Cherry Blossoms, Pro Wrestling, and Stonewall Jackson: The American Dream?
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin, 2025)
Reviewed by Sarah Selden Linville
The idea of the Great American Novel is, perhaps, a tired one. In 1868, an essay by Willliam DeForest called for a piece of literature akin to what War and Peace is for Russia or Madame Bovary is for France—something that would encapsulate the essence of the nation. Despite its noble intentions, over 150 years later, the idea of distilling an entire culture into a single piece of art seems far-fetched at best.
Despite this fact, “book people”—those who read both professionally and those who read just for reading’s sake—continue to obsess over the idea. In 2024, The Atlantic tried to compile a list of contenders. They had no maximum or minimum number for the list, instead relying on “experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it”—for suggestions. From there, they “added and subtracted and debated” until they arrived at a list of 136 titles.
The list they came up with was, as might be expected, sweeping. It ranges from obvious choices like The Great Gatsby to more recent, much-discussed works like Tommy Orange’s There, There. It even included children’s books, like Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Many of the novels home in on particular echelons of society, or particular subgroup experiences. Others have a more zoomed-out approach, covering various aspects of the American identity at once. Many directly address the idea of the American Dream. All in all, the project emphasized that there is still no single text that can fulfill DeForest’s call, and perhaps that’s okay.
If the list came out in 2025, Ocean Vuong’s most recent novel, The Emperor of Gladness, would almost certainly be in the conversation. At once lyrical and brutal, Vuong’s book explores fault lines of contemporary America: the opioid crisis, immigration issues, poverty, and the stubborn myth of the American Dream. Across 400 pages, Vuong suggests that what binds the nation together is not the pursuit of a rags-to-riches story, but rather the pursuit of resilience in the face of decay.
The novel’s opening is a panoramic homage to the fictional East Gladness, Connecticut, a town fighting to persist in the aftermath of the Great Recession. While the narrator recognizes the town’s beauty, he also describes it as a place haunted by ghosts—ghosts who, “when the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal, rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing’s mouth” (1). There are “thumb-sized buds shooting lucent through April mud” (1). There are cherry blossoms blooming that “came to us from centuries of shit, dropped over this place by geese whenever summer beckons their hollow bones north” (2). Despite their grimness, Vuong’s style and tone also tinge these images with hope, creating the paradox at the heart of the novel: life persists upward even as the past drags it down, often with equal force in both directions.
The characters exist at the balancing point of this tension. Hai is a 19-year-old Vietnamese-American and college dropout who, at the novel’s opening, is poised to jump off a bridge. His suicide attempt is interrupted by Grazina, an elderly woman struggling with her laundry on the other side of the bridge. Grazina is a Lithuanian immigrant whose dementia makes it difficult to live alone. Hai, on the other hand, needs a place to live, as he has just left a recovery facility after spending three weeks there trying to break his opioid addiction. Grazina offers him housing in exchange for reminding her to take her pills and helping get groceries, and Hai, with no other real choice, agrees.
Hai and Grazina’s relationship, like the description of East Gladness, has both glimmers of hope and large doses of unpleasant reality. On the one hand, Grazina has provided Hai with the perfect respite after leaving the recovery center. Hai also provides the company and supervision Grazina desperately needs. However, there are “centuries of shit” buried below the surface for each of these characters. Hai doesn’t go home because he doesn’t want to disappoint his mother for a second time. She was devastated when he dropped out of college due to a friend’s death, which also worsened his opioid addiction. Grazina has been effectively abandoned by her children and surrounding community. The house she is living in is in a small neighborhood of condemned buildings because the soil beneath them is chemically unsafe. Their companionship brings hope to them, but there is also a looming sense that it can’t last forever—at some point, they will have to face reality.
