📚 The Emperor of Gladness Review: Beautiful Writing Can’t Save a Wandering Story ⭐✨ (1.5 Stars)
🌧️ Quick Thoughts
I really wanted to love this one. Truly. The prose? Gorgeous. Lyrical. Atmospheric. Ocean Vuong absolutely knows how to string together a sentence that makes you pause and go, “wow.” Unfortunately… pretty prose can only carry a book so far before you realize absolutely nothing is happening. 😭
And at nearly 400 pages, The Emperor of Gladness somehow feels both emotionally distant and painfully slow. It’s one of those books where you keep waiting for the story to arrive… and then suddenly you’re at the ending wondering if you somehow missed the point entirely.
Maybe there’s some deep literary meaning soaring over my head at 30,000 feet. Maybe this is the kind of novel English professors will write dissertations about for decades. But as an actual reading experience? I was bored. Like, aggressively bored.
⚠️ Trigger Warnings
Animal cruelty and animal death (Chapter 9 is especially disturbing)
Addiction/substance abuse
Suicidal ideation
Dementia
Racism
Homophobia
Bullying
Mental illness
Death/grief
Prison/incarceration
Sexual content
🐾 Seriously though: if animal cruelty is a hard limit for you, be careful with this book. That section genuinely upset me more than anything else in the novel.
📖 What Is The Emperor of Gladness About?
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong follows 19-year-old Hai, who is preparing to jump off a bridge in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut, when he’s interrupted by an elderly Lithuanian woman named Grazina.
Grazina has dementia and mistakes Hai for various figures from her past, eventually inviting him to live with her as her caregiver. In exchange for room and board, Hai helps manage her medications and navigates her increasingly severe episodes of memory loss and confusion.
At the same time, Hai works at a chaotic fast-food-style restaurant called HomeMarket alongside an eccentric cast of coworkers, including his neurodivergent cousin Sony and aspiring wrestler Big Jean.
The novel explores grief, addiction, poverty, loneliness, chosen family, memory, and survival.
At least… that’s the intention.
🚨 FULL SPOILER REVIEW & ENDING EXPLAINED
🌀 A Story That Just… Drifts
This book doesn’t really have a plot so much as it has vibes.
Things happen. Then more things happen. But there’s almost no momentum driving the story forward. Hai spends most of the novel drifting between:
caring for Grazina,
working at HomeMarket,
using substances,
avoiding his mother,
and having extremely poetic thoughts about existence.
Every chapter feels intentionally meandering, which I know some readers adore. But for me, it created this exhausting feeling that the novel was constantly circling itself instead of building toward something meaningful.
And the frustrating part is that there are pieces here that could’ve been incredible.
👵 Grazina Was the Best Part
Grazina is easily the strongest character in the book.
Her dementia sequences, where she imagines herself back in war-torn Europe and casts Hai as “Sergeant Pepper,” were honestly the most emotionally compelling scenes in the novel. Their strange little roleplay adventures had tenderness and sadness underneath them that actually worked.
There’s one especially heartbreaking thread involving her son Lucas wanting to place her in a care home while Hai desperately tries to preserve her independence. Those moments carried real emotional weight.
But even then, the story keeps wandering off into long philosophical tangents and detached observations that drained the momentum for me.
🍟 The HomeMarket Crew Felt Like They Belonged in Another Book
The HomeMarket sections almost felt like a completely different novel.
You’ve got:
BJ dreaming of becoming a wrestler 🤼♀️
Russia constantly smoking weed 🚬
Maureen hanging around dispensing commentary
Sony desperately trying to bail his mother out of jail
Individually, some of these scenes were entertaining or touching. Together? They never fully connected into something cohesive.
The novel keeps introducing emotionally heavy storylines, but instead of developing them deeply, it just kind of glides past them in a haze of poetic prose.
💊 Hai Is Intentionally Lost… But It Gets Repetitive
Hai’s backstory involves addiction, dropping out of college after his lover dies from an overdose, lying to his mother about medical school, and eventually spiraling toward suicide.
That’s incredibly heavy material.
But instead of emotionally immersing me in Hai’s grief, I often felt weirdly detached from him. His narration is so abstract and poetic that it created distance instead of intimacy for me.
I understood his pain intellectually. I just rarely felt it.
🐾 Chapter 9 Was Genuinely Upsetting
I need to mention this again because WOW.
The animal cruelty in Chapter 9 felt brutal and honestly unnecessary to me. It completely changed the reading experience for a while because I spent the rest of the novel anxious about whether something horrifying was about to happen again.
If you’re sensitive to animal harm in books, please look up detailed content warnings beforehand.
🛻 The Ending Explained
Toward the end of the novel:
Grazina’s dementia worsens significantly.
Lucas finally forces the move to Hamilton Home.
Hai and Grazina temporarily “fight back” by pretending they’re soldiers defending against enemies and throwing salt and pepper shakers like grenades. Honestly one of the few scenes that actually felt alive.
Sony learns the truth about his father’s death.
The HomeMarket crew road-trips together to Vermont searching for his father’s remains after a fatal car fire.
The group eventually returns home unsuccessful, aside from finding remnants of the burned car.
In the final stretch:
Grazina is taken to the nursing facility.
She gives Hai her hidden savings.
Hai gives the money to Sony and Aunt Kim.
Hai finally speaks honestly with his mother.
The ending then jumps through future revelations about various characters’ lives.
And listen… I understand what Vuong was trying to do. The novel is about fractured people finding temporary connection in a collapsing world. It’s about memory, displacement, labor, grief, and survival.
But emotionally? It landed with a shrug for me. 😬
After hundreds of pages, I wanted some kind of emotional or narrative payoff that never really arrived.
✨ The Prose Problem
This is one of those books where people will highlight half the sentences.
And I get why.
Ocean Vuong writes BEAUTIFULLY. Some passages are stunning. Like genuinely breathtaking.
But eventually the prose started feeling like decorative icing on a cake that wasn’t actually there.
A beautiful sentence cannot replace:
pacing,
plot progression,
emotional payoff,
or character development.
At some point I realized I was admiring individual lines while feeling completely disconnected from the actual story.
That’s never a good sign.
🤔 Final Thoughts
This feels like the literary fiction equivalent of someone staring wistfully out a rainy window for 400 pages while softly whispering metaphors.
Some readers are going to think this is profound genius.
I am not one of those readers. 😅
I can appreciate the artistry of the writing while still admitting I was deeply bored for most of the experience. The story drifts endlessly, the pacing is glacial, and the emotional impact never matched the beauty of the prose for me.
Still, Grazina deserved better than this wandering novel around her because she was genuinely memorable.
⭐ Rating: 1.5 stars
📚 Books I’d Recommend Instead
If you wanted emotionally impactful literary fiction that actually kept me engaged, I’d recommend:
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
→ Still lyrical, but much more emotionally focused.Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
→ Devastating, character-driven, and far more immersive.A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
→ Also long and emotional, but it actually made me FEEL things.The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
→ Gorgeous writing and a compelling narrative.Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
→ Similar themes of addiction and identity, but sharper and more engaging.
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