A Heaven Made of Corn Cake
To live in America in the 21st century is to be an unwilling connoisseur of fictions. We live inside the grand narratives of national destiny, the smaller but more potent fictions of the market, and the intimate, life-sustaining lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. We are told that hard work guarantees dignity, that the past is past, and that happiness is a consumable good. Few writers understand this landscape of necessary delusion better than Ocean Vuong. His earlier work, particularly the novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, established him as a poet of exquisite vulnerability, a chronicler of the body broken by history and salvaged by language. With The Emperor of Gladness, Vuong graduates from elegist to architect, constructing a world not merely haunted by its past but actively, ingeniously, and often absurdly reinvented by its inhabitants. The novel is set in the fictional husk of East Gladness, a New England town that serves as a microcosm of post-industrial American decay, a place where “Nothing stops here but us, really.” Yet, this is not another bleak entry into the canon of Rust Belt realism. Instead, Vuong poses a far more radical question: in a world where reality is a relentless assault of systemic failure, historical trauma, and economic precarity, is the creation of a beautiful, intricate lie not the most profound act of survival? Is the emperor of this crumbling gladness not a person, but delusion itself?
The Geography of Aftermath
To understand The Emperor of Gladness, one must first understand its setting not as a backdrop, but as a primary character. East Gladness is a town built on the sediment of forgotten histories and failed promises. It is a place named for a gladness that “being no more, renamed to Millsap nearly a century ago after Tony Millsap, the boy who returned from the Great War with no limbs.” This foundational irony—a town named for a hero defined by his loss—echoes through every facet of its existence. Vuong’s prose, lyrical and devastatingly precise, renders East Gladness as a palimpsest of American decline. We see the remnants of Puritan rebellion in the name of King Philip’s Bridge, the industrial revolution in the defunct Colt factory repurposed into a Coca-Cola plant, and the slow-motion collapse of the working class in the shuttered sugar shacks and the HomeMarket, a fast-casual chain that serves as the novel’s ersatz town square.
This is the world inhabited by Hai, a nineteen-year-old Vietnamese American boy who we meet as he is about to jump off that very bridge, “in the midnight of his childhood and a lifetime from first light.” His suicide attempt is thwarted not by a grand intervention, but by the absurdly mundane sight of what he mistakes for a floating corpse but is actually an old woman’s bedsheet. This woman, Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant haunted by the ghosts of World War II and battling dementia, pulls him into her orbit. Their relationship forms the novel’s core, a strange, symbiotic codependency built on a shared need to rewrite their respective realities. Hai becomes “Sergeant Pepper,” an American soldier in Grazina’s fractured, war-torn memories, while she becomes the unlikely anchor in his rudderless present. Their shared life at 16 Hubbard Street, a dilapidated house on a toxic riverbank, becomes a theater where the past is not merely remembered but actively reenacted, re-scripted, and ultimately, survived. Vuong positions this narrative not in dialogue with the grand tradition of the immigrant saga of upward mobility, but as its shadow self: the story of being stuck, of making a home not in America’s dream but in its ruins.
The Architecture of Deceit
The first and most crucial pillar of Vuong’s novel is its exploration of fabrication as a fundamental tool of existence. The characters in The Emperor of Gladness are not merely liars; they are architects of entire realities, constructing elaborate, interlocking fictions to shield themselves from the unbearable truths of their lives. This is not casual deceit, but a full-time, world-building enterprise. The most profound example is Hai’s relationship with his mother. To give her hope after he drops out of college in New York, he invents a new life for himself as a medical student at Harvard. This lie becomes a monumental performance, maintained through clandestine phone calls from a rehab center he pretends is a university library. “It’s amazing,” he tells her, describing a fictional campus green where “future doctors” play Frisbee, a vision of wholesome American success he knows she craves. The lie is a gift, a carefully crafted narrative that allows his mother to believe her sacrifices have borne fruit. When she speaks of him to her clients at the nail salon, she points to a clipped-out photo of the Harvard Divinity School’s bell tower, a sacred image sanctifying a secular hope. This fiction is not a betrayal but a form of care, a way to manage his mother’s pain by creating a parallel universe where her son is whole and successful.
