After the strong critical and popular response to his fiction debut, ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS, expectations for Ocean Vuong’s second novel understandably are high. With THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS, the gifted poet has produced an emotionally affecting novel that is rooted in the particulars of life as it partakes of the universal.

Set in the gritty fictional small town of East Gladness, Connecticut, in 2009, the book, like its predecessor, draws on Vuong’s immigrant experience. Its protagonist, Hai, is a 19-year-old Vietnamese American who, as the novel opens, is perched on a bridge high above the Connecticut River on a dreary September evening, contemplating the leap that will end his life.

Hai is rescued from that fate by a shout from Grazina Vitkus, an octogenarian widow and “bent stub of a woman” from Lithuania who has lived for years in a dilapidated house in the nearly abandoned riverbank neighborhood. Diagnosed with dementia five years earlier, in the same year her husband died, she is now without a caregiver. With no training or experience, Hai steps into that role in exchange for her offer of the shelter he lacks.

"With THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS, the gifted poet has produced an emotionally affecting novel that is rooted in the particulars of life as it partakes of the universal."

But Hai also needs an income to support himself. Thanks to his younger cousin, Sony (named for the Trinitron TV) --- an autistic teenager with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War and an obsession with the movie Gettysburg --- he lands a job at the fast-casual restaurant HomeMarket. According to manager BJ, an aspiring professional wrestler, it’s a place that “turns food into feeling” and provides its customers with “a taste of the holidays without the pain of the holidays.” But in his $7.15 per hour job, Hai learns that it’s “not so much a restaurant as a giant microwave.”

Once he joins the “[w]eatherworn and perennially exhausted or pissed off or both” crew, Hai meets up with foul-mouthed but companionable conspiracy theorist Maureen; blue-haired Russia, an 18-year-old immigrant from Tajikistan who mans the drive-thru; and Wayne, the “Chief of Rotisserie,” who is proud of supervising the preparation of the chicken for which the restaurant is beloved by its regulars.

Hai shares with all of them the persistent hardships and fleeting rewards of their work. Vuong stretches his canvas beyond the boundaries of their workplace to include some engrossing set pieces: a harrowing Sunday afternoon that Hai, Maureen and Russia spend at a slaughterhouse to help Wayne earn a performance bonus in his part-time job and a frantic excursion to Vermont to aid Sony in his search to reclaim what he believes is a precious fragment of his family legacy. In depicting their work lives with frank realism, Vuong draws on his own experiences while growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, and working as an employee of Boston Market and Panera.

In this respect, THE EMPEROR OF GLADNESS joins a growing list of novels like Stewart O’Nan’s LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER, Ethan Joella’s THE SAME BRIGHT STARS, and Adelle Waldman’s HELP WANTED, which train a sympathetic eye on the world of working-class Americans. Without sentimentalizing these characters, Vuong reveals how their lives link pain and drudgery to some of the most meaningful connections any of them possess. He sums up this comradeship in a lovely sentence near the end of the novel:

“These people, bound by nothing but toil in a tiny kitchen that was never truly a kitchen, paid just above minimum wage, their presence known to each other mostly through muscle memory, the shape of their bodies ingrained in the psyche from hours of periphery maneuvering through the narrow counters and back rooms of a fast-food joint designed by a corporate architect, so that they would come to know the sound of each other’s coughs and exhales better than those of their kin and loved ones.”

But the novel’s most profound connection is the improbable one that develops between Grazina and Hai (or Labas, the Lithuanian word for “hello,” as she calls him). There is a true tenderness that bonds them, as Grazina increasingly slips from moments of relative lucidity deeper into her dementia. In one powerful scene that plays out in Grazina’s bathtub as Hai tries to calm her terror amid a fireworks display, he adopts the personage of an American soldier he names Sergeant Pepper, shepherding a teenage Grazina out of the village of her birth, a place that at different times fell under the control of both the Nazis and the Soviets during World War II.

Vuong takes a considerable risk with the character of Hai, an avid reader with a vague dream of someday becoming a writer. Fresh out of rehab, he reverts to gobbling prescription pain pills filched from Grazina’s supply and contemplates stealing several thousand dollars from her cookie tin. To conceal his whereabouts from his mother, who lives in low-income HUD housing on the other side of the river, he spins an elaborate fiction about enrolling in a program that will pave the way for his entry into medical school in Boston. Despite these transgressions, Vuong manages to convey Hai’s essential goodness, communicated most clearly in his heartfelt interactions with Grazina and Sony.

“Life is good when we do good things for each other,” Hai’s mother tells him as the novel nears its end. It’s an apt summing up of a story that invites us to reflect on how small kindnesses can resonate despite how inconsequential they otherwise may appear. The novelist Colum McCann once observed, “I happen to think that an ounce of empathy is worth a boatload of judgment.” Ocean Vuong clearly has taken the spirit of that philosophy to heart and applied it with true feeling in this deeply empathetic story.