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Why Ocean Vuong has become a battleground for questions of identity and art

Ocean Vuong’s work has critics decrying its prose while defenders celebrate its beauty. The debate has morphed into a battle over identity, authenticity, and what literature should be.

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese American writer whose works, include On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and his latest novel The Emperor of Gladness. (Wikimedia Commons, Penguin)

When Ocean Vuong burst onto the American literary scene with his 2016 poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, the response was immediate and glowing. “The poet’s debut reveals a master of juxtaposition willing to tell difficult stories with courage,” wrote theatre critic Kate Kellaway for the Guardian. His ‘compellingly assured’ debut collection won him the TS Eliot Prize, establishing him as a new poetic voice.

His 2019 debut novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous cemented his reputation, selling over a million copies, translated into dozens of languages, and winning him the MacArthur “genius” grant, making Vuong one of the few poets of his generation to cross over into celebrity. The novel, a lyrical, semi-autobiographical letter from a son to his Vietnamese mother, drew blurbs that bordered on reverence. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham called it “brilliant and remarkable,” while Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers deemed it “a huge gift to the world”. Vuong’s rise was unusual in an era when few writers reached such visibility. He was profiled in glossy magazines, collaborated with fashion houses, and became a rare kind of literary figure, who became a public star.

Now, with his second novel The Emperor of Gladness, Vuong has met a far more divided reception.

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The sharpest critiques yet

In the London Review of Books, novelist Tom Crewe, winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, delivered a bruising assessment. Vuong’s prose, he argued, suffers from “bludgeoning inexactness – not a fruitful, poetic ambivalence, but sheer clumsiness”. Crewe cited lines like “I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season” as examples of “similes or images that baffle.” He dismissed Vuong’s style as “ridiculous, sententious, blinded by self-love and pirouetting over a chasm.”

Online outlets amplified the pile-on. The literary Substack Discordia Review called Vuong an “illiterate bellend” and dismissed his success as “idpol slop, cheap ammunition in the culture war that once was”. The essay suggested that Vuong’s prominence owed more to publishing hype and identity politics than to literary merit.

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Fans and fellow writers strike back

But the harshness of these critiques has prompted a backlash. On Substack, writer Nancy Alice Chalmers asked why ambition in prose should be treated as a flaw: “Poetic prose isn’t the same as purple prose … If beauty in a sentence is the crime, I’ll keep committing it”.

Substack user Saint Trey W’s passionate defense has been endorsed by several admirers on Substack as he urged critics to draw a line between rigorous engagement and cruelty: “It is one thing to wrestle with a writer’s ideas … It is another to make sport of tearing down someone whose work has given voice to the unspeakable”.

Others have argued that Vuong is being judged by the wrong standard. Benjamin Clabault, a novelist and teacher, observed: “Vuong employs the rhetorical forms of the philosopher … but he’s not a philosopher. He’s a poet. And so the conclusion never comes … But there’s definitely beauty in it”.

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Even The London Review’s readers weighed in. In a published letter, Christopher Waldo, a scholar at the University of Washington, argued that Vuong’s style reflects his immigrant background and struggles with dyslexia, “Vuong, who is dyslexic, immigrated to the United States at the age of two and struggled to learn to read. His style bears the linguistic traces of the typical immigrant experiences of originary fracture and eventual reconstitution.”

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Why it matters

At stake in the Vuong debate is more than one writer’s reputation. For some, he represents the best hope for keeping serious literature visible in mainstream culture: “the last celebrity writer,” as Discordia Review put it. For others, his work embodies a trend toward style over substance, sincerity over craft.

The divide raises larger questions: should a novel strive for restraint and precision, or can it embrace excess and lyricism, even at the risk of absurdity? Does Vuong’s visibility as a queer, Vietnamese American writer shape how his work is received, or judged?

Vuong has become a stand-in for broader cultural battles over identity, authenticity, and the role of literature in a fragmented age. As Saint Trey W put it, “To read him is to remember that we are, indeed, briefly gorgeous, but that brevity is not a diminishment, it’s a command to live, to write, to love with urgency”.

Aishwarya Khosla

Aishwarya Khosla is a journalist currently serving as Deputy Copy Editor at The Indian Express. Her writings examine the interplay of culture, identity, and politics. She began her career at the Hindustan Times, where she covered books, theatre, culture, and the Punjabi diaspora. Her editorial expertise spans the Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Punjab and Online desks. She was the recipient of the The Nehru Fellowship in Politics and Elections, where she studied political campaigns, policy research, political strategy and communications for a year. She pens The Indian Express newsletter, Meanwhile, Back Home. Write to her at aishwaryakhosla.ak@gmail.com or aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com. You can follow her on Instagram: @ink_and_ideology, and X: @KhoslaAishwarya. ... Read More