I read this review in dialogue with Tom Crewe’s review in the London Review of Books, which provided plenty of concrete examples abt the quality of the prose. This review appears to expand, or contextualize, that criticism in terms of the current political and cultural moment. The negative comments here don’t seem to realize this context, and feel that it’s a random ad hominem attack on Vuong himself.
This comment effectively responds to most of my critics so saves me the time of replying to them myself (though the flood of hate mail has already receded by this point). They are largely the same cultural class of idpol slop consumers I called out in the piece, and I largely don't blame them for being offended as, if Vuong is a fraud, it delegitimizes the guilt-exonerating flattery they received for patronizing his work
Very much feel the frustration as an Indigenous writer myself with "racialized" or "ethnic" lit mostly being for white people to read and feel good about themselves. I've had friends in publishing tell me that this is a combination between the fact that those obviously sell better (white majority = more sales, so making accessible to that audience is essential) and also major shifts over the last thirty years that have led to an overwhelming number of positions in the process being held by "well-meaning" white liberal women, who, while wanting to "uplift voices," are unaware of their own susceptibility to largely accepting racialized/ethnic literature that, while sounding "authentic," is predicted on their own comforts and expectations of those communities. Almost every major Indigenous Canadian writer of my generation, for instance, is gay, which feels like a pretty perplexing preoccupation, probably rooted in some chauvinistic ideas, whether consciously or subconsciously held, about Indigenous cultural attitudes and an idea that Indigineity is traditionally "queer" in some respect.
I go back and forth myself. I've gotten flak in comments sections both FOR doing it sometimes and then for NOT doing it other times-- generally I lean toward it because I think races and ethnicities should probably be capitalized (although I also think this extends to capitalizing the W in white). There's some reason for the capitalization that people would probably tell you that derives from some sense of racial justice, but I ultimately think it's pretty petty to put all that down onto a capitalization choice. Feels a bit like saying "unhoused" or something, feels like an impotent gesture.
Me, too. Have no idea. But I know that the haters will save the art world because they care about it more than it seems. No one loves works of art more than their critics, even if they trash it.
To be fair to said magazine, I had a pleasant professional interaction with the editor, who accepted the initial negative piece, then edited it. Why he then ghosted remains a mystery. No explanation was ever given.
That's a good instinct. The natural tendency for the pendulum to return after a writer/movement/style has become overly ubiquitous tends to gather a bit too much force on the backswing and things get smashed that probably shouldn't. With that said, it did feel like there was such a rush to corronate Vuong as a great novelist that his publishers, peers etc. failed to edit him as they should have. He's a good poet, but fiction is a distinct skill, and his writing feels unrefined (in a pejorative sense). Bookforum's piece on his last novel was referred to me by a friend today, and it does a nice job of picking out the technical issues in Vuong's writing that, over the course of the novel, amount to a serious failure of craft: the fact so many writers and critics in the initial press blitz were willing to give him the pass on grounds of apparent genius has contributed to the ferocity of the correction in my opinion. Whether or not it's true, when it feels like there has been some collusion to make a flawed writer blow up, people tend to sharpen their knives.
Never liked Vuong's poetry, HATE his prose, despise the attitude of weepy self-lyricizing. And yet every person gleefully proclaiming his demise past the first couple of stellar negative reviews reads to me as ugly, boring, and hemmed in by an inability to rise above trending culture wars (if I'm being generous and not just seeing it as opportunism). You're absolutely right of course, and I'm trying to remind myself of that to be more sober-minded about it all. But I fear my hatred of bad diaspora culture is matched pound for pound when I see proponents of liberal high culture (and some overeager leftists who think being sentimental and annoying is the worst crime of all) gleefully rub their hands over every diaspora celebrity’s downfall while contributing very little originality to the discourse.
The cultural conditions have aligned such that Vuong is in such a position, which is part of the thesis of the post. But, as my colleague @Sire put it above, the conditions which rushed Vuong to his position in the culture were just as rash. You can distrust the people who "turn" (though I was never personally on his side), but I wouldn't distrust the "moment," the moment is genuine.
Agree. While there's much about Vuong's image that is bogus (the crying in interviews, the convenient deep affinity with whatever capitalist behemoth will prop him up - see Oprah, Starbucks) I actually thought The Emperor of Gladness was a step forward for him as a novelist, and thought it was much more successful than OEWBG - the turning seems more due to the vibe shift and perhaps a bit of resentment towards the Last Big Novelist Standing than anything about the work itself. Lack of knowledge of the history of the form I v irritating tho.
