Ocean Vuong's " On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" a Semi-biographical Novel

Ocean Vuong (b Viet Nam 1988) is American poet & essayist.  "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous" is Vuong's debut novel which is a semi-biographical pastiche of poetry, family history and self-awakening.  "Little Dog' (as he's called by his grandmother) narrates a coming of age tale told in hindsight as a young man in his 20s. Vuong, like Little Dog (LD) were both born in Viet Nam & immigrated to Hartford, CT in the 90s with family after spending a year in a Philippine refugee camp.  LD's mother Rose is loving & brutal, overbearing and neglectful, demoralized and omnipotent.  As a young boy just learning English, LD becomes the voice for the household.  He struggles to fit in at school while yearning to be accepted.  His grandmother is schizophrenic and an artful raconteur for  folklore & life in Viet Nam.  Lan's daughter Rose is the daughter of an American soldier and mother to LD.  This elegiac novel reads as on-going dialogue LD maintains with his mother in attempt to bear his soul to her, reckon with his own life and mostly with the hope of bridging the chasms that set them apart.  In so doing, Vuong becomes a conduit for reflecting deeper into one's own innermost being.  This is achieved through Vuong's revelatory gift for unmasking beauty born of hardship and  pondering connections between irreconcilable forces.  LD writes hauntingly of his first love and sexual encounters with Trevor one of several young men who die from a drug over-dose.  We learn  of LD's physical abuse at the hands of his mother and the brutality his mother suffered by his father who remains apart of the family.  Vuong's memories are viewed with an innocence that paint an amber glow over the indignities and hardships he & his family endured & flourished from as refugees struggling for a foothold. "An individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly." LD's reconciles the lives he & his mother shared as a phoenix rising from ashes.  "All this time I told myself we were born from war-but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.  Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence-but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it."  Vuong's novel is overly ripe with loveliness rendering a contemplation of serenity.