BitterSweet Summer Fiction '25
Louis Shankar reviews four recent queer novels.
Sunstruck by William Rayfet Hunter
Sunstruck will, invariably, be compared to Saltburn — which is, I think, a shame, as it was written before that film had even come out, yet certain similarities are undeniable: even the titles have the same cadence. I, personally, greatly disliked that film; and I struggled slightly with Sunstruck, although I found it to be far more engaging than Saltburn. Both claim to be about class — somewhere between critique and satire — but have very little to actually say about class in the twenty-first century, beyond: rich people are cunts, huh? There’s no serious, genuine, or nuanced class analysis. I honestly think it would be a more interesting and original novel if the central couple were allowed to end up together despite their differences, instead of being doomed from the outset because of their divergent backgrounds. Revelations — in both cases, about parents — are convoluted and ring hollow to the plot, a contrivance in order to provide a twist rather than add depth and authenticity to a character.
I found the narrator to be difficult, but not in an interesting way; I think the book might have been altogether more successful if written in the third person. The fact that he remains nameless throughout — which itself requires a number of contrivances — adds nothing of substance while often becoming annoying.
The first half of the novel is more surprising and successful than the second; it plays with tension and micro-aggressions and is full of brilliant, subtle observations. Plenty is left unsaid, unresolved. I devoured the first hundred pages or so, but by the time I was three-quarters through, I was honestly quite bored. I kept reading out of a sense of obligation and in the vague hope that something radical or strange might happen (it didn’t).
While it pitches itself as somewhere between an erotic thriller and a state-of-the-nation queer romance, it falls short of both. I’m sure it will be commercially successful — not least for its sunbaked marketing, perfectly teed up for summer — and no doubt the rights have already been bought for a screen adaptation. Sunstruck is a perfectly enjoyable summer read. I don’t know if I can offer much more enthusiastic praise than that, I’m afraid, even though the author and publisher both make great claims for its novelty.
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
The Emperor of Gladness is a remarkably different novel to Ocean Vuong’s wildly successful debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. For one, it is structured like a typical novel: where On Earth was written as a letter from the narrator to his mother, Emperor uses a third person narrative voice. There are chapters, which move chronologically forward through a number of months, with a few flashbacks. This voice isn’t neutral, though, and is strangely knowledgeable — seeing not only into certain characters’ thoughts (somewhat inconsistently) but their futures, too. Hai — our protagonist — bears many similarities to both Vuong and the narrator of On Earth, nicknamed ‘Little Dog’. Is this a sequel? I’m not sure it matters.
The novel combines two separate autobiographical threads from Vuong’s life: his time spent working at a fast food restaurant; and his time spent living with an elderly Lithuanian woman while he was a student, about which he wrote an essay in 2015.
The novel is set in East Gladness, Connecticut, and focuses on Hai, a Vietnamese-American teenager who struggles with addiction and lying. We get to know his family: his mother, cousin, aunt, and grandmother; and his quote-unquote chosen family, the eccentric characters who populate the family-style diner where he finds a job. This is a novel of outsiders and seeks to celebrate the overlooked.
The LRB published an evisceration of both Vuong’s novels by the novelist and critic Tom Crewe; it’s a fascinating piece of criticism but, in my opinion, deeply flawed. It reads as personal, and paranoid. (I must admit that Crewe’s novel, which was widely lauded, is one of the most boring novels I’ve read in years, which I had to force myself to finish.) Bookforum’s review of Emperor by Brandon Taylor is much more even handed, as he tries to understand Vuong’s popularity while still pulling up his tonal peculiarities and the inconsistencies throughout the novel — are these deliberate, and, if so, do they serve a valid purpose?
I enjoyed reading The Emperor of Gladness. I didn’t love it; I wasn’t as captivated as I was by On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous — and in part this feels like a question of maturity. Despite its affective draw and its emotional intensity, it didn’t really stay with me after I closed the book. I worry this is partly how thoroughly American the novel is: I couldn’t relate to many of the specificities of the lives Vuong evokes. It is a portrait of very particular America — in terms of both class and geography — at a very particular moment: sensitive, evocative, but flawed portrait.
Jeanne by Arielle Burgdorf
I read Jeanne while on holiday in Wales, surrounded in part by bilingual friends fluent in both English and Welsh. This felt apt: to be immersed in language, only understanding some of it.
Jeanne is an innovative and original novel that follows Jean/ne — a translator — through a marriage and its deterioration; towards an affair with another woman. It’s a wonderful interrogation of queerness and intersectional identity: sexuality, gender, nationality.
It’s a jet-setting plot: meet-cute in Iceland, romance in Paris; stasis in London and escape to Montreal. There is something specific, I think, to the Canadian/Quebecois context that was lost on me. I understand that sections of the novel were previously published in French.
This is a novel of ideas: about language and identity, and how they relate to — and limit — one another. It is never dry, though, and the central characters are fully realised; while there are references to and citations of numerous critics, writers, and philosophers, these don’t weigh down the plot. At points, the language starts to break down as the narrator, too, breaks down — diacritics swarm the page, unpronounceable. This strangeness is intriguing; I wanted even more.
There are a number of sections in French and Russian that are left untranslated — perhaps something is lost, then, to some readers — but this seems to be the point. A degree of unintelligibility is not a bad thing. Art should be able to elicit different responses from different audiences; not everyone should be expected to arrive with an identical frame of references.
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt
I really wanted to like Open, Heaven. I loved All Down Darkness Wide, Seán Hewitt’s memoir from 2022, and I’m a fan of his poetry collections (Tongues of Fire, 2020; Rapture’s Road, 2024), too. His prose is consistently beautiful and his evocation of gay desire and affection is at once specific and capacious.
Open, Heaven is a coming of age novel, a story of a first love, although there’s little growth. James is trapped and we accompany him through a moment of stasis; he circles around certain concerns and the arrival of a mysterious stranger offers hope — possibility — of escape, something new. Undoubtedly James did eventually escape, break free of his rural confines, but this is, sadly, beyond the scope of the novel.
The book teases the reader at the outset — introducing some big revelation that would come only at the end of the plot; something that had happened that would doom the narrator for decades to come. It was an anticlimax, though. He catches feelings for a straight boy, whose body language and general energy he unconsciously misreads. Nothing happens. Boiled down to its essence, it felt like a very clichéd tale: awkward gay boy desires complicated straight friend, wills for something to happen that fundamentally cannot. I hoped for this narrative to be twisted, queered, inverted. Sure, life is full of disappointments — queer life included — but must our fiction be, too? Can we not have stories that show us how things might be (or might have been) otherwise?
I myself grew up in rural England, at a similar time to the events of this novel. I struggled with isolation, with my sexuality. I should, I think, have related to James. But I didn’t.
The prose is beautiful; Hewitt is a wonderful stylist. He evokes rural England with a sensitivity but an undercurrent of savagery: there is violence beneath the beauty. The subplot exploring James’ younger brother’s illness is taut and intense and unusual. It all feels very real — which is at one its greatest strength and a fundamental flaw. I hoped for escapism instead of an insistence — however tender and careful — upon something I have tried to leave behind.
