OPINION: Ocean Vuong and the Emperor’s New Critics

Rishi Janakiraman reviews the Vuong controversy (and Eris's own recent takedown)

Since the release of Eris’s “[Vuong begins to cry]: The beginning of the end of Ocean Vuong,” the conversation about “the conversation” has continued without signs of stopping. I appreciated Rishi Janakiraman recent piece, which originally appeared on Eucalyptus Lit. He’s graciously offered permission to republish it as a useful overview and alternative perspective. Yap in the comments if you have your own take and weren’t one of the 400 who did it on the original post.—Sire

Whenever the literary community falls hard for one writer, you can set your watch to the contrarian backlash. Ocean Vuong’s rise—poetry darling to cultural figurehead, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to GQ photo spreads—was never going to be immune. You don’t get crowned “the last celebrity writer” without provoking someone’s desire to yank the crown off your head. And the past year has brought exactly that: a hard swing into takedown territory, where the prose of the review itself takes on a kind of punitive precision. Tom Crewe’s London Review of Books essay, “My Hands in My Face,” is one of the most conspicuous examples, and—unlike a hit job that would follow—it at least bothers to present the work closely, if also with the enthusiasm of a dentist pointing out every possible cavity.

Crewe’s piece is exhaustive in the way only someone slightly enjoying themselves can be. He rifles through Vuong’s works for every awkward metaphor, every mixed image, every sentence that, once pulled into the spotlight, wilts. And some of his choices are fair game. Vuong does have a tendency to treat each sentence as an objet d’art, polishing it until it gleams, sometimes until it blinds. In Vuong’s debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, that means scenes that might breathe on their own are instead perfumed and lit from seventeen angles, each one vying for your attention. This is a real weakness, one I’ll come back to. But what Crewe does, rather than isolate how and why this happens, is string together example after example until it feels like he’s trying to win a point-scoring contest. The relentlessness dulls his point. The review’s so weighted toward mockery of individual sentences that it forgets to interrogate how those sentences function in the architecture of the novel. I come away knowing Crewe’s taste in prose but not much about whether Vuong’s debut achieves what it sets out to do.

By contrast, Andrea Long Chu’s review of Vuong’s oeuvre takes his language apart with a scalpel instead of a club, all while retaining a generally positive impression of his sophomore novel, The Emperor of Gladness. Take her read on a line from Vuong’s poem “Not Even This”:

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for

love is Yêu.

And the word for weakness is Yếu.

How you say what you mean changes what you say.

Chu notes that the reader, “again presumptively white,” is meant to assume Vietnamese culture understands love and weakness as twin concepts, when in reality, yêu and yếu are just different words that happen to sound alike (comparing them to “live,” “laugh,” and “love”). The poignancy, she argues, depends on the reader’s ignorance of tonal languages. It's a sharp point, not just because it deflates the lyricism, but because it exposes how Vuong’s effect here rests on a projection of cultural mystique: an imagined audience and its blind spots. Chu’s criticism, unlike Crewe’s, is often tethered to intent. She’s explaining how Vuong wants it to land, and why it might not (at least, in this particular instance—Chu absolutely has her misses).

I think of criticism’s job as slowing the reader down long enough to see what’s actually on the page—how the sentences are built, how the scenes are arranged, what the book is trying to do and whether it manages to do it. Good criticism names the wager a work is making, reconstructs the terms by which that wager might succeed, and then tests the book against those terms; it clarifies the criteria before it judges, which is another way of saying it distinguishes between “what the book wants to be” and “what I wish the book were.” Andrea Long Chu’s review of The Emperor of Gladness does exactly this: she identifies Vuong’s wager (a genuinely plotted novel from a poet who previously relied on lyric drift), explains why that change matters, and then measures the book against it, showing both where the prose clears the new bar and where it trips over old habits. So-Mai Nguyen’s criticism in “Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility” is another example—she takes Vuong’s anecdote about his aunt and unpacks the cultural assumptions embedded in it, laying bare how the pathos depends on the reader’s ignorance. In both cases, the reader walks away with sharper tools for reading, not just a verdict.

Bad criticism skips the wager entirely and jumps straight to the verdict, often without making its standards clear. Tom Crewe’s LRB takedown at least engages with the text, but it’s almost entirely a litany of offending metaphors, with little sense of what Vuong’s larger project is or how those lines function within it. The sentences are treated as self-evidently bad, as though anyone who disagrees must be wrong, which means the piece can’t help you think about why you might disagree. Eris’ Substack essay takes this a step further by barely touching Vuong’s body of work; the book is a springboard for grievances about marketing, identity politics, and cultural mood shifts, with quotes from Vuong mostly serving as affirmations that he’s “just that bad.” Neither review gives you a clear framework for evaluating Vuong’s work on your own. They might leave you entertained, or convinced, or angry, but they won’t leave you better equipped to read.

I’d like to note that Eris’ essay likely isn’t meant to be taken as criticism (I don’t think any article subtitled “The beginning and end of [X author]” can be taken as having that purpose), but it still occupies an interesting place in Vuong discourse. It reads more like a cultural obituary, an attempt to narrativize the “vibe shift” as a moral inevitability: Vuong was a perfect darling for a particular moment—queer, Asian, refugee-adjacent, armed with a tender, trauma-tinged lyricism—and now the mood has changed, the market’s attention has drifted, and the crown will pass to someone else. The problem is that in casting itself as a postmortem, the piece dispenses with almost any attempt to autopsy the work itself. Eris doesn’t want to pick apart The Emperor of Gladness, but rather the set of cultural conditions that allowed Vuong to be lionized in the first place. That’s an interesting project if you announce it as such, but here it’s smuggled in under the guise of talking about Vuong himself and his work. Readers expecting engagement with plot, structure, voice, or even the internal logic of Vuong’s style are instead handed a series of cultural grievances.

Eris’ most glaring missteps are when the cultural diagnosis veers into sloppy argument. The claim that Vuong’s work is “politically useless” to his audience because Vietnamese-Americans skew Republican is a perfect example: it treats a voting demographic as a unified, static bloc, as if the politics of a diaspora community could invalidate the narrative of a single writer. It ignores the fact that Vuong is not, and does not claim to be, a demographic spokesperson—his fiction operates in the register of personal experience. The “Vietnamese Republicans” point lands as a gotcha only if you’ve already decided Vuong’s political and artistic worth rises and falls on how representative he is, which is a bad standard for art that I’d doubt any Vuong reader approaches his work with.

What’s left, then, is a portrait of Vuong as a kind of cultural convenience—”idpol slop” manufactured for “self-flagellating whiteys” and “bougie POCs”—rather than an artist working within a particular set of aesthetic and thematic concerns. That’s the most striking difference between this and something like Chu’s review: Chu treats Vuong as an agent, someone making deliberate artistic choices (flawed or not), while Eris treats him as a product. And when you reduce a writer to a product, the work becomes incidental; there’s no need to parse a metaphor or consider a character arc when the very fact of the book’s existence is the punchline.

This is why Eris’ piece, for all its flair and admittedly funny style, is relatively thin on the reread. It doesn’t help you understand why Vuong’s style polarizes, how his overreliance on beautification can both charm and exhaust, or where the new novel tries (and sometimes fails) to reconcile poetry’s compression with fiction’s expansiveness. And yet, in the larger literary discourse, Eris’ essay has a function: it represents a growing impatience with the cult of the literary darling, the suspicion that media saturation and identity optics outweigh the messier, less photogenic qualities of actual writing. After all, it’s published in Discordia Review, a magazine whose submission guidelines posture itself as “a secessionist movement” based on a growing suspicion that the modern literary scene is homogenous and idpol-centric. That suspicion has been hovering around Vuong for years; Eris just gave it a voice loud enough to drown out the quieter, more precise critics. The pity is that in doing so, they’ve ceded the opportunity to read him, to measure his work against its own wagers instead of against the shifting weather of cultural taste.

Rishi Janakiraman is a poet and essayist from Raleigh, NC whose work has been featured in Poetry Daily’s News column, The New York Times, and Rust + Moth, among others.

---

OBVIOUSLY RELATED