Yiyun Li has made something miraculous out of choosing to write not in her mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese, but in her adopted English. She moved to the US from Beijing with her husband in 1996, when she was 23, as a trainee immunologist, and has made her home there ever since. Her reasons for choosing English are intricate and personal as well as political and practical, and she has written about them eloquently. “It’s about making every word a word … I can never get every word to align perfectly. I cannot get the sentence to say exactly what I mean. I like that tension between myself and the language.” Inside the traditions of English prose, the writers she loves include Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, William Trevor and John McGahern, and you can feel this in the plain music of her style, the rich surprises of her perception, her relish for the earthy solidity of words. And yet she isn’t quite a realist; or rather, her realism is always self-conscious and reflexive. Particular scenes in her fictions give way all the time to a restless speculative questioning.
Even Li’s childhood memories play in English now, she says, inside her mind. Nabokov said that having to abandon his natural language was his private tragedy, and while Li celebrates the liberation English brought for her, she registers the losses too, and acknowledges that the rupture must play some part in episodes of suicidal sadness in her life. She has written with such perfect poise about the losses and the sadness – including the terrible loss of her 16-year-old son to suicide in 2017. A lot of her work in these last years has hovered on that borderline where autobiography shades into fiction, and she has made herself master of that ambivalent space, in her 2019 book Where Reasons End, and in a few superb short stories, including When We Were Happy We Had Other Names, All Will Be Well and Hello, Goodbye. It’s been Li’s twisted fate to become in some sense a confessional writer, although part of what she has to confess to is an extreme reticence, a lifelong performance of smiling and withholding.
And now there’s this haunting and strange new fiction, The Book of Goose. At first sight it’s the least probable story for Li to hit upon, in her search for her subject matter. Two 13-year-old peasant girls in postwar France decide to write a novel about the bloody realities of their community; they lie composing on the freezing cold gravestones in the churchyard, and persuade the local postmaster, M. Devaux, a reader and intellectual, to help them get it published. It’s Fabienne’s idea to begin with; Agnès is more reluctant. “Why do you want to write a book?” she asks. Fabienne says that they’ll write so that “other people will know how we live. And they’ll know how it feels to be us.” Briefly their book becomes vogueish in literary Paris.
According to Agnès, who narrates The Book of Goose in the first person, Fabienne is the more powerful of the two friends and the driver of their adventure. Fabienne is inspired and dangerous and odd-looking, from a family on the margins of the community – her older sister died giving birth to the baby of a black GI, who was court-martialled and hanged as punishment. She still has her childhood agility and audacity, while Agnès is beginning to be heavier and more earth-bound – she can’t climb trees any longer, and the men have started to notice her. Shrewdly, Fabienne decides that Agnès should appear as the sole author of their book, although it’s Fabienne who mostly dictates the words. It’s as if, although she’s hardly read anything and hasn’t been to school for two years because she’s been tending the goats, Fabienne can imagine just how an untutored naive genius will appeal to a Parisian readership with a jaded appetite, so long as she looks good in the new clothes her publisher buys her. Authentic raw talent is at a premium on the literary market – until it stales, and is replaced by another latest new thing (Françoise Sagan is published towards the end of The Book of Goose, and the publishers lose interest in Agnès).
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The stories the girls write are full of gothic horror – about dead children – but although the possibility of violence broods over the novel, it happens mutedly, off stage and around the edges of the novel. When Fabienne plans to manipulate M. Devaux into helping them – he “needs something to occupy himself. All widowers do” – we fear the worst, perhaps for the girls, more probably for M. Devaux. Yet when he does get into trouble, he simply moves away. The publishers don’t try to seduce Agnès, either; although she is carried off to a finishing school in England by a sinister Mrs Townsend, who wants to effect a My Fair Lady-style transformation. Agnès is more than a match, though, in the end, for Mrs Townsend.
This isn’t a victim’s story, nothing so straightforward – it’s something much more interesting and strange. The people who take Agnes up aren’t as dangerous as they think they are; these privileged manipulators exaggerate their own power. All the jeopardy in the novel comes out of the estrangement Fabienne and Agnès have chosen for themselves, carried along by their own invention and their adventure; or it comes from the intractable circumstances of their birth and history. “The way we lived back then”, Agnès tells us, “the stench and the filth, the animals running amok, and the people crazier than the animals – these things I had not found extraordinary until I was told, later in Paris and in England, that they were.” And in England: “I was not sad, I was bored. I missed that universe made complete by Fabienne and me. I would not have left that life (the happiest life I have ever known), if not for Fabienne’s conviction that there might be something interesting out in the world. Something beyond our experience, which she deemed important to know.”
Agnès’s time at school in England provides the dream-like mid-section of the book, and the unrolling of this curious story draws us on; it’s compelling and interesting, we care about what happens. But manifestly this isn’t realism: we’re not meant to succumb for a moment to its illusion. Li’s novel feels more like a fable, and so much fascinating speculation seems to be encoded opaquely in Agnès’s narration. Why is the novel set in France? Is there some interesting triangulation, in which an immigrant to America might imagine a European country as a third space to think in, about cultures and coexistences, rather as Jhumpa Lahiri has done with Italy? The friendship of Fabienne and Agnès might remind us, too, of Elena Ferrante’s Lila and Lenù, although the timbre of Li’s prose is much less fervid than Ferrante’s. Li’s two girls, who love each other passionately – at one point Fabienne writes to Agnès as a male lover, Jacques – seem, like Lila and Lenù, more like two parts of the same writer than two individuals: there’s the one who stayed, and the one who got away. Fabienne is the authentic writer left behind, the untrammelled child, more audacious and more true; she becomes lost to Agnès, the adult and mere mouthpiece, who gains fame and goes out into the world, but feels herself inauthentic.
The Book of Goose is framed by the news of Fabienne’s death, which comes to Agnès, now married and settled in America, in a letter from her mother. She knows that the loss of Fabienne will cast its long shadow across the whole of the rest of her life: but the news is liberation, too. Agnès imagines that her friend’s ghost might visit her, licking “the nib of her pen clean”, making her write again. “I may not have gained full freedom,” Agnès writes, “but I am free enough”. Out of the complex torture of cultural politics, Li has made her style her own.
• The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li is published by Fourth Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
