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On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is the first novel from the poet Ocean Vuong, a hybrid memoir and epistolary novel. It is narrated by Little Dog, a boy who shares a great deal with his author. The book is addressed to the narrator’s illiterate mother, whose education ended in the second grade after her Vietnamese elementary school collapsed in a napalm raid. The narrator knows it is unlikely that his mother will ever read this book, and while it is addressed to her, it feels more like a repository for the most intimate memories of Little Dog’s young life. It is a love letter that he is sharing with everyone except the person it is addressed to.
The narrative is quite fragmented, at different times Little Dog visits his childhood in Hartford, Connecticut, then looks back to his mother’s and grandmother’s memories of Vietnam, and sometimes looks forward to his adulthood in New York City. Little Dog’s childhood was spent in a small home in Hartford, which he shared with his mother, Rose, an overworked manicurist, and his grandmother, Lan, a schizophrenic woman who is in many ways his closest companion. Vuong does not shy away from describing the physical abuse suffered by Little Dog at the hands of his mother, writing, “You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I, which is why I can’t turn away from you.” He makes it clear however, that the physical abuse doesn’t stem from inherent cruelty, but from the body’s remembrance of war and violence. Little Dog’s mother was physically abused by her husband, and subject to the terrors of war in Vietnam, so violence is a lesson her body has learned over and over again.
Little Dog learns in talks with his grandmother about the life she led in Vietnam, how she fled an arranged marriage to a man three times her age. She was forced into prostitution at the age of 17, forced to have sex with the visiting American GI’s as a mode of survival. She does not remember the identity of her second child, Rose’s, father. Events like fireworks or local shootings trigger vivid memories of her life in Vietnam, and even her schizophrenia-addled brain has held on to the violence of her youth.
The novel is in many ways about survival, about the sacrifice’s of Little Dog’s mother and grandmother to give him life and the language to articulate himself. The traumas of war in Vietnam and oppression in America have made indelible marks upon the bodies and souls of Lan and Rose, who live perpetually in survival mode. Vuong writes, “Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence — but rather, that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
The middle chunk of this novel is the coming-of-age and into romance and desire plot. Vuong explores the fraught relationship between Little Dog and a white boy named Trevor, whom he met at his summer job picking tobacco. Trevor lives with his alcoholic father in a trailer park, and has been addicted to opioids since he was prescribed painkillers for an injury at the age of 15. Trevor is Little Dog’s first love, and although he never uses the word love, if one reads love as a mutual sheltering from the storm, than this is it. Through his relationship with Trevor, Little Dog develops a conception of the fraught natures of desire and identity, how race and sexuality intersect and repel. He becomes aware of his desire to be desired, and his desire to be destroyed. As Trevor’s addiction and desire to escape becomes increasingly serious, the relationship fractures, a process that is finalized by Trevor’s premature death from overdose, an event that was not unusual in Little Dog’s circle of acquaintances.
Vuong lends his poetic sensibilities to this novel full of loss—of Trevor, of Lan, of Little Dog’s innocence—in ways that truly move the reader’s soul. There is such a luminescence lent to the narrator’s recollections that are at once heavy and gorgeous, so that the novel never feels overbearing. This is a novel from one of our greatest poets and it really reads like one, rendering the most essential of human truths in masterfully crafted and musical prose. It crosses the borders between language, identity, and memory in ways that feel like a reinvention of the novel as a form.