The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

There is a lot and almost nothing going on it this novel, which one review I read called aspirational fantasy and a treatise on self-deception. There is a complex tension that runs through this book between nothing happening and everything falling slowly apart. It is also about dead end minimum wage jobs, desperation, and the family you choose. Hai is a mess. He is caught up in the expectations of Vietnamese immigrant families to assimilate and succeed and his complete inability to inhabit that dream. He won a scholarship to go to college and yet flamed out spectacularly. He is emerging from rehab, clean but more of a dry drunk than a straight ahead success and on one fateful night he meets Grazina, a Lithuanian immigrant who survived the war but lost her husband and she needs someone to take care of her. A match made in poverty. Hai has no ambition for himself, but he doesn't want Grazina to starve, so he gets a job in another roadside diner, and there he makes a family of sorts out of others who are hanging on, not the same as he, but they are more similar than they are different. It is heart breaking, predictable, and somehow lyrical and unexpected. The lies we tell ourselves to go on and the ones we tell others to get by. It is all here, and beautifully rendered at that.