The nature and purpose of reality, though, is one of the novel’s central questions. Grazina’s condition continues to worsen, causing more vivid and drawn-out hallucinations. When speaking truth to her doesn’t seem to work anymore, Hai begins to indulge her hallucinations, reinventing himself as “Sergeant Pepper,” a German soldier charged with escorting her through war-torn Europe. At times, their interactions in these contexts are endearing, but they also raise the question of whether it is kinder to correct Grazina and bring her back to reality or to offer her companionship amidst her confusion.
Hai’s past also allows Vuong to confront this question from a different angle. Through flashbacks, the reader learns more about his childhood as a first-generation Vietnamese American growing up with his mom, aunt, and intellectually disabled cousin, Sonny. Hai’s father died in the Vietnam War, but Sonny’s father is supposedly still alive and living in Vermont. Sonny worships him as a war hero, believing that he was a general in the southern army. This belief fuels his obsession with the American Civil War, particularly with Confederate generals. In one flashback, the family stops at Stonewall Jackson’s house, a museum that scrubs away Jackson’s history as a slaveowner and paints him as a noble hero. Sonny embraces this narrative, enthusiastically reveling in all he learns from the tour guide. While the lies Hai tells Grazina during her hallucinations seem innocent enough and even generous, the ones told to Sonny are much more sinister, pointing toward the far-reaching consequences of the past that inhibit the progress of the present.
And yet, Sonny is one of the greatest sources of joy and hope in the novel. When Hai needs a job to buy groceries for himself and Grazina, he looks to Sonny, who has been working at a local restaurant, HomeMarket, for several years now. HomeMarket is a struggling fast-casual chain that claims to serve Thanksgiving to its customers every day. When BJ, the manager, first hires Hai, she tells him that “what we give to America is the taste of the holidays without the pain of the holidays…Hell, they might not even have a grandma, but you bet they’re gonna see her face when they got this pie in their mouth” (53). And yet, HomeMarket is anything but Grandma’s cooking—the narrator describes the process of defrosting large, gelatinous bags of pre-made mashed potatoes and green beans and pouring them into industrial food warmers every morning in detail.
Despite the lack of real cooking that occurs in the establishment (besides the chicken, which is roasted on site with great pride), BJ takes her job as manager very seriously, hoping someday to outpace the sales of the chain’s second most profitable location in Reading, Pennsylvania. To do this, she even creates her own special cornbread recipe, which we later find out is just white cake mix added to HomeMarket’s just-add-water cornbread mix. The food at HomeMarket is a symbol of the falsified hope in East Gladness.
Beyond her “famous” cornbread, BJ also has big dreams beyond her HomeMarket career—dreams of being a professional wrestler and producing her own entrance music. She enters a variety of contests throughout the course of the novel, hoping to be noticed by a producer, but this dream seems destined to be a dream endlessly deferred. However, BJ doesn’t seem to be too bothered by it. She and the rest of the staff, from single parents scraping by to Sonny saving up to post his mother’s bail, work with dignity but little illusion of escape. If there is an American Dream at HomeMarket, it seems to be of stability more than upward mobility, and through their little community, many of them seem to find it.
Yet the joy and hope that their little community represents is also hindered by lies. Sonny is being lied to by his mother from jail. And, just who is aware of the deception at what point in time also complicates Vuong’s position on the value of truth in general. Perhaps even more significantly, Hai lives a lie throughout the novel, falsifying his whereabouts and situation to his mother and continuing to struggle with his opioid addiction. At the novel’s conclusion, the reader is left to parse out whether these lies are actually just the same thing as false hope—what are the hopes that can peak out of the “centuries of shit” like the cherry blossoms, only to die and be reborn again?
Does The Emperor of Gladness stand up to War and Peace or Madame Bovary, then? No, but Vuong does succeed in creating an evocative landscape of a variety of American experiences that demonstrates the nation’s ability to both decay and bloom at the same time. As Nick Carraway is “borne back ceaselessly into the past” at the end of The Great Gatsby, Vuong’s characters are not. Even as they experience disappointment after disappointment, they keep going, and perhaps, to Vuong, that is the most American ideal.
Sarah Selden Linville earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.
