On bursts of tenderness – Tom Crewe in LRB:

“Something very strange has been going on. Picking up the paperback of Ocean Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which has now sold more than a million copies, you encounter blurbs the likes of which you’ve never seen before. ‘A marvel,’ Marlon James says. Daisy Johnson tells us that ‘Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be’ and – forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable first novel.’ Ben Lerner goes big: ‘Vuong ... expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres.’ He must have thought this would be hard to beat. But he hadn’t reckoned on Max Porter, who declares it ‘a masterpiece ... a staggeringly beautiful book’, and what’s more, a ‘huge gift to the world’.
Then you read the book and are confronted with such lines as ‘a bullet without a body is a song without ears.’ Or: ‘The most useful thing one can do with empty hands is hold on.’ Or: ‘The work somehow sutured a fracture inside me.’ Or: ‘I drove my face into him as if into a climate, the autobiography of a season.’ Or: ‘The heart, like any law, stops only for the living.’ It’s obvious that Vuong is rewriting what fiction is supposed to be, but is it a privilege to watch? On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which was published in 2019, takes the form of a letter written by a young man, known only as Little Dog, to his mother, Rose. Little Dog’s life story, which closely maps onto Vuong’s, involves his coming to the US from Vietnam in 1990 aged two and growing up in deindustrialised, down-and-out, opioid-numbed Hartford, Connecticut. He is raised mainly by Rose, who has almost no English and is illiterate (so can’t read the story she is being told, which is in some sense her story), and suffers from mental illness. She beats her son between occasional bursts of tenderness.”

(…)

“After this, Trevor shows a softer side, and takes Little Dog to the river to wash, before making a grand redemptive gesture.
I was only a few steps ahead of him before I felt his palm push hard between my shoulders, leaning me forward, my hands instinctually braced on my knees. Before I could turn around, I felt his stubble, first between my thighs, then higher. He had knelt in the shallows, knees sunk in river mud. I shook – his tongue so impossibly warm compared to the cold water, the sudden, wordless act ... I looked between my legs and saw his chin moving to work the act into what it was, what it always has been: a kind of mercy. To be clean again. To be good again. What have we become to each other if not what we’ve done to each other? Although this was not the first time he did this, it was the only time the act gained new, concussive power. I was devoured, it seemed, not by a person, Trevor, so much as by desire itself. To be reclaimed by that want, to be baptised by its pure need.
It’s hard to believe that, in the history of literature, an episode of rimming has ever been presented in such gauzy terms, made quite so desperately sentimental. It stands for the evasions – and confusions (‘concussive’) – of a desperately sentimental book.”

(…)

“But no writer can expect to be taken at their own self-estimation.”

Read the review here.

A hatchet job can be fun to read, as long as you are not the victim of the hatchet man that is.

Sentimental fiction in which suffering is romanticized and certain minorities – the ones that according to current standards deserve empathy – are subtly or not subtly glorified has been popular for quite a while.

Oprah played a huge role in this.

And the examples that have been given are quite convincing. On the other hand, you can find sentences in Kafka’s work that can be easily ridiculed.

But to turn the act of rimming into pure sentimentality is definitely a highlight.