On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

”Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence — but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”

So much of this is impossibly good that anything less than the maximum rating feels cheap. It is not perfect - many times a sentence sits like a golden egg, pleased with itself at the cost of flow — but if I were Vuong's editor I'd be afraid to cut, too. And many long passages are crafted to perfection. Every other line is a gut punch, but the novel's kaleidoscopic structure is what makes it feel enormous. It resists easy synthesis but feels complete. Ocean Vuong has that (little) dog in him.