paperback, 256 pages
Published June 1, 2021 by Penguin Books.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being …
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
I was totally captivated by the language in this book. It's beautiful, lyrical and powerful. It's a language of destruction and possession. At the same time, it becomes an attempt to break free, a lighthouse searching for a way forward. Linguistically the book is absolutely phenomenal.
The whole novel is full of descriptive, immersive language that borders on poetry without being poetry. So beautiful.
There are some poignant passages and metaphors that generate nice turns of phrase, but without a clear narrative structure I was left with very little to hang onto. To call this novel pretentious is an error but there is something problematic about the cloudy conceit and the philosophical descriptions which felt like recitations of a grad school reading list. It kept me at a distance and never let me get fully into the work. It was all feelings over actions, telling over showing, and side commentary using other theorists' ideas.
The title is beautiful and there are a few eruptions of prose that land (I am fond of chapter 9) but I'm not going to remember this book in a month.
