{"id":8322,"date":"2020-03-20T18:17:16","date_gmt":"2020-03-20T22:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8322"},"modified":"2020-03-20T18:17:18","modified_gmt":"2020-03-20T22:17:18","slug":"on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2020\/03\/20\/on-earth-were-briefly-gorgeous\/","title":{"rendered":"On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous<\/a><\/em> made the\nlonglists for this year’s National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise<\/a><\/em>) and the Andrew Carnegie\nMedal for Fiction (won by Lost Children Archive<\/em>), both in the same year\nthat Vuong earned a Macarthur Foundation grant. A grim, epistolary work of\nauto-fiction, On Earth <\/em>is a difficult and unsparing read that’s probably\nbetter from a critical eye than it would be in the eyes of most readers (mine\nincluded).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written as a series of letters from the protagonist, Little\nDog, to his abusive mother, now that Little Dog is an adult, On Earth<\/em>\ngoes back to Little Dog’s childhood, to stories his mother and grandmother told\nhim from before they left Vietnam, and to his adolescent years, when he first fell\nin love with a local boy named Trevor who became addicted to opioids. Little\nDog is closer to his grandmother, Lan, who helps take care of him and tries to\nprotect him when his mother becomes violent, and who helps him get to know an\nAmerican veteran, Paul, who became her husband and Little Dog’s surrogate grandfather.\nThe novel bounces around in time between those three settings \u2013 Vietnam, his\nchildhood, and his relationship with Trevor \u2013 but hurtles towards multiple\ndeaths that define the end of the novel, and the way it’s constructed, the story\nunfurls as a tapestry that weaves grief and memory together for a somber and\noften depressing read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\n\n\n

Entangled with those themes is Little Dog’s three-pronged\nintersectionality \u2013 he’s an immigrant, a person of color, and openly gay, all\nof which are true of Vuong as well. Little Dog also arrives in this country\nunable to speak English, and he becomes the first member of his family to learn\nto read, which makes the entire conceit of the novel as a series of letters to\nhis mother more poignant or a little bit farcial. On Earth<\/em> is more\ninteresting as a new entry in the long tradition of immigrant fiction,\nespecially given how many variables are different \u2013 how extreme the fish-out-of-water\naspect is when his family ends up in Hartford, Connecticut; the added challenge\nof his sexual orientation at a time when society was more bigoted than it is\nnow, and with a mother who doesn’t really understand it; and his mother’s work at\na nail salon, a haven\nfor exploitation<\/a> of women who’ve immigrated here from east and southeast Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s plenty to dissect in On Earth We’re Briefly\nGorgeous<\/em>, but Little Dog himself is too much of a cipher \u2013 even with all of\nthe details we know about him as a person \u2013 to make this slight book connect\nwith me. I sympathized with him, but never empathized with him; perhaps it’s\nthe nonlinear narrative, perhaps it’s the dispassionate way in which Vuong\nwrites, which always seemed to keep me at arm’s length. There’s a scene in the\nnovel where Vuong describes something in explicitly physical terms, but never\ngrapples with the emotional impact of it, during or after. That seems to be\nemblematic of the work as a whole. In the end, Little Dog seems to forgive his\nmother, to arrive at some sort of understanding, but I still wasn’t sure how he\ngot to that point even with 240 pages leading up to that point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: I finished Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s short story collection\nSabrina & Corina<\/a><\/em> and started\nJo Walton’s Lent<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous made the longlists for this year’s National Book Award (won by Trust Exercise) and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (won by Lost Children Archive), both in the same year that Vuong earned a Macarthur Foundation grant. A grim, epistolary work of auto-fiction, On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1161,1159,36,556,502,143,1058,884],"class_list":["post-8322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2019-books","tag-2019-novels","tag-american-literature","tag-immigrant-fiction","tag-immigrant-novels","tag-lgbt-literature","tag-novels","tag-vietnamese-literature","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8322"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8323,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8322\/revisions\/8323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}