On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2020, BookTube Longlist 2020, Carnegie Longlist 2020, Center For Fiction Finalist 2019, Dublin Finalist 2021, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2020, PEN/Hemingway Longlist 2020, Kirkus Finalist 2019, National Book Longlist 2019
Date Read: October 18, 2021
I cannot remember the last time I read a novel that was so beautiful, so too-the bone honest and real. In a letter to his mother that is never meant to be sent, Vuong brings out the beauty and the complexity of a mother and son relationship made even more complex by the son often assuming the role of parent, helping his mother navigate a world in which she doesn’t speak the language. A lover of all things beautiful, often violent, traumatized by a war she endured as a child, brings home the fact that none of us is perfect and we are all reacting to a past that no longer exists.
“I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication.”
Little Dog sheds his Vietnamese, a language he learned from his mother that only completed the 2nd grade and thus a language stalled in time, to become the family’s interpreter and official representative, ensuring that the family’s needs are met, that they are seen and heard.
Little Dog’s life is made even more complicated by not just being an immigrant but by being gay. The very things that make him beautiful and whole. He has the fortune to meet Trevor and discover this truth about himself in a complicated and tragic love with this discarded boy looking to squelch the pain of his own existence.
Trevor, through all his machismo, mostly treats Little Dog with tenderness and love. Perhaps, the only tenderness and love Trevor has ever been able to give. And for Little Dog, the experience of Trevor’s tenderness is his first introduction to gentleness, to acceptance, to mercy. I found myself sadly happy that he found someone to show him a kind of love, a type of caring, an introduction to his sexuality. Without Trevor, so much of Little Dog’s self-discovery would have been lost.
For all the truths exposed here, I would hope that a mother, myself being one, would love Little Dog more for his honesty and humanity. I can’t help but think that regardless of what Vuong writes in the future, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is his masterpiece, his magnum opus. I am fucking gobsmacked by this talent.
“City coroners, underfunded, don’t always work around the clock. When someone dies in the middle of the night, they get trapped in a municipal limbo where the corpse remains inside its death. As a response, a grassroots movement was formed as a communal salve. Neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called ‘delaying sadness.’”
“All this time I told myself we were born from war – but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence – but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
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