Vuong’s big heart outruns his sentences.

Ocean Vuong’s second novel, published by Penguin Press in May 2025, sets out to do something American fiction rarely bothers with. It spends its whole length with people who stay poor, and it refuses to treat escape as the only story worth telling about them. That ambition is admirable, and for long stretches The Emperor of Gladness honors it.

Hai is nineteen, has dropped out of college, is dependent on painkillers and has told his mother he is in medical school in Boston. The novel opens with him on a bridge in East Gladness, Connecticut, about to end his life. He is interrupted by Grazina, an eighty-two-year-old neighbor with dementia who fled Soviet Lithuania long ago, and he ends up as her caregiver. To pay his way he takes a job at HomeMarket, a fast-casual chain restaurant, where his cousin Sony, a young man devoted to the Civil War and the film Gettysburg, already works.

The best of the book is at HomeMarket. Vuong, who drew on his own experience of restaurant and care work, gives the crew a crowded, specific life of long shifts, private jokes and outright slapstick. These chapters have a Dickensian appetite for secondary characters, and they make a real argument: that a stable, modest life can be a success, and that the people who serve food to strangers all day are running an economy of mutual care that nobody pays them for. Hai’s evenings with Grazina, whose memories slip between present-day Connecticut and wartime Europe, are tender without being sentimental, and the relationship gives the book its spine.

The problem is the prose around them. Vuong came to fiction as a poet, and here the lyric habit often works against the material. Passages that should be plain reach for a figure of speech, and scenes that have already made their point are extended by another round of reflection. At more than four hundred pages, the book repeats its effects, and the sections that range across generations of war and displacement feel imposed rather than discovered. Several reviewers found the style gorgeous, and one Irish critic found it close to unreadable. The truth sits between them, on a page that needed an editor.

What survives is the novel’s decency. It looks at people the culture tends to ignore and grants them comedy, dignity and a hope that is small but real.

The verdict: Read the restaurant chapters and the scenes with Grazina, and forgive the rest. It is a warm book that would have been a strong one if Vuong had trusted his characters more than his sentences.