On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong
Jonathan Cape: 2019
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Ma, I don’t know if you’ve made it this far in this letter — or if you’ve made it here at all.” This sort-of-novel which is a sort-of-letter had started, “Let me begin again. Dear Ma.” The central characters are Little Dog, a conflicted gay Vietnamese American with the shards of his college education, and his mother, an illiterate expat survivor of the American War, struggling to hold herself together in Hartford. The story that percolates through the spasms of these one-way letters rotates around this mother-son relationship, a relationship which works through cultural dichotomies and is also the site of Little Dog’s self-scrutiny. Basically, then, a variation on that traditional sub-genre, the Bildungsroman.

Yet it carries a surprising addendum for a piece of fiction. In an appendix of acknowledgements Vuong deploys a roll call of writers “whom I leaned on repeatedly while writing this book”. Some of the names invoked might be predictable: Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose The Sympathizer has parallels with Vuong’s novel; Marguerite Duras, who was born in Saigon and whose novels became increasingly experimental; James Baldwin, writing extensively and polemically on race and sexuality; Frank O’Hara, an influence on Vuong’s poems. But are the references to Miles Davis or Nina Simone somehow to do with artistic structure or is it just that Vuong likes their music?

More pointedly, Roland Barthes is pulled in on questions of mother tongue — Saigon street talk and Hartford demotic — quoting a Barthesian gnomic warning that two languages cancel each other out. Little Dog chews on the bone of language, proposes that the placenta is a language between mother and foetus, the true mother tongue, and even that it’s no accident that the comma — a curve of continuation, visually and syntactically — resembles a foetus. Uterine semiology as well as urban sociology? Saigon and Hartford are the cultural geography, but mother tongue, mother and tongue, are the substance as well as the tropes of the book.

• Tags: Issue 16, Michael Freeman, Ocean Vuong, Vietnam