Review for On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong: The Hidden Clarity

Welcome back to Stephanie Writes and happy Tuesday! I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed my previous two posts and hope you’re good and ready for the next one because she’s a heavy one today, folks. This week, I’d like to write a bit about Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, written in epistolary (letter) format; Little Dog writes a long letter to his mother, Rose.

Upon searching different reviews to situate myself into this space of giving my own opinion, I was ecstatic to find that most of the ratings were between four and five stars. But having the curious mind I do, I wondered how someone could fathom giving this exceptional piece of literature a one-star review and was a little taken aback from what these reviews contained. Now, let me tell you something right here on this day. I’m about to blow your mind. Are you ready?

Literature does not have to follow the basic intro, middle, climax, and conclusion pattern that you were taught in the third grade and often doesn’t when written in an epistolary format. Further, authors certainly do not have to think of their audience throughout the entire writing process. I actually enjoy it more when I can see an author being authentically themselves, without bounds, which is, I think, exactly what Vuong does.

Here, in this novel, is an extraordinary understanding of an incredible amount of painful narratives. There are multiple storylines that intersect at different moments, like that of his early youth with his mother, grandmother, and father. He also delves beyond himself into his grandmother’s history with the Vietnam War. He attempts to understand the poverty he has been tied to for most of his life. There is a certain bildungsroman element to this novel that aids in his process of understanding his sexual identity, of which he uses sex as a language to explain. There are constant language barriers and, in a way, this novel is entirely revolved around language as he knows his mother will never be able to read the English words. To put it bluntly, this novel is not large, but certainly contains multitudes.

Vuong uses poetic, intense, clear language to describe the indescribable or the too much. There are these wonderful little nuggets of beautiful phrasing placed throughout that have such a clear surface level meaning, but an impossibility of understanding; much like trauma. He has managed to put these feelings into words that we can feel, deeply, but cannot follow to their ends.

I think perhaps, though, my favourite element of this novel is the network, or mapping, Vuong has woven into the pages. The word I kept repeating in the margins (yes I write in margins don’t come for me) was return. I will give you one example and then swiftly move on so as to not spoil your (hopeful) future reading. Part way through the novel, Little Dog and his mother, Rose, open the nail salon she works at on a Sunday morning. Not long after, a woman comes in for a pedicure and the two workers (and reader) soon find out that she is an amputee that has at some point lost her right leg from the knee down. Rose continues the pedicure in a deeply powerful moment that I will allow you to experience for yourself, but the important part comes awhile later. Little Dog and his partner are listening to his partner’s grandfather tell a hunting story. He notes how he caught a moose in his snare, and it clamped the moose’s leg off, creating another amputee. It makes you go back to that beautiful moment with Rose and the nail salon amputee to question the significance of the return.

The novel is all like this. It makes you return, question, and reflect. Often, I would stop reading in the middle of a page and simply consider the work that this novel does not only for the narrative in the novel, but for my own as well. I suppose that’s why the coded homophobic language in the one star reviews of “too purple” or “excessively sentimental” was so bothersome to me. It may also be why this review runs the risk of sounding like a rant, however, I did promise you authenticity!

Holistically, this is perhaps one of the most powerful novels I have read for my classes thus far and I highly recommend it for any who would like to read it!

If it wasn’t obvious, my personal rating (as I still hardly feel qualified to give any at all) is five out five.