Watch his video talking about Oprah and what that program meant for his mom and the other illiterate immigrant women she worked with. Enough with the classism.
I have watched that video. And initially I was very moved by it, but then I saw a number of other interviews in which he behaved in a very similar way, to the point that I felt that he was recycling a schtick. Which... unsurprising, he's building a brand, but a healthy amount of scepticism doesn't make me classist.
this was an excellent piece! i found it incredibly strange at university (i studied creative writing) when we were taught to avoid ‘overwriting’ and yet vuong was on the syllabus. his work always left a bad taste in my mouth and now i feel vindicated.
What makes you think that I, or any other of his critics, ‘turned’? Vuong just published a book, and threatens to continue, a prospect that many readers of his first book are trying to forestall. Why? Because the cultural landscape, like any earthly one, has only so much room, and cluttering it with work of this vacuousness is like throwing empty cereal cartons on a beautiful green field.
I mean that ties into one of the things the "why can't you be nice and let people enjoy things???" crowd never seems to understand, which is that when work like Vuong's goes on to encourage a cultural landscape that promotes more of the same. It's reasonable to be mad about that.
You’re a hater. Why can’t we just celebrate mainstream success of a POC writer while recognizing they are also human and flawed? And what gives you the right to dictate what is art? I hated reading this…
I don't like Vuong's writing really at all, for about the same reasons you don't. But your reasons as for why he has been compelling to so many people are, I think, incomplete, and even ungenerous. I know multiple asian-american people who aren't 'bougie' who really like Vuong's writing: I think much more because it recreates (and probably amplifies) certain problems that they've faced, than because it satisfies their desire to like, have a more authentically tragic childhood or whatever.
I also think that Vuong has a real eye for compelling images despite how annoying his writing is in getting it all across. The tough-talking straight-passing boy in the army helmet and the summer heat picking tobacco who falls in love with you is, if nothing else, a perfect gay teenage fantasy right?
And in fact a lot of different aspects of Vuong's life are just, like, *interesting*, right? Strong, vocal personalities with fraught and intense relationships to one another. Even in the plainest language (like that of a memoirist without literary ambitions whatsoever), I think the story could be read and appreciated. It would be striking to hear told to you over the course of a very long conversation at a party: a memorable and seriously lovely night, can't you imagine it? Vuong does a quite competent job recognizing and emphasizing the most 'interesting' parts of his life, too.
My point is, I guess, that liking or even loving Vuong's work, even if it might make one a bit of a philistine, is not a reflection of, like, an incomplete or crass relationship to one's own racial identity, some deformation in your character. Some people want quite different things out of books than 'literary types', and literary types can be quite awful at predicting what those wanted things are.
The description you pulled of making the bed (dandelions) made me laugh; a couple years ago, when I was gathering my thoughts around On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I couldn’t get past his ridiculous description of a Jolly Rancher.
I really struggle to connect with Vuong’s writing but I find myself trying really hard to like him because he seems so kind and I generally want him to succeed. Which may be why other people have lifted him up. I also fear backlash around him because if we start turning on a writer for being too soft, too empathetic, too flowery, I worry about a swing to the right, as with politics, where we find ourselves back in the aughts. Which was admittedly a more fun time, but it could also be a cruel time and required some backbone.
I'm hesitant to get into an actual debate about this considering how bad your home was, but do you really think authors should only write for their own ethnic groups? What exactly would writing for a Vietnamese audience look like?
Many people enjoy eating at PF Chang. Just not many Chinese people. It doesn’t mean the food is bad.
I think it’s very difficult to write for a Vietnamese audience using English. There are cultural meanings built into the Vietnamese language that has no English equivalent. How I think and talk to myself in Vietnamese is different from how I think and talk to myself in English.
Vietnamese readers instantly recognize the inauthenticity in the characters of Nguyen and Voung’s novels. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. Authenticity may not even the goal of the authors. The goal is to sell books.
The people I spoke with simply said they liked his books, mentioning his book of poetry and On Earth. This was in 2023. It wasn't a critical conversation about literature from the diaspora, just people trying to connect with me.
I'm Vietnamese-American and a lot of my Vietnamese-American friends enjoy his work. I haven't had a chance to read this new book, but I personally enjoyed his experimentation with language in On Earth and related to the character a lot, especially his relationship with his mother. I haven't read his book of poetry.
