Novel of the week

(Penguin, $26)

It may be unfair to compare any modern writer to Walt Whitman, but Ocean Vuong is “surely a literary descendant,” said Ron Charles in The Washington Post. The stunning debut novel by the young poet who was born in Saigon and raised in Connecticut is, like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “a lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universal.” Vuong’s fictional stand-in is Little Dog, who is recounting his life story in a long candid letter to his volcanic mother, a Vietnamese immigrant who can’t read. Little Dog is a product of war in his homeland and poverty in America. He is also gay, and a secret teenage affair with the grandson of a tobacco farmer becomes a defining experience. As fine as his prose can be, On Earth is also “filled with showy, affected writing, with forced catharses and swollen quasi-profundities,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The book achieves “genuine force” when its doomed romance blooms, but you have to endure its lows to enjoy its peaks. “At its best, it’s unleashed in every regard.” ■