Book Review: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2019)
Stunning, heartbreaking, hauntingly lyrical
This book has nothing to do with magic, but the writing casts a spell. Read on of you love to nerd out about literary form and get swept away by deeply evocative prose…
Written in the form of a letter, Ocean Vuong’s memoir-like novel tells the story of “Little Dog,” a Vietnamese American who grows up in Hartford, Connecticut. The novel is addressed to Little Dog’s mom Rose, even though she can’t read and doesn’t speak English.
PTSD and abuse shape Little Dog’s childhood. He grows up aware of his “otherness”—not white, gay—overlooked at school or else chastised for being different. His first love is a complex interweaving of pain and love, tragedy and beauty, two boys fumbling their way through American masculinity and their budding sexuality.
The novel reads a bit like poetry, rife with recurring lines and metaphors, and constructed with evocative juxtapositions: family history alongside childhood vignettes, sex scenes alongside death scenes, animal migration imagery alongside plot. The use of juxtaposition echoes the strongest parallel of all, that of Little Dog’s life story and Vuong’s. The language is beautiful, but it’s the closeness between author and narrator that makes the story so effective, elevating it to an intimately emotional experience.
Without compromising its sense of intimacy, the novel deftly turns our attention to larger themes.
Immigration. American culture. Tragedies that sweep multitudes, like war, discrimination, drug epidemics. It clobbers the heart while delivering facts for the head.
In writing this, Little Dog (and presumably Vuong), makes himself visible, even if not to his mother. Little Dog shows us how emotional and physical pain can be endemic, tracing its way through a family line. But he branches out farther than his family, mastering English and using it to reflect, heal, and stake an impressive claim as a writer in his new country.
What’s important to know about this novel is right there in the title: it’s gorgeous.