His experiments with English doesn’t really match how a Vietnamese speaker plays with language in my opinion. For one, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language. Alliteration, metaphors and double entendres are much more prevalent.
I was speaking more generally on his experimentation with English prose.
I believe in interviews he has said that he's fluent in Vietnamese, but I question to what degree. I get the sense that he can comfortably speak Vietnamese with people he knows, but wouldn't be able to do an interview or something that demands conveying complex information with extreme clarity in Vietnamese. That's one reason I don't have expectations that he would try adopting Vietnamese wordplay to English, but I also don't think a Vietnamese-American writer has to do that.
I can understand why someone might develop those expectations since he ruminates quite a bit on language and the differences between Vietnamese and English, though some of his commentary seem rather naive and childlike. Some of it reminded me of me as a kid, amused that má and ma were differentiated only by a little tone mark. These linguistic asides didn't take much, if anything, away from my overall enjoyment of his work.
I read this review in dialogue with Tom Crewe’s review in the London Review of Books, which provided plenty of concrete examples abt the quality of the prose. This review appears to expand, or contextualize, that criticism in terms of the current political and cultural moment. The negative comments here don’t seem to realize this context, and feel that it’s a random ad hominem attack on Vuong himself.
This comment effectively responds to most of my critics so saves me the time of replying to them myself (though the flood of hate mail has already receded by this point). They are largely the same cultural class of idpol slop consumers I called out in the piece, and I largely don't blame them for being offended as, if Vuong is a fraud, it delegitimizes the guilt-exonerating flattery they received for patronizing his work
Very much feel the frustration as an Indigenous writer myself with "racialized" or "ethnic" lit mostly being for white people to read and feel good about themselves. I've had friends in publishing tell me that this is a combination between the fact that those obviously sell better (white majority = more sales, so making accessible to that audience is essential) and also major shifts over the last thirty years that have led to an overwhelming number of positions in the process being held by "well-meaning" white liberal women, who, while wanting to "uplift voices," are unaware of their own susceptibility to largely accepting racialized/ethnic literature that, while sounding "authentic," is predicted on their own comforts and expectations of those communities. Almost every major Indigenous Canadian writer of my generation, for instance, is gay, which feels like a pretty perplexing preoccupation, probably rooted in some chauvinistic ideas, whether consciously or subconsciously held, about Indigenous cultural attitudes and an idea that Indigineity is traditionally "queer" in some respect.
I go back and forth myself. I've gotten flak in comments sections both FOR doing it sometimes and then for NOT doing it other times-- generally I lean toward it because I think races and ethnicities should probably be capitalized (although I also think this extends to capitalizing the W in white). There's some reason for the capitalization that people would probably tell you that derives from some sense of racial justice, but I ultimately think it's pretty petty to put all that down onto a capitalization choice. Feels a bit like saying "unhoused" or something, feels like an impotent gesture.
Me, too. Have no idea. But I know that the haters will save the art world because they care about it more than it seems. No one loves works of art more than their critics, even if they trash it.
May I ask why you would not look Ocean up?
Autofiction is the influencer culture of the art world
I think this is a naive and unfair position.
If you want a deeper analysis then check out a short piece I wrote : https://open.substack.com/pub/chiccritique/p/autofiction-is-a-grave?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=69i4wf
To be fair to said magazine, I had a pleasant professional interaction with the editor, who accepted the initial negative piece, then edited it. Why he then ghosted remains a mystery. No explanation was ever given.
This is why I can never write a book 😂
Is a bullet without a body still a song without ears when it ends your whole career? Goddamn
Also, is this how I have to find out M. John Harrison is sundowning? What the fuck man
Preach. Also ...
your cringe excerpted prose>>>Ocean Vuong's cringe excerpt
I really, really distrust these moments when everyone turns on a writer at the same time
That's a good instinct. The natural tendency for the pendulum to return after a writer/movement/style has become overly ubiquitous tends to gather a bit too much force on the backswing and things get smashed that probably shouldn't. With that said, it did feel like there was such a rush to corronate Vuong as a great novelist that his publishers, peers etc. failed to edit him as they should have. He's a good poet, but fiction is a distinct skill, and his writing feels unrefined (in a pejorative sense). Bookforum's piece on his last novel was referred to me by a friend today, and it does a nice job of picking out the technical issues in Vuong's writing that, over the course of the novel, amount to a serious failure of craft: the fact so many writers and critics in the initial press blitz were willing to give him the pass on grounds of apparent genius has contributed to the ferocity of the correction in my opinion. Whether or not it's true, when it feels like there has been some collusion to make a flawed writer blow up, people tend to sharpen their knives.
