Where American Literature Went Vuong

The book world has been all too kind to Ocean Vuong. In the 2010s, he received breathless plaudits for his unremarkable early poetry and first novel before raking in a Whiting Award, Eliot Prize and a MacArthur "genius" Grant. His new novel, The Emperor of Gladness, about a young Dilaudid addict and restaurant worker named Hai and his various dreary adventures around the invented town of East Gladness, Connecticut, received the kind of gargantuan mainstream book coverage of which most writers may only dream. Yet after reading this and his other work, I have a question: What happened to our literature? How did American letters emerge from the riches of the Bible and Shakespeare, with Hawthorne and Melville in tow, then produce a 20th century of Faulkner, Bellow, Pynchon, Ozick, Kincaid and McCarthy, only to land us in an illiterate swamp of endless purple description and laughable metaphor? Bad popular writing happens. But literary writing this bad, this praised? This is a sign of some deeper malady.