The Emperor of Gladness

The novel opens with a wide portrait of East Gladness, a neglected New England town shaped by poverty, abandoned industry, buried violence, and stubborn endurance. Into this landscape steps Hai, a nineteen-year-old carrying grief, addiction, and shame. On a rainy night in 2009, he goes to King Philip’s Bridge intending to jump. Before he can do it, he is seen by Grazina Vitkus, an eighty-two-year-old Lithuanian widow living nearby. She talks him down with a mix of suspicion, humor, ritual, and command, then brings him into her house, feeds him, and offers him a room in exchange for help around the house after her previous live-in aide disappeared. With nowhere else to go, Hai accepts.

At 16 Hubbard Street, Hai becomes Grazina’s caretaker and slowly learns the shape of her illness. She has frontal lobe dementia that can leave her paranoid, combative, or trapped in wartime memories. Hai organizes her medications, cooks, shops, and steadies her through episodes in which she confuses past and present. The arrangement gives him temporary shelter and purpose, but it does not cure him. He is still haunted by Noah, a dead friend whose UPS jacket he wears, and by the lies he has told his mother about his life. He also secretly pockets old Dilaudid from the house, showing that self-destruction remains close at hand even while he is trying to survive.

When money runs low, Hai looks for work and reconnects with his cousin Sony, who helps him get hired at HomeMarket. The grocery-and-rotisserie store becomes Hai’s first real community in East Gladness. Its manager, BJ, is grandiose and needy but sincere in her belief that food can comfort people. Wayne rules the chicken station with quiet pride rooted in his family’s tradition of Black pitmasters. Maureen hides grief and fury beneath crude jokes and conspiracy talk. Russia, restless and funny, carries worry about his sister’s addiction. Amid reheated food, exhausting shifts, and absurd routines, Hai discovers the dignity and intimacy of shared labor. Even when the store’s comforts are partly fraudulent, the relationships are real.

As Hai settles into work, the novel fills in his past. He was born in Vietnam, immigrated to Connecticut, and became the first in his family to attend college. After Noah’s death and his own addiction deepened, he dropped out. Unable to bear his mother’s disappointment after his grandmother’s death, he lied and claimed he had been accepted into a medical program in Boston. Instead of going to school, he entered rehab, then left it still lying to her. That deception becomes one of the central wounds of his life: he wanted to give his mother hope, but the lie traps him in deeper shame and avoidance.

Life with Grazina grows more intimate and more unstable. Fireworks and storms send her into vivid wartime episodes, and Hai learns to calm her by becoming “Sergeant Pepper,” an invented soldier who guides her through imagined evacuations. These performances let him meet her inside memory rather than fight it. At the same time, he grows attached to her as more than a patient. She opens Jonas Vitkus’s hidden basement library to him, reviving his abandoned desire to be a reader and writer. Yet the strain of caregiving and the weight of her decline also push him toward relapse. After a terrible night in which he grasps the true devastation of her dementia, he breaks forty-seven days of sobriety by taking the pills he has hidden.

The people around Hai are similarly burdened by loss. A racist incident at HomeMarket reveals Wayne’s fierce attachment to his work as inherited dignity. Maureen eventually tells Hai that her son Paul died of leukemia and that grief never resolved into meaning. Russia admits how hard he is working to keep paying for his sister Anna’s rehab. Sony, awkward, literal, and obsessed with military history, is carrying his own family damage: his mother, Aunt Kim, is in prison after an arson scheme, and he dreams of earning enough money to help her. Hai and Sony’s bond deepens through work, shared childhood memories, and mutual disappointments, even as Hai repeatedly fails to tell the truth or fully show up when it matters.

Several crises accelerate the story. A homeless regular named Cookie overdoses in the HomeMarket bathroom, forcing Hai into direct contact with the emergency he is always trying to outrun. Regional manager Mitch Vogel later humiliates the staff and pressures BJ to lay someone off. Meanwhile, Hai learns more of Sony’s family mythology: Sony believes his absent father Minh is alive, heroic, and somewhere in Vermont. During a prison visit on Tết, Aunt Kim privately tells Hai that Minh actually died years earlier in a car fire, and that the family has kept up a fiction for Sony through forged letters. Instead of clearing things up, the revelation binds Hai to yet another secret.

At the same time, Grazina’s family threatens the fragile home Hai has made with her. Her son Lucas Vitkus and his wife Clara treat her as an embarrassment and push to place her in Hamilton Home and sell her house. Hai sees how cruelly they reduce her to a burden, and his loyalty to Grazina becomes explicit. She, in turn, tells him plainly that he is not just her helper but her friend. After a hospitalization from a fall, however, her condition worsens sharply. She grows more frightened, disoriented, and physically frail. Lucas returns with legal authority and social-service support, making it clear that Hai cannot hold off her removal forever.

Before that final separation, Sony’s own crisis explodes. Forced by Vogel to fire someone, BJ dismisses Sony. He runs off toward Vermont, chasing the fantasy of recovering the “diamond” fused into his father’s hand and finding some final proof of meaning in the family legend. Hai tries to stop him, then gives in and joins the trip, bringing Grazina because he cannot leave her behind. BJ and Maureen come too, and the journey turns into an improvised road trip of damaged people trying to help one another. At Minh’s crash site in Vermont, Sony breaks down in grief. The group searches for the diamond and finds nothing. Later, the myth itself is undercut: Minh was not the war hero Sony imagined but a laundry worker on a U.S. base whose wound came by accident. The trip yields no treasure, only mourning and a brief, exhausted solidarity.

When Hai and Grazina return, an official notice announces that Family Services will come the next day to take her to Hamilton Home. They spend one last night together in forced normalcy, then share a tender dawn at a diner and in a parking lot full of migrating salamanders. When the removal finally comes, Hai tries to protect Grazina the only way he knows how: by entering her delusion and staging one last escape on her scooter, casting her transfer as a passage to America. Lucas and the staff stop them anyway and take her. Afterward, unmoored and nearly out of pills, Hai gives Sony the money he has managed to gather so Sony can help free Aunt Kim and start over. Alone, he hides in a dumpster and speaks to his mother on the phone, still lying about medical school but at last admitting the core truth beneath everything: he is afraid of the future. Her answer is simple—that life is good when people do good for one another. The novel ends with Hai suspended between collapse and survival, stripped of illusions but still held, however precariously, by the care he has given and received.