https://www.bookforum.com/fiction/states-of-grace-62313
Never liked Vuong's poetry, HATE his prose, despise the attitude of weepy self-lyricizing. And yet every person gleefully proclaiming his demise past the first couple of stellar negative reviews reads to me as ugly, boring, and hemmed in by an inability to rise above trending culture wars (if I'm being generous and not just seeing it as opportunism). You're absolutely right of course, and I'm trying to remind myself of that to be more sober-minded about it all. But I fear my hatred of bad diaspora culture is matched pound for pound when I see proponents of liberal high culture (and some overeager leftists who think being sentimental and annoying is the worst crime of all) gleefully rub their hands over every diaspora celebrity’s downfall while contributing very little originality to the discourse.
I disagree: Vuong is not a good poet.
The cultural conditions have aligned such that Vuong is in such a position, which is part of the thesis of the post. But, as my colleague @Sire put it above, the conditions which rushed Vuong to his position in the culture were just as rash. You can distrust the people who "turn" (though I was never personally on his side), but I wouldn't distrust the "moment," the moment is genuine.
"Fight the real enemy," I say, tearing up a photo of David Baldacci.
Agree. While there's much about Vuong's image that is bogus (the crying in interviews, the convenient deep affinity with whatever capitalist behemoth will prop him up - see Oprah, Starbucks) I actually thought The Emperor of Gladness was a step forward for him as a novelist, and thought it was much more successful than OEWBG - the turning seems more due to the vibe shift and perhaps a bit of resentment towards the Last Big Novelist Standing than anything about the work itself. Lack of knowledge of the history of the form I v irritating tho.
Watch his video talking about Oprah and what that program meant for his mom and the other illiterate immigrant women she worked with. Enough with the classism.
I have watched that video. And initially I was very moved by it, but then I saw a number of other interviews in which he behaved in a very similar way, to the point that I felt that he was recycling a schtick. Which... unsurprising, he's building a brand, but a healthy amount of scepticism doesn't make me classist.
Classism? Oprah...is...a...billionaire...
"you don't understand how inspirational a guy like Jeff Bezos is to a lot of the lumperproletariat enough with the classism Amazon is good actually"
Well that's cool because I really, really distrust those moments when The Machine canonizes a writer as great at the same time. Guess we cancel out.
this was an excellent piece! i found it incredibly strange at university (i studied creative writing) when we were taught to avoid ‘overwriting’ and yet vuong was on the syllabus. his work always left a bad taste in my mouth and now i feel vindicated.
You mean a “moment” like when a book is published? Yeah, real mysterious… must be a conspiracy.
And who is “everyone”?
Many of us aren't turning on him, because we refused to jump on the bandwagon in the first place.
What makes you think that I, or any other of his critics, ‘turned’? Vuong just published a book, and threatens to continue, a prospect that many readers of his first book are trying to forestall. Why? Because the cultural landscape, like any earthly one, has only so much room, and cluttering it with work of this vacuousness is like throwing empty cereal cartons on a beautiful green field.
I mean that ties into one of the things the "why can't you be nice and let people enjoy things???" crowd never seems to understand, which is that when work like Vuong's goes on to encourage a cultural landscape that promotes more of the same. It's reasonable to be mad about that.
You’re a hater. Why can’t we just celebrate mainstream success of a POC writer while recognizing they are also human and flawed? And what gives you the right to dictate what is art? I hated reading this…
Because the writing is terrible and pretending it isn’t is condescending.
I hope you have this energy for Colleen Hoover and other white, straight authors who are terrible writers and wildly successful
I do!
I don't like Vuong's writing really at all, for about the same reasons you don't. But your reasons as for why he has been compelling to so many people are, I think, incomplete, and even ungenerous. I know multiple asian-american people who aren't 'bougie' who really like Vuong's writing: I think much more because it recreates (and probably amplifies) certain problems that they've faced, than because it satisfies their desire to like, have a more authentically tragic childhood or whatever.
