Ocean Vuong is a generous and compassionate speaker and writer, and a subtle observer of softness and innocence. In his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which I finished reading yesterday, there’s always a sense of sadness and quiet irony within—and because of—the complexity of the writing. The novel takes the form of a letter to Vuong’s mother, who will never be able to read it: his medium, written language, through which he expresses various longings for intimacy, ultimately alienates her. There’s something voyeuristic, therefore, in reading and enjoying Vuong’s richly expressive prose, in participating in a literary industry that hungers for writing of this quality and vulnerability. “They will write their names on your leash and call you necessary, call you urgent,” he says,1 in what feels like a sharp preemptive corrective to critics preparing their breathless praise as the book draws to a close.
It does warrant praise. The writing is lovely. Vuong employs a consistent vocabulary of images to accompany key ideas which are developed throughout the narrative. Migration is figured in the observations of monarch butterflies; predatory hunger for soft and innocent creatures is revisited in references to the hideous brutality of the meat and dairy industries. The cosmic significance of first love is deeply felt when the brilliance of the city is likened to “the sparks made by some god sharpening his weapons above us”. Revisiting the landscape of the tobacco field in his memory, the narrator notes its emptiness and stillness, with a poet’s observation of “the full elms windless at the field’s edge”.
And yet this is not a purely poetic novel. Vuong is not afraid to take aim at the destructive forces in contemporary American life and to make an explicit critique. Writing about the opioid crisis and its victims, his prose moves frequently between lyrical and polemical:
… Then he winked, smiled—and faded back into the dream he made of himself.
Using a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, Purdue sold OxyContin to doctors as a safe, “abuse-resistant” means of managing pain. The company went on to claim that less than one percent of users became addicted, which was a lie …
What if art was not measured by quantity but ricochets?2
Vuong has been criticised for an inconsistency of tone in this book, but I actually liked these jarring shifts. The narrator is, at this point, a grieving young man, and naming the predatory company responsible for the opioid crisis evokes a visceral anger that I didn’t sense earlier in the book. This is a character who has witnessed and felt a great deal of pain, and has even worked to bring that pain into his identity, to equate love itself—familial, yes, but especially sexual and romantic—with destruction and violence. Finally externalising the pain, and naming an enemy, is a powerful move.
When Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrator medicates herself into “good strong American sleep” in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, it’s a comic swipe at the pharmaceutical industry as personified by Tuttle. For Vuong, the enemy is the same, but is figured not as a clownish caricature of a doctor, but rather as “the millionaire of American sadness”. This is where I begin to take issue with the polemic, and where perhaps I would have appreciated some more nuanced thought to be expressed, because Vuong isn’t talking about opioids here but rather the treatment of bipolar disorder. Little Dog, Vuong’s narrator, is protected from heroin only by his fear of needles, but that doesn’t mean he’s free from the American pharmaceutical machine: he has “the wrong chemicals” in his brain, and needs a pill to fix them.
I was surprised to find bipolar disorder mentioned only at this later stage in the book—it seemed to be almost an aside, brought up to do little else but provide further ammunition for the attack on a predatory industry. But I felt that more could have been done here. I’m never quite comfortable with the type of argument that equates psychiatric treatment with the diminishing of artistic and personal expression and experience. But nonetheless, I relate to the narrator’s attachment to his own sadness and elation:
… I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for? … What if I’m running outside because the moon tonight is children’s-book huge and ridiculous over the line of pines, the sight of it a strange sphere of medicine?3
Little Dog resists pathologising his ecstatic experiences, because they are precious, and hard-won. This makes sense. An artist with a severe mood disorder is utterly justified in guarding the range and power of their emotional experience, and in exhibiting caution when it comes to seeking treatment. Furthermore, elation itself isn't necessarily indicative of a manic episode. I wondered if Vuong might be setting up an intriguing comparison, whereby untreated mania is a kind of opiate, and not taking the pill is, in fact, the addiction. But he dropped this particular thread, a little sooner than I wanted him to.
That’s not a criticism of his writing, but rather a note on the particular interests I happened to bring to my reading of this novel. I’ve found myself tracing these generally across all the reading I’m doing at the moment, which is why my individual posts, while they sometimes focus on one book, are never strictly speaking book reviews. I’m writing here neither as critic nor academic, and besides I find myself happier with my output when I break away from the rules of either profession. Yet for some reason, I’ve struggled to do this breaking away while writing this particular post. I’ve been going back and forth with certain points, deleting whole paragraphs on account of finding them pretentious, rewriting them only to delete them again, struggling to find the right energy.
It might simply be that On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous hit me in unhealed places, and I don’t have clever ways to talk about them. The abuse Little Dog suffers at the hands of his mother, and seems to tolerate without anger, is painful to read. The idea that there is a natural hunger in humanity for soft things, for innocent things, is horrific, and not since reading Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects with its gruesome slaughterhouse scenes have I felt so relieved in my decision to go vegan. And then there’s the idea that our desires are met by an indifferent world, or that if there is a god out there he’s hungry, too, sharpening his weapons for a reaping.
The title of this post comes from a quasi-liturgical passage shortly after the naming and shaming of the drug company responsible for the opioid crisis. It reads as a sort of secular creed for contemporary America:
The one good thing about national anthems is that we’re already on our feet, and therefore ready to run.
The truth is one nation, under drugs, under drones.
… Let me stay here until the end, I said to the lord, and we’ll call it even.
Let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, I said to myself.
I woke to the sound of wings in the room …4
Perhaps it's my long history as a musician in the Anglican and Episcopal churches, but I felt the rhythms of Compline in this passage, the soothing prayers of the sleep-bound monk, the death-bound St Simeon. Hide me under the shadow of thy wings. To reverse the famous Marx aphorism, opiates have become the religion of the masses. Rather than seeking transcendence through spiritual experience, it's found at the point of a needle. One nation, under drugs.
It’s a bleak vision of America, and one I cannot find the power to counter at present, but that’s not to say that this is a bleak book. I found it beautiful, joyful, profound, and playful, with a kind of copiousness and freedom in the language that is nonetheless efficient, accessible, plot-driven as well as poetic and consciously literary. I took a lot of notes while reading that I didn’t articulate in this post, but I might want to revisit them later. For now, though, I’ll leave this as an incomplete and conflicted response to a powerful and complex literary work.
