TONE DEAF WRITING SINKS ALL GOOD IDEAS

Ocean Vuong takes inspiration from the elegance of other writers and works hard to construct memorable, poetic sentences. Note here that the verb used is construct, not compose—the latter implies an effort of musicality, the work of a writer with an ear for euphony. The list of those who can do this effortlessly is long—Updike, Cheever, Baldwin, Nabokov, Abe, Toni Morrison—but the line of those who slave away to achieve it is infinitely longer.Vuong is by no means a horrible writer. In fact, there are stretches of fine detail and emotional nuance when he leaves the poet’s hat in the trunk of the car. I say “trunk of the car” to suggest that Vuong writes at his best when he stops trying to take the reader’s breath away with images that are clearly designed to do just that.The premise of the novel is certainly sound for a three-hankie literary sob-fest. The Emperor of Gladness follows a depressed 19-year-old college dropout named Hai who becomes the caretaker for an elderly widow, Grazina, suffering from dementia. They form an unlikely bond and find a sense of belonging in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut.

Far too often, however, Vuong gums up the narrative flow with sentences that are incongruous—sometimes even ridiculous—howlers that make you swallow hard, like you’ve bitten into something too bitter or too sweet. Lines like “I know, it’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter” or “Our hands empty except for our hands” are examples of poetic overreach. These images, similes, and allusions often feel absurdly strained and tonelessly incongruous. They add nothing to the storyline—no irony, no momentum, no mystery, and no real connection to the emotional core of the suffering being portrayed.I finished the book in fits and starts, forcing my way past the roadblocks of these inept poeticisms. There was no joy in Mudville after closing the final page. Vuong clearly wants to be a good writer—perhaps even a great one—but that will be difficult unless he develops a sharper sense of what works in his prose and what doesn’t. Composing means paying attention to how well the words come together to form an effective whole. Vuong has the raw talent, but he needs to learn when to let the poetry serve the story, not smother it.

THE SILENCE by Don DeLillo

 

The worst thing that could happen to all of us, at times, seems less like a nuclear holocaust that would render the planet a charred cinder than all of us being cast into our own self-designed hells. What if we had to talk to each other and depend on the function of collective wisdom and planning just to exist another day? What if the lights went out, the internet went blank, planes fell from the sky, and there were no distractions to mummify our individual sense of terror?Don DeLillo’s 2020  novel The Silence tells the story of five people gathered in a Manhattan apartment on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022, when a sudden, unexplained global event causes all digital technology to cease functioning. As usual, DeLillo stays in the world he knows and has chronicled so well over the decades—that of privileged white Americans relying on their powers of rationalization to convince themselves that things are fine and normal, even as the various systems that gave them affluence in the first place—finance, science, political skullduggery, technology, college-level obfuscation—fall apart and cease to operate. It might be said that DeLillo’s fictions have always been about the failure of belief systems that once seemed to explain and define the universe his characters inhabit. Just as the advances in science, philosophy, capitalism, ideology, and the rest en masse replaced the gods and became the de facto religious beliefs of the modern era, DeLillo highlights the death of these old-new gods. He shows how individual and collective dedication to various beliefs about how things *should* be leaves us clueless, comic, full of dread—doubling down on convictions that no longer convince anyone, at the core of their being, that anything is fixed in place.The Silence is that tale again, in brief—a terse and lyrical ode to a world that has literally run down, suddenly and seemingly permanently without the power to fuel our commerce and distractions. It is a comedy written on a philosopher’s sketchpad, a setup for a joke that just ends—no punchline. It makes you think, What the hell just happened?—which is the point. I’m inclined to think that’s the wrong question. Rather, we might ask: How long have we been walking in our sleep, earbuds connected to cell phones playing music we don’t even like? Has it all been white noise, in all things? Something worth asking—and a book worth reading from a great American novelist.

 

A MASTERPIECE FROM JOHN CHEEVER

 
The Wapshot Chronicle  is John Cheever's first novel, published in 1957, and it is a timeless masterpiece of expressing the sorrow, the pity and the tragicomic of middle class life .  The titular family consists of eccentrics, all pursuing their varied and impulse driven distractions. The novel follows Leander Wapshot, an aging patriarch and ferryboat pilot in the fictional New England town of St. Botolphs, as he grapples with his eccentric family and fading relevance. His sons, Moses and Coverly, leave home to seek purpose in a world that seems increasingly absurd and disjointed. Moses navigates a series of romantic misadventures and professional aimlessness, while Coverly wrestles with existential confusion and sexual identity. Their cousin Honora, a wealthy and domineering matriarch, exerts control over the family’s finances and future. Through their missteps and revelations.  All such activities show to be vanities and the characters, despite vague assertions and protests from time to time of declaring themselves fully motivated citizens, show themselves to be a rudderless lot, a family in decline, each in their own way sensing that a veil has lifted and the illusion of their own normality is evaporating , but who still maintain that all is fine with their oddball takes on reality. Cheever has one of the greatest, if not the greatest prose styles of his generation, an elegant tone that guides savvy and sympathetic sentences , with an anonymous narrator that never reveals his or her hand, keeping matters in the third person, showing intimate knowledge of the lives of this family and their ideas as such, but withholds any outright suggestions as to how anything resolves . He wordsmithery is a marvel of elegant brevity with  just enough detail, his treatment of seasonal light is brilliant conveyed. Also on display is a sad ruthlessness in how he leads the reader toward the inevitable. The effect is comic, but the laughs are not slapstick but more like a melancholic jolt of recognition, as a reader’s own experience realizes the folly our gathering of the generationally related have embarked on.