This description is not so much the plot of the novel as it is the haunting backdrop that Little Dog circles again and again in his letter. The violence and desperation of the stories he’s grown up hearing (for instance, of men eating the brains of a live monkey as it kicks and rages) are retold and reimagined, exploited for their metaphorical potential. Vuong is masterly at creating indelible, impressionistic images. The characters of both Lan and Ma are shaped by the novel’s glimpses into their ecstasy and agony, as when Ma attends an Afro-Latino Baptist church for the first time, and, among the booming “fat organ and trumpet notes,” she begins shouting at her absent birth father in Vietnamese: “Where are you, Ba? … Where the hell are you? Come get me! Get me out of here! Come back and get me.” Focused, descriptive snapshots of Little Dog’s mother and grandmother abound, largely overshadowing the interstitial bits of essayistic writing. Vuong’s intention with the long riff on the opioid crisis, for example, seems to have been to explicitly abstract political meaning from personal narrative. And, although the book’s break into poetic form is perhaps designed to suggest that there are some expressions only poetry can communicate, at times the stylistic switches can feel like adornments on a powerful story that never required dressing up.

It is all backdrop for perhaps the more propulsive narrative thread that begins midway through the book, when a teenage Little Dog takes a summer job on a farm outside Hartford. There he meets the farm owner’s grandson Trevor, “the boy from whom I learned there was something even more brutal and total than work — want.” Trevor is older, white, a druggie, homosexually active but internally conflicted, twisted up in his own understanding of the demands of masculinity. Vuong beautifully evokes this boy’s seductive power over Little Dog: This is some of the most moving writing I’ve read about two boys experimenting together (and reader, I’ve read a lot). The sex here is good because it feels honest, messy, joyous, awkward, painful. In one scene, Little Dog admires his own body in the mirror, recognizing for the first time his own desirability: “I let the mirror hold those flaws — because for once … they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time.” The tenderness of the prose feels like a triumph against a world hellbent on embittering the tenderhearted. Early on the novel alludes to a future in which Little Dog has made it to college and found relative success and stability through writing; we assume that Trevor has been left behind, but as we read on, the why and how of the couple’s undoing is heartbreaking to discover.

Nowadays the word “sentimental” is impossible to detach from its pejorative sense, but the original, philosophical sense of the word refers to thought that is either colored by, or proceeds from, feeling. In today’s culture we’re often offered the choice between the ironic shrug of nihilism and positivity-obsessed pop psychology, which suggests that changing one’s thought patterns can control and produce desirable feelings. Vuong rejects that binary, and the book is brilliant in the way it pays attention not to what our thoughts make us feel, but to what our feelings make us think. To what kinds of truth does feeling lead? Oscar Wilde famously quipped that sentimentalism is wanting to have an emotion without paying for it, but Little Dog has paid and paid, and the truths arrived at in this book are valuable precisely because they are steeped in feeling.