The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong was not, initially, what I expected. It has a different shape and a different pace from dearly beloved and much adored On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. I registered that this required a different approach in my reading. I let myself read it slowly, over a few months. It’s lyrical but also more episodic - more like a soap opera, I realised, or a Dickensian drama in how it presents characters and what happens in their everyday lives in the setting of a post-industrial town in Connecticut.We meet our protagonist Hai at a moment of crisis. He’s negotiating tough realities of economics and addiction and the immigrant experience and war and more. He finds purpose in working two jobs - in food service and as a carer. The book eschews the usual conventions of plotting towards a tidy ending. Instead we engage, carrier bag style, with Hai’s finding of found family. His colleagues and the elderly widow Grazina bring love and lessons and also laughter into the story. Themes of care and service are paramount: compassion and the idea of leading a good life. While I was reading I read a vile review (clickbait) and also snark on Substack. I felt this mostly spoke to reviewers and also Substack’s platforming of show-offs. A young and immensely talented and thoughtful writer clearly presses buttons for the less talented and thoughtless (or maybe just: the boring). I also felt the use of quotations in certain reviews was selective and wrong-headed. The very metaphors that distressed pantywaist critics are the very figures of speech that I love to arrest me in Ocean’s writing.These are matters of taste, rather than scorn. I also watched a review by more enthusiastic young reviewer @jackbenedwards who called this a ‘sentimental novel’. I liked that. I liked that that young reviewers as well as Ocean have no shame about sentiment and sentimentality - about feeling in writing. I saw Ocean at the Southbank recently, and he has so much intelligence to give.Anyway, I myself enjoyed this novel very much indeed. Many tender and funny and heartfelt moments along the way, and a beautiful last chapter.#bookstagram #theemperorofgladness

YouTube video by Alexandra Hidalgo

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