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THE BOOK OF GOOSE, by Yiyun Li
“Isn’t it enough just to know a story? Why take the time to write it out?” wonders 13-year-old Agnès, one of two adolescent girls at the center of Yiyun Li’s new novel, “The Book of Goose.” The question drives not only the tale Agnès proceeds to tell us, but the entire course of literary history. What moves us to share our inner lives in this way? By inscribing them on the world, can we ever capture something enduring in our speck-of-dust-in-the-universe existence?
Literature has always been a safe house for people who don’t make official histories, who don’t pretend to be the heroes of their own destiny. That’s certainly true of Li’s wide-ranging body of work: two virtuosic story collections, a memoir-in-essays and four previous novels, which include what might be the bleakest work of fiction I’ve ever read — “The Vagrants,” a granular portrait of a small community amid the political oppression of late-1970s China — and the most heart-rending: “Where Reasons End,” a dialogue between a mother and her deceased son, written after the suicide of one of the author’s own children. Often, there’s a tension between the reticence of the people on Li’s pages — a stoicism that shouldn’t be mistaken for passivity — and the eerie, supersaturated grandeur of Li’s storytelling, with its insistence that life matters enough to recount it with such precision and tenderness.
“The Book of Goose” is, on its face, about a literary hoax devised between two French teenagers in the 1950s, Agnès and Fabienne, who grow up in a desolate village in which privation is as spiritual as it is material. “Well-proportioned we were not,” recalls Agnès, who narrates in retrospect. Ravaged by World War II, their village, St. Rémy, is the kind of place in which even moments of joy seem to precipitate doom: After falling in love with an American G.I., Fabienne’s older sister dies in childbirth along with her infant; Agnès’s brother, Jean, returns home from a German labor camp only to become a prisoner of his bed, vacant-eyed and coughing up blood.
While Agnès attends school, the scrappier, nearly feral Fabienne spends her days tending farm animals, waiting on her drunken father and brothers (her mother’s absence is unexplained), and cooking up games involving ghosts and graveyards. A “whetstone to Fabienne’s blade,” the more biddable Agnès realizes that she would have been like other girls had it not been for her bolder and more brilliant friend, writing down the lyrics to love songs in her notebook, wanting nothing more from life than stockings and boys. “What a tragedy that would have been,” she decides, “living an interchangeable life, looking for interchangeable excitements.”
The desire to make people “know how it feels to be us” prompts Fabienne to come up with a new diversion: She will tell Agnès stories; Agnès, who has better penmanship and a “more pleasant look,” will transcribe them and take credit for their authorship. Together, they enlist the town’s postmaster, M. Devaux, who is educated and worldly by St. Rémy standards, to help them revise the manuscript and submit it to a publisher. Against all odds, the book, a series of macabre stories involving the death of a child, becomes a hit, praised for its “ferocious honesty.” Agnès is invited to Paris to promote the book, where she’s hailed as “a savage young chronicler of the postwar life.”
While Fabienne is the engine behind the scheme, it is Agnès — her sense of possibility ignited by her Paris adventures — who turns out to be more skilled at telling the world what it wants to hear, answering questions from the press about her book’s verisimilitude enigmatically. (Here I was reminded of the reception of Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird,” his lurid account of peasant depravity in occupied Poland, which was eagerly embraced as at least semi-autobiographical when it was first published in the United States in 1965 — though one may also detect echoes of the publicity machine Li herself has been subjected to over the years.) “The journalists and critics, mindless people, refused to see that the distance between life and death was always shorter than people are willing to understand,” Agnès reflects.
The distance between fiction and reality is shorter, too. “All worlds, fabricated or not, are equally real. And so they are equally unreal,” Agnès muses, recalling her frustrated efforts to talk about her experiences in the capital with Fabienne. If, for Parisians, the countryside serves as a handy projection for the worst of humanity, then for the villagers, Paris might as well be Neverland. Later, the adult Agnès, married to an American and living in Pennsylvania, experiences a similar dissonance when she’s asked about French fashion or cuisine and imagines sharing some of the more authentic textures of village life with her housewifely interlocutors: “the maggots unearthed by the torrential rain,” or “the screeching of butchered pigs, their panting replaced by a liquid hiss.”
Li, of course, has never been the kind of writer who tells you what you want to hear, and this is surely part of why she has become, while still in her 40s, one of our finest living authors: Her elegant metaphysics never elide the blood and maggots. Agnès and Fabienne succeed in creating a thrillingly illicit world of their own making, one that acknowledges their pain, but Li doesn’t flinch from the girls’ emotional fascism. The indifferent cruelty of the village is re-enacted both in the fictional realm they’ve built and in the way they manipulate, with grave consequences, their real-world elders. Aspects of their hothouse friendship may initially invite comparison to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, but as the novel progresses and Agnès lands, at the behest of a P.R.-savvy headmistress, in a British finishing school, I was reminded of the cooler registers of Fleur Jaeggy and Muriel Spark. Their relationship becomes an epistolary one — Fabienne sends Agnès letters under both her own name and that of an invented suitor — and the rules of the game, of their friendship, and indeed, of the novel itself, become increasingly ambiguous.
All fiction is a kind of hoax in that it spins a delusion, inciting genuine feelings with invented characters and situations. The most propulsively entertaining of Li’s novels, “The Book of Goose” is an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories: to apprehend and avenge the truth of our own being, to make people know what it feels like to be us, to memorialize the people we keep alive in the provincial villages of our hearts. But it’s the motives behind our impulse to read fiction, and why we enter this delusion so eagerly, that occupied me through Li’s novel: the desire to suspend life in order to return to it more specifically and more vividly known to ourselves — and perhaps in order to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, in our own consequence.
Megan O’Grady is a professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is working on a book about art and life.
THE BOOK OF GOOSE | By Yiyun Li | 348 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $28
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