This architectural impulse is mirrored in nearly every character. Grazina, in the fog of her dementia, recasts Hai as “Sergeant Pepper,” a soldier from World War II. Their shared life becomes a “theater they made of her memories,” conducting mock gunfights under the dining room table and transforming her bathtub into a military jeep bound for Gettysburg. This shared delusion is not a symptom of her illness to be managed, but the very medium of their connection. It allows Hai to enter her fractured past and offer a form of comfort that reality cannot. He doesn’t correct her; he collaborates with her. Similarly, Aunt Kim, locked away in York Corrections, perpetuates the fiction that her deceased ex-husband is alive and well in Vermont, writing letters to her son, Sony, in his father’s name. For Sony, who knows the truth of his father’s death, these letters are a tangible link to a past he refuses to relinquish. He tells Hai, “I knew it was my mom the whole time… But then, at three in the morning, I’d read them again… and pretend they were really his.” The lie becomes a ritual, a willed suspension of disbelief that provides solace where truth offers only absence. Vuong argues that these fictions are not escapes from life, but the very scaffoldings that make life possible.
The Haunting of HomeMarket
The second pillar of the novel is its profound engagement with history, not as a static backdrop but as an active, spectral force. The characters are not just products of their pasts; they are perpetually in conversation with ghosts. East Gladness itself is a haunted landscape, where “even the ghosts agree” that it’s a beautiful place to linger. These are the literal ghosts of forgotten Algonquin tribes and the metaphorical ghosts of deindustrialization. This haunting, however, is most potent on the personal level. Hai is relentlessly pursued by the memory of his friend Noah, another casualty of the opioid crisis that stalks their generation. Noah’s old UPS jacket, which Hai wears like a second skin, is a tangible piece of the past, a relic that both comforts and suffocates him. When Hai finally tells Grazina about him, he frames it as a story of two soldiers, recasting their teenage wanderings as a wartime brotherhood. History, for Hai, is a wound that never closes, and his only recourse is to re-narrate it, to place it within a fiction he can control.
This dialogue with the dead extends across generations and cultures. Grazina’s dementia is not just a neurological decay but a chronological collapse, forcing her back into the traumas of her escape from war-torn Lithuania. Her brother Kristof, lost in the rubble of a bombed village, is as real to her as the kitchen table. Her fabricated history of a heroic lover, Filip Lucas, a resistance fighter who died for his country, is a narrative she constructs to give meaning to her survival and to bestow a more noble lineage upon her disappointing son. History, in Vuong’s hands, is a raw, unstable element. It is actively shaped by memory’s fallibility and desire’s insistence. Sony’s obsession with the American Civil War is another manifestation of this. He clings to the “truths” of history—the tactics of generals, the outcomes of battles—as a way to order a chaotic world. He sees his own family’s narrative, that of Southern Vietnamese refugees who “lost their war in the South,” as an echo of the Confederacy’s defeat. For him, history is a pattern, a recurring tragedy, and by understanding its mechanics, he hopes to understand his own place within it. Vuong suggests that we are all, in a sense, historical reenactors, playing out scripts written long before we were born. The ghosts are not just in the past; they are at the dinner table, in the driver’s seat, and whispering in our ear.
The Kitsch of Salvation
Perhaps the most radical and insightful pillar of The Emperor of Gladness is its location of grace within the absurd, the corporate, and the kitsch. In a literary landscape often obsessed with an austere, high-minded form of authenticity, Vuong makes a powerful case for salvation found in the most unlikely of places: a fast-casual restaurant chain. The HomeMarket is the novel’s beating heart, a place that is both a symbol of corporate homogeneity and a genuine site of community and meaning. The manager, BJ, a queer Black woman with pro-wrestling aspirations, delivers impassioned monologues about their mission: “We turn food into feeling,” she declares. This is, of course, corporate jargon, but Vuong shows us how the employees, and BJ herself, earnestly believe it. The food is pre-packaged, reheated mush, yet it provides real comfort to the lonely and overworked populace of East Gladness.
The novel is filled with these moments of sublime absurdity. BJ’s disastrous wrestling debut as “Deez Nuts,” complete with her coworker Maureen playing a bluegrass banjo, is both a comic failure and a moment of profound communal effort and vulnerability. When the crew finds a homeless man freezing to death outside the store, they bring him in and feed him BJ’s secret-recipe corn bread. The man, tasting it, says, “Wow, this is amazing,” and in that moment, the corporate fiction becomes true. The corn bread, which Maureen reveals is just standard mix with vanilla cake batter added, is a lie. But it is a delicious lie, a “narcotic” that brings genuine pleasure. The lie, Vuong suggests, is in the alchemy. It’s not about the ingredients, but about the intention and the effect. Even the novel’s most tender romantic encounter occurs in a Motel 6, where Hai connects with Tom, the mechanic with a missing ear he’d seen at HomeMarket. Their connection is fleeting, anonymous, yet deeply human. In these spaces—the fast-food joint, the dive bar wrestling ring, the cheap motel—Vuong locates a form of secular grace. He rejects the notion that meaning must be found in rarefied, intellectual spaces. Instead, he argues that it is forged in the shared, often clumsy, and deeply imperfect experience of trying to get by, of finding beauty in a Fluffernutter sandwich or transcendence in a perfectly roasted chicken.
