The Emperor of Gladness

“Our town is raised up from a scab of land along a river in New England. When the prehistoric glaciers melted, the valley became a world-sized lake, and when that dried up it left a silvery trickle along the basin called the Connecticut: Algonquin for ‘long tidal river.’”

The first chapter opens with a description of the setting, with Vuong adopting the voice of an unidentified narrator in the plural first person throughout this chapter, underscoring the importance of the setting to the story. The name of the fictional town and its socioeconomic make-up reflect deliberate choices by Vuong, in service of the book’s themes.

“The jacket once belonged to his friend Noah, a boy he met working tobacco when he was fourteen, the crop blooming verdant along the river that carved East Gladness in half. His real name wasn’t Noah, but that’s what Hai started calling him a week after he died. Because why shouldn’t the dead receive new names?”

Hai wears a jacket that was once his friend Noah’s, who passed away prior to the events of the story. This passage introduces Hai’s decision to call his late friend by a pseudonym, pointing to his propensity for fictionalizing or editing details of his life to help him cope with reality—a tendency Vuong uses to explore the theme of Storytelling and Make-Believe as Tools for Survival. For those who have read Vuong’s debut novel, this context signals a connection between The Emperor of Gladness and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, in which Vuong’s narrator forms a romantic relationship with a young man named Trevor who, like Noah, passes away from a drug overdose.