On Ocean Vuong (and Poetic Wisdom)

People are talking a lot about Ocean Vuong these days. His second novel, The Emperor of Gladness, was published earlier this year — largely to acclaim. Then, the discourse sharpened. Novelist Tom Crewe wrote a blistering review in the London Review of Books. Discordia Review published its own Substack takedown. Suddenly, critiquing the country’s preeminent literary superstar has become an international pastime.

Having recently read Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I can sympathize with some of the criticisms. Crewe takes special pleasure in lampooning Vuongisms like “I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season.” I’ll agree it’s a bit self-indulgent, a bit more purple than anything I’d write.

I’ll also agree with Discordia that many of Vuong’s free associations don’t make a whole lot of sense. Take this example: “What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life? …what is a country but a life sentence?” There’s an analytical part of my brain that wants to follow these figurative statements to a concrete insight, and never manages to get there.

But here’s where I qualify those criticisms. Making literal sense isn’t Voung’s mission. He’s a writer of noticing, of expressing what it’s like to experience. His observations don’t often resolve to a tidy point, but they’re nonetheless true to how we experience the world.

Take as an example the following, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: “How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.” Do I know what his point is here? No — and I suspect he doesn’t have one. He’s simply evoking, with his customary focus on linguistic norms, the strangeness of our tendency to elevate the ephemeral.

What breeds frustration in some readers, I think, is that Vuong employs the rhetorical forms of the philosopher — the open-ended questions, the sweeping statements, the language-as-frequent-subject-matter — and that leads us to expect a philosopher’s steadfast conclusion. But he’s not a philosopher. He’s a poet. And so the conclusion never comes — or if it does, it’s not as concrete or sensical as we’d like. But there’s definitely beauty in it. And in fact, there might even be wisdom in it, even if it’s not the tangible wisdom, refined into digestible insights, that we’d sometimes like.

There’s a certain type of wisdom that looks like this: “If A, then B. If B, then C. Excellent, C is a wonderful insight!” But this isn’t the only type of wisdom there is. There’s also a vaguer kind — the kind, incidentally, that one often experiences during a mystical moment or psychedelic trip — defined not by concrete insights, but by a sustained heightening of attention, a tireless capacity for association, a ceaseless grasping for meaning that doesn’t quite reveal itself from whispers softly “I’m here; I’m here; I’m here.” That is what Vuong seems intent on capturing.

It’s fair to ask more of a writer, especially one of Vuong’s stature. More insights, more compelling plot points, more incisive prose — sure, sure, sure! But let’s acknowledge that Vuong is doing something that readers value, and the adoration he receives isn’t merely performative or political. It’s literary. Vuong gives us the experience of walking through the world full of wonder and curiosity — often heightened by a perceptive form of extreme emotionality. Is that the literary experience all readers desire? Certainly not — but it’s one many have understandably come to cherish.

Recent essay publication: Interesting and Clever, Smiled at and Seen - A look at how fatherhood cured my obsessive scheduling.