Penguin Random House, John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation

A FEW WEEKS before the publication of Ocean Vuong’s first novel, 2019’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, his mother died from cancer. She had only just moved into the house that Vuong had bought her with proceeds from the book. “I was a zombie,” the 36-year-old tells me over a video call, in a tone that suggests, while the shock is no longer fresh, disbelief lingers. We are speaking a month out from the publication of his second novel, and this time round he is just doing his best to pay attention. “I’m not an author that really understands my work clearly while I make it,” he warns me at the very top of our conversation. “And so, it’s like I’m waking up from a dream, and now I have to make sense of it for people.”

The book Vuong is trying to make sense of is The Emperor of Gladness, which, to be fair to its author, is sprawling. It begins, after a seven-page description of growing grass (more compelling than it sounds), with college dropout and recovering addict Hai contemplating suicide. He decides against it, and we move through his humdrum life in the fictional Connecticut town of East Gladness, as he befriends Grazina, an elderly woman with dementia, and endures/enjoys minimum-wage hours at a local fast-food restaurant. Vuong calls it his “slump book”, which I think is a joke until he enlightens me. While his first novel felt like a capital-M moment — one marked by personal and very public success (Instagram grids and Tube cars alike were flooded with the title) — this one has felt a little more circuitous, slightly self-indulgent. “I’m learning that I’m not really great at writing for myself,” he admits, “or I don’t feel great writing for myself.”

It is fair to say that Vuong has found success writing about himself. And there is good, if gruelling, material: his grandfather, a farmhand from Michigan, met his Vietnamese grandmother while he was serving during the Vietnam War. They had three daughters, one of whom was Vuong’s mother. She raised her son in Ho Chi Minh City, until a police officer discovered she was mixed race (under Vietnamese law at the time, she was not allowed to work) and the family was forced to flee. They headed to the Philippines, before settling in Hartford, the capital city of Connecticut. Vuong was two. In America, his father abandoned the family, while his mother worked at a nail salon. He learnt to read at 11, eventually studied for his BA in English at Brooklyn College, and later received his MFA in poetry from New York University.

Themes of parentage, patriotism, queerness (he has a long-term partner, Peter) thread through Vuong’s work: in 2017’s Forward prize-winning debut collection of poetry, Night Sky With Exit Wounds; in 2019’s epistolary novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which tells the story of a refugee who falls in love with a tobacco field worker (Vuong used to work at such a farm earning $9.50 an hour, cash); and in 2022’s Time is a Mother, a series of poems written after his mother’s death. “I’m deeply invested in autofiction because the stakes are so high, right?” Vuong tells me at one point. “It’s both the world that I live through and it’s the world that I’m trying to launch as a kind of simulation.”

The small-town world of The Emperor of Gladness will be familiar to Vuong’s readers. Hai has a tempestuous relationship with his mother – a well-worn topic in the author’s work – and lies to her about attending medical school (their phone conversations, which Hai fills with fantasies about campus life, are some of the most moving passages here). He is also holding onto the memory (and jacket) of a boy he met working tobacco. But as our protagonist, over the course of a year, learns to work with his fellow fast-food labourers and becomes a best friend and carer to Grazina, there is something new and, at times discomforting, in Vuong’s writing: a refusal to play by typical storytelling rules.

You might expect a tearful reunion between Hai and his mother. Or the hours in a sweaty kitchen to lead to a promotion or an easier life. No such luck. “I just did not want to have an arc of improvement,” Vuong tells me, pointing to the novel’s 2009 setting, which he calls “the height of supposed Obama hope.” “I saw Obama rise to his presidency and immediately bail out corporations that were too big to fail,” he says. “I think my generation, coming up at the time, was completely disenfranchised.” That political settling ties into Vuong’s impulse towards Eastern philosophy – particularly the Japanese literary movement ma, which he describes as a “lull in the story” – and results in a narrative that can frustrate and delight. As Vuong playfully puts it: “It’s like The Lord of the Rings, but there’s no ring, right?”

That is not to say the novel, nor Vuong, is totally nihilistic: characters change, relationships evolve, and there is comfort to be found amid the mundane. In a poignant episode that comes to define the novel’s ethos, Vuong describes a cigarette break between Hai and his colleague, known only as “the Russian”: “There was a kind of luxury to be amongst this place of sweat and ache and yet sit and suck a cigarette down to its soggy nub and have no one tell you anything because you’re off the clock.”

It is the kind of observation you’d only be able to make with first-hand experience, and sure enough, Vuong has worked in the fast-food industry. It’s a setting, he believes, for “circumstantial family”: where Vuong, a queer person, was able to work alongside his boss, an evangelical Christian escaping religious persecution in Pakistan, and just aim to “close the shift without catastrophe”. “Ideologies didn’t hold up,” he notes, “when you had to depend on each other during the lunchtime rush.”

Vuong is currently at his home in Northampton, Massachusetts, hiding away in the woods on spring break. He teaches an MFA in creative writing at New York University, and next week he will be back in the city to wrap up the term with his students. I imagine he is a popular teacher: our conversation is fast-paced and eclectic — ranging from French writer Marguerite Duras to Netflix megahit Adolescence — and then, all of a sudden, inspiring. He engages in what he calls a “somatic practice” when he writes, jotting down ideas when inspiration hits (usually, and many of us will relate, in the shower). “When the notebooks are full, it’s almost like a dam that’s about to be breached,” he says, in a typically lucid flourish. “And you feel the crack, there’s enough water, and it’s time to open the dam.” ○

‘The Emperor of Gladness’ by Ocean Vuong is out now (Jonathan Cape)

This story originally appeared on Esquire UK