In 1954, Françoise Sagan scandalised literary France with Bonjour Tristesse, a slender tale of adolescent betrayal and revenge written when she was a teenager. In her sly, profound new novel, award-winning author Yiyun Li imagines a pair of 13-year-olds whose inky scheming will see them break into print in that same era with calamitous results.
Best friends Agnès and Fabienne are so different they complete each other; the former obedient, devoted, the latter feral but brilliant. They’ve grown up together in the impoverished French village of Saint Rémy, whose mud and meadows, madmen and drunks anchor The Book of Goose, infusing its imagery and its aphoristic musings, even though Agnès narrates it from the vantage point of a very different life more than a decade on.
What sees the girls through is their increasingly elaborate games of make-believe, and when Fabienne suggests that they write a book together, it seems to Agnès, whose job it becomes to transcribe her friend’s stories, like just another lark. Except that with help from the local postmaster they attract the attention of a Paris publisher and Agnès – who should be credited, Fabienne insists, as the author of Les Enfants Heureux (a macabre title given that it’s all about dead children) – is soon being feted by the media as a peasant prodigy, eventually finding herself a virtual prisoner at a finishing school in England.
For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry, roaming from the nature of reality and the truth quotient of fact, memory and fiction to the instantaneousness of childhood friendship – so much more “fatal”, as Agnès puts it, than the endlessly crooned about love at first sight. There’s room, too, for a spiky, often droll critique of what it takes out of an author to be published and compelled to engage with the outside world.
In a text resonant with echoes of stories as diverse as Cinderella and My Brilliant Friend, as well as authors including Elizabeth Strout and William Trevor, Agnès’s voice could belong to nobody else. Ultimately, she’ll be forced to begin writing in earnest and in so doing will discover her own agency. Quite what this means for her defining bond with Fabienne, and the currents of feeling and power that have hitherto shaped it, is resolved in an electrifying graveyard denouement, featuring a glinting knife and howls into the dark.
Li, who writes in English and teaches at Princeton, grew up in China and spoke in a recent New York Times interview about discovering a gift for writing propaganda as a teenager, and her horror at finding she could move an audience to tears by channelling patriotic cliches. That experience surely fuels the thrilling complexity of The Book of Goose’s relationship with the literary impulse and its sometimes sullied motives, along with the demands placed on those presumed to have a facility for words.
It’s to Li’s credit that the structural cleverness of her seventh work of fiction doesn’t obscure its defining drama, the relationship between Agnès and Fabienne; instead a sublime closing passage draws it out into the open, allowing Agnès – who was always more amanuensis than prodigy – to sign her name to the “real” story of the two of them, with all the possibilities and limitations that that word entails.
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
