On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

I'm not sure if Ocean Vuong's first novel is more intense on the page or in your ear. I took it in the latter way, read in Vuong's own soft, quavering, and forceful voice, which he keeps at such a pitch of high, vulnerable emotion that even his reading of the copyright notice at the end could bring you to tears. But so could any note of his character's story, written as a letter to his immigrant mother in a language she could never read, recounting the losses and fleeting joys (see the title) of their lives with an almost unbearably tender exactness for physical details—the toxins of nail salons, the brush of a farmer's son's teen mustache as they embrace in the barn—and the metaphors they spawn. The traditional immigrant's story charts a growing assimilation in the new culture and estrangement from the old; Vuong's follows no such arc but hovers in the anguish of the middle, sung like a bluesy, bitter lullaby, one of those in which down comes baby, cradle and all.
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