Don't underestimate the wisdom of court jesters. In The Tempest, Trinculo, King Alonso's jester, said, "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows," a maxim that lesser fools have reconfigured for everything from politics to war. That combination of war and unexpected circumstances is central to The Emperor of Gladness, a deceptively simple fusion of bleakness and mordant humor by MacArthur Fellow Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous). Hai, a 19-year-old Vietnamese American drug addict, lives in East Gladness, a Connecticut town "raised up from a scab of land along a river in New England." Having run "out of ways to salvage his failures," he's about to jump off a bridge during a storm. In a brilliant touch, he's saved by a woman waving her arms from her house, not to get his attention but to catch a bedsheet that's blowing away.
She's 82-year-old Grazina, a Lithuanian with "mid-stage frontal lobe dementia," who fled her war-torn homeland decades earlier. That Hai becomes her live-in caretaker is only one of many elements in this marvelous work. Others include Hai's cousin, Sony, who helps Hai, an aspiring writer fond of Slaughterhouse-Five and The Brothers Karamazov, get a job at a fast-food place; the restaurant manager, a woman who dreams of becoming a professional wrestler; and a colleague who indulges in crackpot conspiracy theories, such as that "the earth was controlled by reptilians living underground" and that Dick Cheney is a lizard in disguise. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Questions of war and prejudice are sensitively explored in this poetic work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer