In Defence of Ocean Vuong

-Ashley Allard

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 In a world where people are reading less and less, and if they are reading they are reading disconnected, blatantly-badly written smut, we are now cancelling authors. And yes, sure, cancel them for saying a slur or writing misogynistic sex scenes or being an accomplice to murder. You know, your typical cancellable things. But, now, get on the bandwagon of cancelling authors based on style and grammatical errors that don’t really matter.

We have slipped into a society where contemporary reviews must be overwhelmingly, almost sickeningly, positive. As a culture writer, I often attend plays and shows and movie premieres and book launches and open mics. And I feel this instinctive need to write about them positively. I used to write for a different media company, and I was invited to attend and review a comedy show. I didn’t necessarily approve of the one skit, and wrote a tough but fair criticism of it. My editor told me to remove it, as they had politely invited me. This marked anything negative I wanted to say as null and void. So, at the end of the day, contrary to popular belief, if you want to get a positive review of something, just invite a bunch of journalists!

We have lost the art of the critical review. This snowflake treatment isn’t helping anyone, but in defiance of this, it is incredibly easy for everything to instead turn into rage-bait. A negative review now relies on swear words, ungraceful insults and, comically, britishisms to really get the point across. Balance must, somehow, be possible.

Let’s talk about Ocean Vuong. If you are unfamiliar with Vuong, he has written two novels, both of which immediately rocketed to international critical acclaim: On Earth, We Are Briefly Gorgeous and The Emperor of Gladness. He recently received an honorary doctorate, and lectures Creative Writing at NYU. Apart from his novels, Vuong has released multiple poetry anthologies, for which has received multiple awards, including the T. S. Eliot prize.

It wasn’t long before Vuong became popular outside of the gate-keeping literary spaces. Which means, the haters obviously started to come crawling out of their caves, watching, waiting for the tiniest slip-up to back up their shallow hatred of anything mainstream.

With Vuong, there wasn’t necessarily a slip-up. Instead, it was writer Tom Crewe’s review. Crewe is an award-winning writer, so he has a leg to stand on. And his criticisms of Vuong’s writing are grounded in academic and novelistic reasoning.

Crewe’s criticism includes:

• "Vuong’s prose [has a] bludgeoning inexactness – not a fruitful, poetic ambivalence, but sheer clumsiness. Tenses slip (…), Constructions are off (…), Descriptions frequently make no sense (…) Images are confused (…)"

• "the book is intolerably busy with vatic, empty utterances (...)"

• "This language is not poetic, but ridiculous, sententious, blinded by self-love and pirouetting over a chasm (...)"

• "the success of the novel hinges on its mode of presentation"

• "The Emperor of Gladness appears to have been edited from space, with the result that it is inordinately long and almost entirely filler."

Now, I will take Crewe’s critique to heart. Yes, sometimes Vuong’s prose is deeply self-indulgent and sickeningly rich sometimes (I mean, take a look at the titles of his works). Yes, Crewe does point out some sentences where an editor has failed to pick up the slips in tenses and sometimes I do pretend to understand the writer’s descriptions to appear intelligent.

Vuong has defended his prose and his narrative plotting by saying he refutes the minimalist and the controlled, the typical Western style of story-telling. He explicitly stated in multiple interviews — pre-release and post-release — that The Emperor of Gladness is meant to examine characters, rather than follow a narrative arc. It is meant to be portraiture, rather than your stereotypical setting: action — climax — denouement. And yes, work can focus on the characters without being unnecessarily flowery but at the same time, that is just Vuong’s style.

But then we go on to examine the masses of armchair literary critics that hide behind their niche yet relatable Substack username and defile literature on subreddits. It is a snowballing effect: One academic or writer will write something that criticizes a popular contemporary author and everyone who either didn’t like it or didn’t understand it or sometimes didn’t even read it (often because it is just that: popular) will jump at the chance to write their own op-eds and think pieces, recycling the original critic’s work. Just now with SuperSized Slander.

I first heard that Vuong was being cancelled via —where else?— TikTok. Which led me to Crewe’s article which then brought me to the Ultimate Soapbox, Substack. Here, I found the review which inspired me to write this.

Upsettingly, the review has a banger title: "[Vuong begins to cry]": The beginning of the end of Ocean Vuong. Eris, the author, writes for the Discordia Review, and I looked at some of their content and found it interesting. It’s exactly what your typical edgy gen z who uses Substack wants to read: Sydney Sweeney drama, the cheating couple at the Coldplay concert, some things about Palestine and America, America, America, America. Basically, the Discordia Review is merely an echo chamber of what Western-centric pseudo-intellectuals continue to consume online.

But, enough hate towards Discordia.

The user, Eris, simply decided to take Crewe’s critique a step further, and decided to kick Vuong in the gut over and over and over again. The review is littered, a bit too heavily, with swearing and ungraceful attempts to roast his writing:

• "yes, his novels wipe the dog’s ass"

• "the man is a fucking illiterate bellend"

• "Vuong asks such empty-headed free-associative bullshit"

The review centres itself in the following main criticisms of the author: his flowery prose, which does sometimes fall flat, especially out of context, and his defence of his white students (saying that they’re trying to improve their reading and understanding of other communities, even though this comes off as bittersweet; they are, after all, white male students studying at NYU). Eris focusses on Vuong referring to the Second World War as an American war, and how this is historically incorrect. Which is difficult to acknowledge as a criticism, as America’s very existence has relied on blood and missiles and bombs. America has been complicit in almost every contemporary war. If war is what fuels America, and if every war has benefitted America in some way, does that entitle us— especially populations who have been directly targeted by America, like Vuong’s Vietnam — to call every war an American war?

All in all, the review uses crude language to make a point which can’t even sustain itself. You’re really going to call a Vietnamese immigrant and refugee, whose first language is not English, with multiple literary awards under his belt ‘an illiterate bellend’? Sounds kinda… problematic to me. I also find it cute that the author — a Canadian — resorts to British slang to try and come off as posh when just being blatantly rude and ridiculous. It shows.

All in all, because of Eris’ crude language and sole reliability on Crewe’s review and out-of-context quotes, the attempted tear-down piece falls flat. And if it's just rage-bait, well… you got me!

Vuong is the next victim of a cancel culture that will rip you apart because of your popularity. Which is especially sad: As if we needed more reasons for people not to read anymore.

We all just need to chill the fuck out. If authors are gaining popularity and they’re not involved with Epstein or preaching right-wing individualism or transphobia then let them fucking write! Our world needs empathy more than anything right now, and reading fiction is always a good step in the right direction. We need to read the narratives of those we will never fully understand: it puts us in someone else’s shoes for a couple hundred pages. So, let people write. And encourage people to read.