I also think that Vuong has a real eye for compelling images despite how annoying his writing is in getting it all across. The tough-talking straight-passing boy in the army helmet and the summer heat picking tobacco who falls in love with you is, if nothing else, a perfect gay teenage fantasy right?
And in fact a lot of different aspects of Vuong's life are just, like, *interesting*, right? Strong, vocal personalities with fraught and intense relationships to one another. Even in the plainest language (like that of a memoirist without literary ambitions whatsoever), I think the story could be read and appreciated. It would be striking to hear told to you over the course of a very long conversation at a party: a memorable and seriously lovely night, can't you imagine it? Vuong does a quite competent job recognizing and emphasizing the most 'interesting' parts of his life, too.
My point is, I guess, that liking or even loving Vuong's work, even if it might make one a bit of a philistine, is not a reflection of, like, an incomplete or crass relationship to one's own racial identity, some deformation in your character. Some people want quite different things out of books than 'literary types', and literary types can be quite awful at predicting what those wanted things are.
The description you pulled of making the bed (dandelions) made me laugh; a couple years ago, when I was gathering my thoughts around On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I couldn’t get past his ridiculous description of a Jolly Rancher.
I really struggle to connect with Vuong’s writing but I find myself trying really hard to like him because he seems so kind and I generally want him to succeed. Which may be why other people have lifted him up. I also fear backlash around him because if we start turning on a writer for being too soft, too empathetic, too flowery, I worry about a swing to the right, as with politics, where we find ourselves back in the aughts. Which was admittedly a more fun time, but it could also be a cruel time and required some backbone.
Also: Andrea Long Chu’s review was more like “this is competent in a way the previous novel wasn’t”… i wouldn’t at all call her enraptured!
Ocean Voung and Viet Thanh Nguyen are the PF Chang of literary fiction. I don’t know a single Vietnamese person who have read their books.
Can't speak for the second half of your statement, but the first part is patently false.
Both statements compliment each other. Voung and Nguyen (and Amy Tan and others) write for white audiences.
I'm hesitant to get into an actual debate about this considering how bad your home was, but do you really think authors should only write for their own ethnic groups? What exactly would writing for a Vietnamese audience look like?
Many people enjoy eating at PF Chang. Just not many Chinese people. It doesn’t mean the food is bad.
I think it’s very difficult to write for a Vietnamese audience using English. There are cultural meanings built into the Vietnamese language that has no English equivalent. How I think and talk to myself in Vietnamese is different from how I think and talk to myself in English.
Vietnamese readers instantly recognize the inauthenticity in the characters of Nguyen and Voung’s novels. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. Authenticity may not even the goal of the authors. The goal is to sell books.
I thought you didn't know any Viet people who have read his books?
I know several.
What do they honestly think about it?
The people I spoke with simply said they liked his books, mentioning his book of poetry and On Earth. This was in 2023. It wasn't a critical conversation about literature from the diaspora, just people trying to connect with me.
*This is referring to my experience in Vietnam.
I'm Vietnamese-American and a lot of my Vietnamese-American friends enjoy his work. I haven't had a chance to read this new book, but I personally enjoyed his experimentation with language in On Earth and related to the character a lot, especially his relationship with his mother. I haven't read his book of poetry.
His experiments with English doesn’t really match how a Vietnamese speaker plays with language in my opinion. For one, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language. Alliteration, metaphors and double entendres are much more prevalent.
I was speaking more generally on his experimentation with English prose.
I believe in interviews he has said that he's fluent in Vietnamese, but I question to what degree. I get the sense that he can comfortably speak Vietnamese with people he knows, but wouldn't be able to do an interview or something that demands conveying complex information with extreme clarity in Vietnamese. That's one reason I don't have expectations that he would try adopting Vietnamese wordplay to English, but I also don't think a Vietnamese-American writer has to do that.
I can understand why someone might develop those expectations since he ruminates quite a bit on language and the differences between Vietnamese and English, though some of his commentary seem rather naive and childlike. Some of it reminded me of me as a kid, amused that má and ma were differentiated only by a little tone mark. These linguistic asides didn't take much, if anything, away from my overall enjoyment of his work.
This is vacuous. Self-serving. Reactionary.
I’m no connoisseur of literature or Ocean specifically, but this is less than useful. Just author scratching their itches in public.
It is not about Ocean at all.
Not sure what all this sour sarcasm does other than attempt to entertain people who are otherwise already bitter and look for the same frequency.