Exquisite descriptions

The first chapter blew me away. It was, bucking current trends and seeming more like an E.M Forster novel or something from that era, a chapter devoted entirely to description. No dialogue, no plot, pure description. It takes a very confident author to dare this, and a very powerful writer not to lose the reader straightaway. Needless to say Vuong pulled it off with aplomb. This first chapter was actually perhaps one the best of this novel – the elegiac tenderness of the descriptions, tinged with such nuanced observations and dry-eyed acceptance of grim reality, gripped with almost every sentence and turn of phrase, so original and so fresh, when describing a no-hope, insignificant, small town where the entire novel takes place.

East Gladness, only 12 minutes by car from affluent Hartford, “the capital built on insurance firms, firearms, and hospital equipment”, is the very opposite of Hartford, as deprived as Hartford is privileged; a place where

everyone rushes past us, either on their way in or to get the hell out. We are the blur in the windows of your trains and minivans, your Greyhounds, our faces mangled by wind and speed like castaway Munch painting. […] We pay taxes on every check to stand on the sinking banks of a river that becomes the morgue of our dreams” (p3)

Reading Vuong’s words is like watching the beautiful lotus flower bloom in a muddle pond.

Here are just a few more examples of the phrases in chapter 1 alone that caught me as I read, made me stop, reread, admire the beauty of the thought process driving this prose: The wooden sign,

“rubbed to braille by wind” (p1)

“Though sceptical, we are not ambivalent to hope” (p4)

“Even the steeple of the boarded-up Lutheran church grows from dove-white to day-old butter by noon” (p4)

How could one not pause to imagine the off-yellowy-whites of dove-white and day-old butter, admire the subtlety of the imagery? I loved how his descriptions had so much motion, so much pent up energy:

“Look at how the birches, blackened all night by starlings, shatter when dawn’s first sparks touch their beaks” (p3)

Vuong uses the first chapter to paint such a vivid portrait of East Gladness, a nothing-place, but one which has been brought so sharply into our focus now. His skill as a writer is of course to help us find beauty in dereliction, of both place and people, to make us care, for such lost souls, to find value in what and whom the world has deemed largely disposable and valueless.

20 year old, 2nd generation Vietnamese American Hai forms a surprising bond with Grazina, an 80 year old Lithuanian. Both are Americans thanks to war, different wars of course, but they are part of the fall out of past violence and their stories are infused with that underlying violence and trauma. Their relationship is symbiotic and tender, a solidarity between two extremely vulnerable people who have so little armour in a rough, cruel world. Their very existence is precarious, and their finding each other and mutual interdependence, even more gossamer precarity.

Hai finds a job, what most might regard as a dead end job, working in Home Market, a fast food outlet selling Thanksgiving type food: mashed sweet potato pie, creamed spinach, corn bread, mac and cheese,etc. But each of the down-and-our staff there take on a charm, a personality, and the kindness they show each other is surprising and touching. In a place of grime and dead-beat discards of capitalism, in a place reeking with grease and stale food, hot, humid, sweaty, they graft on and find ways to help one another lurch on, to give each other reason to smile, to back each other up. It is credit to Vuong’s light, deft touch that this is credible, and never turns sentimental.

These no-hopers form a most unlikely alliance, despite having so little each to give. Wayne, the black man, is turning rotisserie chickens to look after his kids, his dogs. Maureen, perhaps the oldest there, whose knees are killing her, is working to pay off the medical bills of an already dead son. Tajikistan-born Russia who is usually stationed on drive-thru, skinny and stoned with a ring through his nose, is trying to find money for his sister’s gender-change surgery and rehab. BJ is their charismatic manager, with her dreams of pro-wrestling, ultimately cannot protect her staff from the ravages of corporate demands and aggressive capitalism that has no care for its labour force. Hai’s cousin’ Sony, autistic but affectionate, is also working there to try to raise money (5000 dollars) to bail his mother out of prison. And Hai, pretending to his mother that he is off to attend medical school, is working because he needs to help dementia-stricken Grazina with expenses. There is even, touchingly, a ‘dishwasher girl’ who has no name, so self-effacing is she. Vuong writes of the camaraderie or fellowship thus: “These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other’s coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones. Theu, who owe each other nothing, but time, the hours collectively shouldered into a shift so that they might finish on time…” (p366). These long sentences are typical of Voung’s style, threading the reader swiftly through the details and nuances that he is such a master of.

If I have a very small criticism to make, it is that the novel is actually quite long, and a lot of the details don’t actually go anywhere, in the sense, they are not all picked up later in the story – some are, and some aren’t – some are just there to provide context. I read a blistering review of this book which called all this just ‘filler’. In Tom Crew’s (2025) “My Hands in My Face” London Review of Books, 47 (11), Crew complains that this book  is written with “bludgeoning inexactness”, “bloated with rhetoric”. I chuckled through this review; it is interesting to see just how goaded Crew was, how impatient he was rendered by Vuong’s style.

But for those of us who enjoy Vuong’s style, it is a thing of beauty in its originality and attention to detail. However, Crew is not entirely wrong about ‘filer’  midway through, it can feel as if you are in a swirl of details which don’t seem all that necessary, and I will admit I picked up the reading pace a little, speeding through some of the swirls and eddies, without losing the plotline for a moment. Beautiful as the details are, there were perhaps a few pages too many which detracted from the momentum and dropped the pace perhaps unnecessarily. But nothing a good editor couldn’t easily address to make this excellent novel even tighter and more focused. Also, given Hai is a drug addict, some of his mental wanderings and fantasies can be bewildering, as indeed probably the experience of being on a high may feel, but does not read particularly rivetingly.

All that said, the pace did pick back up after the slight mid-way dip, and the novel finished as strongly as it started. Our gentle, accepting drug-addicted, hapless but outstandingly caring and kind protagonist, Hai, was introduced to us in chapter 1, in a description bathed in resonance and melancholy,

“He was nineteen, in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light. He had not been forgiven and neither are you” (p7)

By the end of the book, Hai climbs into a dumpster

“To have your uselessness become a marker of time, waste being the proof of having lived at all. He had successfully thrown himself into the trash, and the act was so complete, so total, it felt clean. He was a container inside a container filled with containers contained by space – and somehow this made him full” (p392)

Hai finds meaning in the most futile of actions and places, redemption of sorts. Hai is so gentle that it is impossible not to love him, but he is so dismaying in being unable to rise above his circumstances, that we end up like his mother, willingly self-deluding about Hai’s potential because we hope against hope, hope against reality and evidence, and that continual  ambivalence of hope is, of course, Vuong’s point, that humans have this capacity which is both blessing and curse simultaneously.

It is a wonderful read, because Vuong has the gift of sharing his own unique worldview, and more, his own unique reading of the world’s texture, and conveying those sensations with marvellous precision and immediacy through text. None of Vuong’s books are easy reading, but I am always glad to be reading them, to be experiencing them, because each indeed is an experience. Quite wonderful, and may this exceptional author keep going from strength to strength as he has been doing.

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