On Earth Were Briefly Gorgeous

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong – Jonathan Cape

Some novels begin with a murder, a mysterious inheritance or somebody arriving at a country house in suspicious weather.

Ocean Vuong begins with a letter to a mother who cannot read it.

Which rather efficiently tells you that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is not planning to be straightforward.

Published by Jonathan Cape in 2019, Vuong’s debut novel is written as a letter from a young man known as Little Dog to his Vietnamese mother, Rose. Through that letter he attempts to explain himself, his family and the complicated history that brought them from Vietnam to America — knowing all the while that the person he is addressing may never actually read the words.

It is an unusual structure for a novel, but an extraordinarily effective one. Memory moves backwards and forwards. Childhood scenes sit beside family history, love, violence, migration, sexuality, addiction and the lingering consequences of the Vietnam War. The result feels less like someone calmly telling you their life story and more like opening a drawer full of photographs, letters and things nobody quite knew what to do with.

Little Dog grows up in a working-class immigrant household in Connecticut, surrounded by women whose lives have been shaped by war and displacement. His grandmother carries memories of Vietnam; his mother carries trauma of her own; and he gradually begins trying to understand not only where his family came from, but what has been passed down to him without anybody necessarily intending it.

Then there is Trevor.

Their relationship introduces tenderness, desire and first love into a world where tenderness frequently has to negotiate with masculinity, poverty, drugs and the generally unfortunate human habit of making beautiful things unnecessarily difficult.

Vuong was already known as a poet before writing this novel, and it shows. The prose can be lyrical, fragmented and intensely observant, capable of lingering over a tiny physical detail before suddenly opening into a much larger thought about memory, language or loss.

This does mean it is not the sort of book to read while simultaneously checking the football scores and wondering whether the oven has finished preheating.

It occasionally demands attention.

Annoying, really.

There is also a great deal here about language itself: what happens when children become more fluent in a new country than their parents, what cannot easily be translated, and how families communicate through actions, silences and arguments when words prove inadequate.

The title is wonderfully characteristic of the book. Life is temporary. Beauty is temporary. Love is temporary. Apparently everything is temporary, which is a slightly inconvenient philosophical conclusion for anyone currently trying to organise a pension.

Yet the novel is not simply bleak. Its sadness sits beside humour, intimacy, beauty and the stubborn survival of people who have already endured more history than seems entirely fair.

It is a book about being Vietnamese-American, gay, working-class, a son, a grandson, a lover and a writer — but also about the larger question of how anyone turns the chaotic material of a life into a story that can be understood.

This copy is in Good condition, making it an excellent reading copy of one of the most discussed literary debuts of recent years.

Ideal for readers of contemporary literary fiction, family sagas, immigrant narratives, LGBTQ+ fiction and novels in which the sentences sometimes deserve to be read twice simply because the author has gone to the trouble of making them unusually good.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where life may be brief, beauty may be fleeting, but somehow the piles of books remain permanently in the way.

ISBN: 9781787331501
Condition: Good

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