On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
2019
- fiction, coming of age
- mothers and sons, fiction
- fiction, cultural heritage
- lgbtq novels
- stonewall book awards
- nyt:hardcover-fiction=2019-06-23
- vietnamese americans
- fiction
- adult child abuse victims
- coming out (sexual orientation)
The story
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
What it’s like
Long, looping sentences that feel like breath held and released, the prose lit like a dim kitchen at dusk: sensory and close, with dense images of smoke, nail polish, orchards and bruised fruit, and a voice that moves between tender and hard-edged. The sound on the page is a murmur, a confessional address that circles back on itself and lingers on small domestic details. Its vibe is aching and intimate, with quiet heat and a tender melancholy that can turn sudden and raw. It suits a slow weekend afternoon, a long night alone with a lamp on, or a reread when you want to be spoken to directly. Pacing is unhurried and recursive, built from memory and confession rather than forward momentum. The emotional register is grief braided with fierce love; a young man reckons with a mother who cannot read his words, and with the bruising inheritance of family, race, class and masculinity. Intensity is substantial: physical abuse, drug use and overdose, bodily harm and sexual content between men, all rendered frankly and with weight, though never gratuitous. It is for readers who want literary fiction that is candid about violence and desire while holding onto compassion, especially those drawn to queer and immigrant family stories told in a voice that refuses to look away.
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