that failure “becomes a necessary practice towards success so they fail forward” really struck me. And I was struck again when he said, “…failure until it triumphs in spite of its bumbling, which is what being queer feels like to me.”
I read all of this to my book club group, and one person still said that none of that made any difference; they still despised the book. They felt I and others who seemed to like the book were unduly influenced by Ocean Vuong’s articulate and striking interviews. They could have a point, but I have listened to other authors’ interviews, thought they seemed like someone whose writing I would like, and then discovered I did not like their writing at all. So I’ll take that observation with a grain of salt.
I am thankful for my book club for many reasons, and one is that we can exchange opinions freely, knowing that we will be listened to. We are kindred spirits and agree on many things but not all. It is good we can like and dislike different books and learn from consideration of all our views.
At any rate, I like the book. I plan to keep following Ocean Vuong because I find him intriguing, too.