Ocean Vuong’s powerful second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, May 13), centers on Hai, a 19-year-old college dropout with a painkiller habit who abandons a suicide attempt and finds an unlikely haven in a Connecticut fast-casual restaurant. But rather than a straightforward coming-of-age novel, Vuong delivers a complex study of identity, generational trauma, and capitalism’s downward pressures.

Vuong, a MacArthur Fellow and creative writing professor at New York University, has been equally acclaimed for his fiction and poetry. His first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Kirkus Prize; his poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds earned him a Whiting Award. In this interview, conducted over videochat and edited for space and clarity, he discusses the inspirations for Gladness, American literature’s shortcomings, and whether he plans to keep writing.

There are many tracks that this book runs on: It’s about working-class America, it’s about the aftereffects of war, it’s about addiction. What was your path into the novel?

The genesis is in the beginning of the book, where a 19-year-old is about to jump off a bridge. I’ve lost friends to suicide. I lost my uncle to suicide when he was 28. In our society, the mythos of suicide is often a disruption in the social fabric. If somebody’s on a bridge, all of a sudden, there’s all this attention, and they get talked off the edge, and then it’s kind of like, “All right, great, everybody go home.” But what does Day 2 look like for someone who decides to live? Day 4? Day 10? No one talks about that part of it.

Do you feel suicide and addiction are aftereffects of generational violence?

Yes. The poets knew this hundreds of years ago; oral traditions have talked about the contagion of sadness and trauma and rupture. Science is now catching up, finding that it’s wired in us. It changes our mitochondria, mostly through the maternal line. I think on one hand it’s epigenetic trauma. But another way to look at it is also epigenetic strength: The vigilance that your parents teach you how to perform could be a strength. It could be a site of power even while it’s a site of harm and reduction.

There’s a dearth of working-class American novels, and I appreciated the granularity of your description of the Home Market restaurant. How did you come to understand that environment and the people who work inside it?

It was something very deliberate to make the workplace feel real. I wanted it to feel like weather, because that’s what it’s like working in those places. I worked at a Boston Market—“Home Market” is not really a veiled reference. When you walk in there, it changes your life in the sense that your experience of the world is now dictated by a corporation. The fast-food restaurant is the most American thing to me, because it is all about illusions. It’s all about presenting a home-cooked meal—Thanksgiving every day. Meanwhile, nobody cooks in that entire building; everything is reheated, everything is formulated by scientists somewhere in the Midwest and processed in a giant warehouse. It also turns human beings into functions. There’s something really interesting about working in those spaces where your humanity gets evaporated and you become functional. That’s why I think people treat us so poorly when we work in those places, because your humanity is pushed away. The restaurant is curated in a way that allows that to happen.

There’s a very visceral scene involving a pig slaughter that seems intended to be a contrast to that—a shock to the system, a dose of reality.

That scene was the keystone of the novel for me. It was a kind of parable. These workers are slaughtering while they are being slaughtered in a much more abstract, philosophical way, and it’s all to push the facade of “free-range organic hogs.” I wanted to show the brutality of that. The subtext of that chapter is that these workers know that they’re absolutely lonely in this labor—the people who eat the hogs will never know how it’s done, and they’re kind of resigned to accepting that their lives will not be amplified in any way. We could talk about the nuclear family in American life, and we could talk about the antithesis of that, the found family. But what we don’t talk about is the circumstantial family, the family that’s cobbled together on a work shift. Through labor, you know who’s coughing behind you. You know their gait and you know what they smell like three hours in, once the drugstore perfume fades away.

Two books that the novel references multiple times are Slaughterhouse-Five and The Brothers Karamazov. Why were they so important to this story?

What I love about those two books, particularly a lot of Dostoevsky’s work, is that it does something that a lot of American contemporary fiction shames. In the discourse of contemporary workshops, we’re often shamed from asking with sincerity these big existential questions. And that’s a quintessentially American thing. I haven’t been able to put my hand on it. There’s a kind of humility that American authors are asked to perform: Be grateful, be humble, and if you ask questions that are too grand, it’s almost like, Who do you think you are? You’re just an author. There’s always a policing of an artist’s formal ambition in America. But Vonnegut and Dostoyevsky were fearless in asking those questions. And it’s interesting, because we love to read them, but I’ve seen colleagues and students being dissuaded from writing like them. And these two writers are all in; they asked the most essential questions. Vonnegut asked, is humor possible in the face of absolute horror? Dostoevsky asks, what is the soul of the nation? Even brotherhood is contested: What is kindness and goodness when the family cannibalizes itself? You rarely see any American author ask, Who are we? What are we? It’s almost like they’ll be laughed offstage. But I think they’re worthy questions to ask.

Are you swinging back to poetry, or are you considering another novel?

I’ve been writing poems. I write very slowly, and I can write only one thing at a time. Poems are very difficult. They’re harder than novels because they require more ideas, particularly poetry collections. If you have the 30 poems that often make up a collection, that’s 30 different ideas. A novel, it could be maybe three ideas, and then you just keep writing into it. But a poem takes a lot of thinking, so the replenish rate of poetry is much slower. So I don’t know. I think, I hope, if I’m lucky, one more collection throughout my life would be good.

And then that’s it?

I’m interested in seeing my work as finite, rather than endlessly producing. The double-edged sword of finding success as an author is that, after a while, people will publish whatever. I’m very skeptical of publishing as a lifelong endeavor. I see teaching as a vocation because I can be useful to my students forever, as long as my brain works. But why should a writer keep writing? It doesn’t make any sense.

Mark Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix.