On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (4*)

 

My mind is too linear to appreciate poetry although I did once attempt to memorize the first section of The Waste Land because I found the language of T.S. Eliot so achingly beautiful. Which turns out to be a pretty good description of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous the remarkably generous coming-of-age novel by Ocean Vuong.

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly . . . To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

Despite good reviews, I'd avoided the book because I thought it would be too poetic until Gus Dapperton, of all people, introduced Chiffon to Vuong in "Sunrise" with lyrics that definitely bore repetition against a tear-inducing sonic back drop.

Here, on the edge of memory

When you are free only for the length of your name held in my mouth

And the dawn coming off the windows turns our hands blood-red

And we are children again

Running heart-first towards the end of laughter

And yes, Vuong adorns On Earth with jewel-like phrases (needles clicking down like the hands of smashed watches) but he's also telling two tragic love stories in this clearly autobiographical novel.  It takes the diffuse and meandering form of a letter the protagonist, Little Dog, is writing to Rose his deeply scarred mother (“Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you. Everything.”). This is the second immigrant mama's boy book I've read recently, and Hombrecito suffers mightily in comparison because Vuong betrays little if any of that author's narcissism.  He vividly renders the horrors of his grandmother's life in war-torn Viet Nam but he also treats the American soldier who becomes his grandfather with both kindness and understanding.

Trevor, the first person who "sees" him, anchors the second love story.

I was seen—I who had seldom been seen by anyone. I who was taught, by you [his mother], to be invisible in order to be safe, who, in elementary school, was sent to the fifteen-minute time-out in the corner only to be found two hours later, when everyone was long gone and Mrs. Harding, eating lunch at her desk, peered over her macaroni salad and gasped. “My god! My god, I forgot you were still here! What are you still doing here?”

The setting for Trevor's and Little Dog's mutual exploration of their burgeoning sexual orientation--an unlikely tobacco field just outside of Hartford, Connecticut--enables Vuong to do for Latino farmworkers and white trash (He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers), what he also does for his Vietnamese forbears:  to see THEM, as well as the mostly bleak, working class environment they share.  His mother hits the jackpot in the chemically toxic nail salon where she's practically enslaved when an elderly woman tips her a Benjamin after Rose successfully mimes massaging her phantom limb.

Particularly fond of animal metaphors (monkeys, Monarch butterflies, buffaloes and veal calves) to convey the near hopelessness of the life Little Dog eventually escapes, Vuong wanders a little too far from narrative at times.  That said, he still leaves readers with an intense appreciation for his resilience in the face of the severe trauma--both historical and personal--experienced by a sensitive and extraordinarily observant gay child of the Vietnamese diaspora.

Oh, and Vuong also writes as well as anyone I've ever read about gay sex, unflinchingly.

After he came, when he tried to hold me, his lips on my shoulder, I pushed him away, pulled my boxers on, and went to rinse my mouth.

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.