On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Books)

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet whose debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous became a New York Times Bestseller. The main character, Little Dog, is writing a letter to his mother. He knows it’s a letter she will never read as his mother is illiterate. It is more about Little Dog coming to terms with his own life by revisiting his past. 

Little Dog first reminisces about his mother—the way she hurt him when he was still a child. The first time she hit him, he was only four years old. Then there was the time with the remote control that left a bruise on his forearm but he told his teachers, “I fell playing tag”.  Another time, he writes about his mother throwing a box of Legos at her head. 

Little Dog writes to his mother and says he was thirteen when he finally told her to stop hurting him. He looked deep into her eyes, the way he learned to do with the bullies that used to hit him. His mother turned away as if nothing happened. He writes to say, “we both knew you’d never hit me again”. 

Little Dog writes this letter when he’s in his late twenties. He is putting down on paper the history of his life. He knows he was born in Vietnam and was given a name that meant Patriotic Leader of the Nation. He not only writes about his mother, but his grandmother, Lan, as well. They were survivors of the war, then they were refugees, and now they live in Hartford, Connecticut. 

He writes how Lan ran away from an arranged marriage and became a prostitute during the Vietnam War and how she married an American serviceman, then gave birth to a child, his mother, Rose. However, Rose was not the child of the soldier Lan married as she was already four months pregnant when she met him. 

Rose doesn’t have much of an education as her schoolhouse collapsed after the Americans dropped napalm over the place she lived. It is because of the war that Rose suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She marries an abusive man but manages to leave him. 

Halfway through the novel, Little Dog makes his confession to his mother about his first true relationship—a white boy named Trevor, born and bred in America. whom he meets while working on a tobacco farm one summer when he is only seventeen. This relationship continues into adulthood but ends in tragedy as Trevor becomes a heavy drug user. 

What’s fascinating about this story is the fact that it mirrors Vuong’s life. However Vuong makes no attempt to write a chronologically correct timeline of Little Dog’s life. His nonlinear approach makes the story hard to follow at times. The reader is often left wondering what Vuong is actually trying to convey and although the book has received praise and many accolades for a first novel, I may be in the minority as I found it self-indulgent and tedious. If this is the new wave of fiction, I will gladly find my way back to the classics. ~Ernie Hoyt