Memory is a choice. You said that once, with your back to me, the way a god would say it. But if you were a god you would see them. You would look down at this grove of pines, the fresh tips flared lucent at each treetop, tender-damp in their late autumn flush. You would look past the branches, past the rusted light splintered through the brambles, the needles falling, one by one, as you lay your god eyes on them. You’d trace the needles as they hurled themselves past the lowest bough, toward the cooling forest floor, to land on the two boys lying side by side, the blood already dry on their cheeks.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Vuong first came to my attention as a poet – his first book of poetry, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, won a number of awards and was very impressive. It contained a poem, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” which wove details of sexual passion and parental violence into a kind of prayer of transcendence. This On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel, though it contains a good deal of what might best be described as prose-poetry.
Structured as a series of letters to the narrator’s mother, it tells the story of a boy, referred to throughout, and by everyone, as Little Dog, who is the grandchild of a Vietnamese refugee come to America having married and become separated from a US soldier during the war. Their child is the narrator’s mother and the relationship between Little Dog and his mother– both loving and fraught, affectionate and violent – is the center of the novel. In relatively short bursts of intensely sensory language, Vuong paints the portrait of their relationship and Little Dog’s sexual awakening, both colored by his growing understanding of how lives are shaped by history and geography.
Much of the narrative is elusive, Vuong draws our attention to details that do not seem immediately central to his story, or are taken wildly out of chronological context. For example, there is a fairly long section early in the novel (which is, in total, quite short) in which an encounter between Lan, the narrator’s grandmother, her young daughter, and a pair of US soldiers is told in short, tense, visually intense paragraphs that alternate with an equally intensely rendered story of a group of well-to-do but sinister Vietnamese men preparing and eating live monkey brains. Similarly, images of a car accident in which Little Dog and the boy he first falls in love with are injured, become a kind of refrain – introduced before Little Dog and Trevor have fallen in love and repeated after their affair has ended.
These elusive, powerful but ambiguous details are the real heart and muscle of the book. When Vuong resorts occasionally to more conventional narrative techniques, like actually providing exposition or identifying characters, his prose flattens and I had the distinct sensation that he had lost his confidence in his prose or my reading ability. Thankfully, these passages are few and far between. As a result, my appreciation for his prose may outstrip my ability to recount its narrative, but I was transported – taking on the bodies and lives of several people I understand only marginally. There is a good deal of sadness here – the novel is consumed with loss that begins before we know we have something to lose. But that brevity is balanced with beauty. Vuong establishes very clearly that, while we may only be gorgeous briefly, we are gorgeous.
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