A review by nothingforpomegranted
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

challenging emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

A young man's letter to his illiterate mother: How does it feel to be a writer? But also: What is a second generation immigrant and how does he process inherited trauma? How does one define and distinguish among love and lust and desire and grief? Where does the self end and the community begin?

Ocean Vuong is undeniably a poet, and I underlined more passages in this book than I have in a long time, appreciating his lyrical language and the way he carried metaphors across chapters. Perhaps my favorite quotation of the entire novel is this paragraph from the last page, pulling together all of the animal metaphors Vuong used throughout the novel in one concise sequence:

I think of the buffaloes somewhere, maybe in North Dakota or Montana, 
their shoulders rippling in slow motion as they race for the cliff, their 
brown bodies bottlenecked at the narrow precipice. Their eyes oil-black, 
the velvet bones of their horns covered with dust, they run, headfirst, 
together--until they become moose, huge and antlered, wet nostrils 
braying, then dogs, with paws clawing toward the edge, their tongues 
lapping in the light until, finally, they become macaques, a whole troop 
of them. The crowns of their heads cut open, their brains hollowed out, 
they float, the hair on their limbs fine and soft as feathers. And just as 
the first one steps off the cliff, onto ait, the forever nothing below, they 
ignite into the ochre-red sparks of monarchs. Thousands of monarchs 
pour over the edge, fan into the white air, like a bloodjet hitting water. 

However, too often, the language veered too far away from the plot, beautiful for beauty's sake without any meaningful contribution to the story. 

As for the story, Vuong addresses a lot. Though not quite chronological, the story begins with his mother's immigration to the United States from Vietnam with her mother and the baby, fleeing at the end of the war, connected to what they left behind but also to Little Dog's white soldier grandfather and to Tiger Woods. The boy grows up in a nail salon, then rides his bike to the tobacco fields, where he finds a job and self-discovery, exploring consciousness (through drugs) and identity (through sex). This, too, was where Vuong started to lose me; though the whole premise is that the mother cannot read the letter, and certainly not in English, I was mortified to read such graphic scenes in this context, and it seemed like Vuong started writing an entirely separate book, trapped in the middle of the family story. 
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