Book Review by Rishi Janakiraman
Artwork by Julian Riccobon
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous:
Ocean Vuong's Sparkling, Sterling Novel Remains a Classic of LGBTQ+ Literature
Ocean Vuong’s debut is nothing short of its title; gorgeous in its brevity, generational trauma that knows no bounds except the Earth itself. His voice, shaped by the specific fracture of being a Vietnamese immigrant and queer, doesn’t just tell stories—it collapses time and reinvents form. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous unfolds like a memory in its own right: nonlinear, fragmented, and bathed in a distinctive excess. It is a “queerness” not only in the romantic sense but also the literal, where sentences bend and undress, each line hand-picked from the backdrop of Little Dog’s upbringing.
And Vuong and his protagonist, Little Dog, aren’t too different. Both had families split cleanly open by the fall of Saigon; both immigrated to the US at a young age; and both were queer boys in the late 90s. In an interview, Vuong said he’d wanted to “start with truth and end with art,” and the novel reflects this trajectory—a deliberate movement from the documentary to the poetic. But On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous doesn’t follow a conventional path. The “truth” Vuong begins with is not a stable narrative but a collection of impressionistic, sprawling images, which he then pushes to the breaking point of language. This isn’t memoir dressed up as fiction; it’s fiction as a form of excavation, an unearthing of the unsaid and the unsayable.
The novel’s ostensible premise is a letter from Little Dog to his mother Rose, a woman who can’t read. There’s an obvious irony here, and with essayistic ramblings, the purported structure is understood as a clever ruse—this letter serves less as direct communication and more as a vessel for Little Dog’s internal landscape. What unfolds isn’t just an attempt to convey his life to his mother, but an incisive exploration of his own identity, insecurities, and his family’s haunting legacy. We weed through Little Dog’s past as the son of a Vietnamese immigrant, the grandson of a woman who the American war in Vietnam as a prostitute for American GIs. These women, and Little Dog himself, are all surviving in their own right: a grandmother who “made a way to eat” through sex work; a mixed-race, nail-salon-working immigrant mother; and her queer son who has faced violence in its most generational form. To be alive is to be haunted, to be constantly on the verge of collapse.
I keep using that word—-“haunting”—to describe Little Dog’s lineage. And I don’t believe I can describe how haunted these characters are—not just by their pasts, but by the America that both offers refuge and alienates those very refugees. Vuong said in an interview that he’d “[written] a phantom novel” with his debut, and he couldn’t have articulated it better. Little Dog is caught between his own (queer) desires and the weight of his family history. His mother, Rose, is a traumatized parent, afflicting trauma on Little Dog to protect him from facing trauma—”to lay hands on your child is to prepare him for war,” writes Vuong. His grandmother, Lan, battles schizophrenia yet never breaks her strength in front of her grandson. In the sandal-clapping kitchen of Little Dog’s childhood, mounds of rice become ghosts themselves—silent witnesses to the history of survival. The steam rising, her son birthing and unbirthing himself.
There is a kind of horror in an American body, Vuong reveals. And there is a kind of horror that is then passed onto Little Dog, translating America to his family. They are not survivors of war, or survivors of motherhood, but rather survivors of America itself. Little Dog is translative in his telling, and it shows us that the country of refuge is cruel—it is unforgiving as any mother who has lived through war, it is a cradle that snaps on a whim. And for him and his family, they survive America, in all its horrors. Their survival is in spite of everything that wounds their bodies—Vietnamese bodies, war-lived bodies, queer bodies—they are all gorgeous in the fact that they are being.
In this backdrop, the character of Trevor, with whom Little Dog has a teenage affair, embodies a different strain of American identity—a rough-edged masculinity that stands in stark contrast to Little Dog’s queerness (both sexual and literal). Trevor represents a kind of privilege, his confidence stemming from an acceptance that Little Dog can only dream of. He’s older, white, a tobacco farm worker, a 50 Cent listener, and football fan; Little Dog says that it’s impossible to describe Trevor without mentioning “the Oxy and coke.” He’d become a young addict after he was prescribed OxyContin for a broken angle—Trevor is constantly high and “impossibly American,” in Little Dog’s words.
And Vuong’s portrayal of the two boys’ love is nothing short of extraordinary. Trevor—while a part of the white American masculinity that excludes Little Dog—engages in an immediate attraction to him. Vuong invokes Trevor’s internalized homophobia; he’s attracted to Little Dog, but at the same time conflates masculinity with heterosexuality: for Trevor, queer love becomes innately transgressive. After the two’s first intimate encounter, Trevor lays next to Little Dog, head turned to the side as he cries—”the way boys do.” It’s as if he’d call Little Dog a slur, but can only offer him tenderness. In Vuong’s previous debut in poetry, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, there’s a sprawling, undeniable gift for language, at its most granular level. And I wouldn’t consider this novel completely outside that realm. It is a prose poem in its own right—and this vivifies the love between two boys. In the 90s, there was a major fear of gaybashing, and queer love is still too often seen as obscene; with a voice as poetic as Vuong’s, queer love is not anything but a form of love itself. And this love is gorgeous.
Perhaps what I’m trying to say is this book couldn’t be any more worthy of its title. Perhaps it exceeds the title—redefines gorgeous, redefines queerness, redefines an immigrant’s love. But we too often add objects to these verbs. Vuong deconstructs being an immigrant, being Vietnamese, being in an American body or being queer—but I think we are complicating things too far. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous was never about one thing: it is about being, by itself. There is no doubt that this novel will continue to be read, and we can only thank Vuong for composing it.
About "Love in the Time of Banned Books"
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