Book Review: Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”

Few pieces of art create a sense of awe within me. Terrence Malick’s films, especially Tree of Life, do. So do Rilke’s poems and letters, and the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Roberto Bolano. But it’s a rare experience. In fact, I cannot remember the last novel I loved passionately until I read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. It is a stunningly beautiful novel, which created that sense of awe within me that I have not felt for years.

The story is simple enough. A Vietnamese-American man writes a letter to his immigrant mother. He recalls her PTSD and abuse toward him. He remembers his grandmother who affectionately nicknames him “Little Dog.” He remembers his first sexual affair as a teenager with another man. People pass away. He grows older. He reflects on meaning and death.

Nothing about that plot description is fantastical or instantly intriguing. But the novel isn’t really about story. It’s first and foremost about language, and how that language evokes all those feelings which are buried deep in our unconscious in daily life: melancholy, connection, lust, grief, love. It is about living moment to moment in a world where there is so much beauty and suffering all wrapped up into individual moments. Its words left me in a trance. Take this passage describing Monarch Butterflies,