In this absolutely stunning novel, Ocean Vuong, a Vietnamese-American poet, inhabits the character of Little Dog. The entire book is in Little Dog’s voice; he’s writing a letter to his estranged mother, a letter in which he struggles with the strange arc of his own life and the traumas he has suffered. A lot of it is spent dealing with the physical and emotional abuse that his mother heaped on him, herself a Vietnamese refugee who was psychologically broken by her treatment in that war-torn country. But then too there’s Little Dog’s mentally ill grandmother, the racism he faced as a foreign child growing up in America, his own homosexuality and the intense beauty and sorrow of his first illicit gay relationship. And then when Little Dog tries to put himself in the perspective of those who have hurt him, he delves into their sufferings and trauma. If I’m not making this entirely clear, this is a heavy, heavy book. It’s short, under three-hundred pages, but it’s as emotionally draining as any book I’ve ever read probably. This is Vuong’s first novel, I think; he’s made a reputation as a poet (as much as anyone these days can make a reputation as a poet) and that’s probably why this is the most beautifully written book I’ve read in years. The book is elliptical and its written in kind of thematic sections, rather than chronological ones or ones based around characters. So Little Dog and his letter don’t so much “jump” in time as much as they just slip through it in a really fluid way, making connections across time and across characters to really dig deeply into the suffering these characters go through. This book isn’t going to be for everyone simply because of how intensely, brutally sad it is; there’s a chapter here that goes past sadness to a kind of deep existential horror and both the animal cruelty and what Vuong is getting at with the images of animal cruelty made this chapter the most horrifying and disturbing thing I’ve read in years, more than anything in a lot of straight “horror” books I’ve read the last few years. It’s stayed with me in a really haunting way. So this is a book some people simply won’t be able to get through and for even more people this is going to be a book they’ll need to approach after the pandemic is over. But, as far as I’m concerned, this is an absolute masterpiece of literature. It’s a book that succeeds on every level and it ultimately puts you inside the suffering of its characters in a visceral way that few books do. It’s easy to look at the slate of new books on Amazon and get into a “they just don’t write ‘em that way anymore” attitude toward the classics. This book is a nice counterpoint to that, a masterpiece decidedly modern, but also timelessly beautiful as only the best works of art truly are. 4 stars.
tl;dr – harrowing, oppressively sad and disturbing, this book about trauma isn’t for everyone; but it’s gorgeously written and a masterpiece of visceral empathy. 4 stars.