The Emperor’s New Clothes Are Real
Herein lies the novel’s most provocative and vital argument: The Emperor of Gladness is a radical defense of willed delusion as a necessary, and perhaps the only, moral response to an immoral world. The book’s title, taken from a line in Hamlet—“Your worm is your only emperor for diet”—initially suggests a nihilistic vision where death and decay are the ultimate rulers. But Vuong inverts this. The true emperor of this world is not the worm, but the gladness—however artificial, however constructed—that holds the worm at bay. The characters who thrive, or at least survive, are not those who face reality head-on, but those who are most adept at building and inhabiting alternative ones.
This is not a simple celebration of escapism. The fictions in the novel are not frivolous fantasies; they are complex, high-stakes projects of psychological engineering. Hai’s lie to his mother is not just about avoiding disappointment; it is about actively producing her happiness. Grazina’s regression into her wartime past is not a passive decay; it is an active, imaginative space where she can process trauma and where Hai can perform a version of masculinity and care that is otherwise unavailable to him. When BJ transforms her role as a fast-food manager into that of a “general” leading her “troops,” she is not just coping; she is investing her labor with a dignity and purpose that her minimum-wage salary denies her. These are not people who are fooled by their own lies. They are, like Sony reading his mother’s letters, consciously choosing to “go along with it” because the fiction is more livable than the truth.
Vuong challenges the reader to reconsider the virtue of authenticity. In a world defined by systemic injustice—the opioid epidemic, the prison-industrial complex, the failures of the mental health system, the precarity of labor—what is the value of being “true” to a reality that is itself a violent fiction? The novel suggests that the most authentic act is to reject that reality and build a better one, even if it is built from the scraps of corporate slogans, historical dramas, and outright lies. The emperor’s new clothes, in Vuong’s universe, are not only visible but are also warmer and more beautiful than anything the “real” world has to offer. The characters are not mad; they are insurgents of the imagination, waging a quiet, desperate war against the tyranny of the real.
A Shovel for the Living
While set in the first decade of the 2000s, The Emperor of Gladness resonates with a startling, almost prophetic, urgency in our current moment. It is a novel for the age of “alternative facts” and curated online identities, but it approaches this theme not with cynical despair but with a deep, aching empathy. It asks us to see the human need behind the fabrication. In an era where the American Dream has been exposed for many as the ultimate cruel fiction, the novel’s characters offer a blueprint for a different kind of dreaming—smaller, more personal, and infinitely more adaptable. The opioid crisis, which forms the tragic background hum of the narrative, is rendered not as a headline but as a landscape of personal loss, a field of ghosts like Noah that the living must carry. The book speaks directly to the gig-economy generation, to those who understand the exhausting labor of performing a persona—for a customer, for a social media feed, for one’s own survival.
This is not a book for the faint of heart, nor for those who seek easy resolutions. Its ideal reader is one who is willing to sit with discomfort, to embrace ambiguity, and to find beauty in the broken. It is for the reader who understands that sometimes the most profound love stories are not romantic, but are forged in the strange, messy crucible of codependency and shared survival. It is for anyone who has ever felt that the story of their life was not quite the right fit, and has been tempted to write a new one. Vuong offers not a recommendation, but a recognition. He holds a mirror up to a fractured America and shows us not our ruin, but our astonishing, heartbreaking, and endlessly creative resilience.
The Taste of a Lie
In the end, The Emperor of Gladness is a novel about the stories we tell to stay alive. It is a book of profound contradictions: it is both deeply sad and riotously funny, lyrical and raw, a critique of America and a testament to the strange beauty of its forgotten corners. Vuong’s achievement is not just in his masterful prose, which remains as luminous and precise as ever, but in his philosophical bravery. He dares to suggest that our fictions are not our failings, but our greatest creations. The novel’s ultimate value lies in its radical empathy, its willingness to see the heroic in the absurd, the sacred in the profane. It is a book that doesn’t offer answers, but instead deepens the questions, forcing us to confront the fictions that scaffold our own lives. Hai, sitting in a dumpster at the end of the novel, finds a moment of grace while lying on the discarded refuse of his town, realizing, “To discard is to move on. Inside the dumpster, he was pressed on all sides by human forwardness.” That is the novel’s enduring legacy: the understanding that even in the trash, in the lies, in the failures, there is the undeniable, relentless, and beautifully human impulse to go on. Vuong has not written a happy book, but he has written one that, against all odds, argues for the possibility of gladness, even if we must build its kingdom ourselves, one beautiful, necessary lie at a time.
