Review of The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong (Penguin, 2025)
Deindustrialization in the Northeast spawned a service sector that didn’t quite match up to the offerings of the old, manufacturing-based economy. The resulting lower wages, limited job benefits, and reduced job security propelled many workers, their families, and communities into a downward spiral.
Two great regional storytellers — Russell Banks and Richard Russo — plowed this field with great personal insight. Both endured difficult childhoods, marked by absent or unreliable blue-collar fathers who left single moms in charge. In their short fiction and novels, both Banks and Russo chronicled the tragedies and tribulations of white working-class people living in hometowns like their own.
In works by Banks like Hamilton Stark, Affliction, and Rule of Bone or Russo’s The Risk Pool, Empire Falls, and Nobody’s Fool, we meet pipe fitters and laborers, leather factory workers, auto mechanics and small-town cops, grill cooks and waitresses, and even the occasional failed academic.
Their fictional world contains few characters and plots of the politically uplifting sort favored by promoters of proletarian literature the 1930s. Late twentieth-century working-class life in the Northeast did not lend itself to such heroic narratives. It was a time of downward mobility after lost strikes, layoffs, plant closings, and the replacement of stable blue-collar jobs with far more precarious ones.
In tumble-down houses, battered by cold winters, cross-generational family dysfunction worsened. People got divorced, went bankrupt, and left town. In the works of Banks and Russo, even the human company and liquid solace found in local bars and diners…
Auteur: Steve Early
