In a moving new narrative, Ocean Vuong redefines what it means to write an American novel.

The follow-up to his first prose endeavor – the heralded 2019 novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” – “The Emperor of Gladness,” released May 13, marks Vuong’s first formal prose effort. “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a poetry-laden epistolary novel told from the point of view of an authorial stand-in named Little Dog, represented an in-between of literary forms for Vuong, a poet. In “The Emperor of Gladness,” however, he takes a different direction. Beyond the obvious development – “The Emperor of Gladness” clocks in at over 400 pages, nearly doubling his prior novel – the work’s sense of time and place feels especially fixed, set in the atmospheric fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut.

The plot revolves around an initial chance encounter. Standing on the edge of a bridge, 19-year-old Hai (another Vuong stand-in) contemplates jumping into the freezing Connecticut water below when he hears a voice call from the riverbank. The voice belongs to Grazina, an 82-year-old Lithuanian widow suffering from dementia. Over the course of the novel, the two form a poignant, emotional relationship as Hai becomes Grazina’s de facto caregiver. Like “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a conventional plot seldom exists, perhaps reflective of Hai’s own purgatory. Instead, Vuong’s transcendent writing follows Hai’s quiet months with Grazina as he continues to evade his mother, to whom he lied about being at medical school in Boston.

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However, the novel’s scope expands tenfold beyond the confines of Grazina’s derelict house when Hai takes a job at East Gladness’ HomeMarket (a parody of the regional fast-food chain Boston Market). There, he works alongside a motley crew of East Gladness residents, each with their own storied pasts: Maureen, a mother grieving the loss of her child; Russia, a high-school dropout; and Sony, Hai’s young cousin coping with his mother’s incarceration. Through this dynamic cast, Vuong builds atop the foundational theme of chosen family first laid in Hai’s relationship with Grazina.

The verdict is this: “The Emperor of Gladness” is Vuong’s best yet. Beyond its bold advancement in narrative – while remaining intensely self-reflexive by means of unrestrained prose – Vuong finally lets his words unfurl upon the world they are so used to acutely compressing. This breathing room provides some of the novel’s best features – most starkly is the novel’s humor. The narrative’s expanded cast of characters – each one representative of a different facet of American malaise – provide much authorial space for Vuong to insert his own comedic anecdotes from his time working at a fast-food restaurant in rural Connecticut. For example, Hai’s gruff boss often uses vulgar language to impart innocuously kind wisdom – a maxim potentially revealing of Vuong’s ethos of love.

Then there is the matter of subject. Drawing from his own experience as an immigrant with an illiterate mother, Vuong’s prose is as quiet as it is full of life, haunting as it is exacting. Once again, Vuong’s personal history growing up with such circumstances in Connecticut and his narratively-rich New England terrain fuse with one another to produce a raw, incandescent result. There is such pain and hardship that all of Vuong’s characters – particularly Hai – face, a burden of American life that feels both contemporary and timeless. It is for this reason that “The Emperor of Gladness” – intentionally or not – grabs hold of the Great American Novel’s limits and stretches them, making room for foundational changes in the American experience since the days of Mark Twain and William Faulkner.

In this, there is an almost mythic but undeniably grandiose scope to Vuong’s uniquely American novel, tackling contemporary American phenomena: the diasporic experience, opioid epidemics, fast-food jobs and the endurance that binds them. In fact, the first chapter of “The Emperor of Gladness” identically mirrors the famous environmental prelude of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”: “Beyond the graveyard whose stones have lost their names to years, there’s a covered bridge laid over a dried‑up brook whose memory of water never reached this century.” What truly binds Vuong’s writing to the American canon, however, is his theory of love.

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In her ostensibly cruel takedown of novelist-editor Hanya Yanagihara’s 2022 novel “To Paradise,” critic Andrea Long Chu outlined the underlying precondition of Yanagihara’s works: that true love is only born of misery. The characters of Yanagihara, another recently cemented figure in the contemporary American canon, are maimed, infected with disease and abused – yet across these pains, they are united in their consequent production of terminal, saccharine love. But in “The Emperor of Gladness,” Vuong presents an alternative hypothesis: What if true love supersedes misery? This theory has informed all of his writing and rears its brutally realistic head in “The Emperor of Gladness.” In recent interviews, he has even made this vector of love explicit, stating that he “realized writing was not writing a respectable email to get a job. It was a medium of understanding suffering.”

Indeed, misery permeates through every one of the novel’s characters: Each is running from something, trying to forget something or trying to remember something. But from each suffering emerges a kind of budding tenderness, distinct from Yanagihara’s palliative love. For Vuong, love is a survival instinct, a gene passed down generationally. It is what keeps his characters going – but more apparently, perhaps, it is what he lives for.

Although it may not always be so gleeful, “The Emperor of Gladness” cements itself as the quiet triumph of Vuong’s bibliography.