How Yiyun Li Became a Beacon for Readers in Mourning

As we sat together on a smooth stone bench, we noticed an Asian girl of maybe 11 or 12 years old sitting a long arm’s length away, watching us silently and steadily. We paused to ask her the sort of small, uninteresting questions that adults ask children — Are you visiting campus? Are you with your parents? — and she stared mutely, giving only the slightest one-shoulder shrug in response. Both our minds turned naturally, unavoidably, toward our observer, as we tried to continue a conversation — until, once, when we looked up, we saw her walking away, her small hand hung lightly on her father’s palm, gazing up at him and saying something that we could no longer hear. Long after we left, Li was still thinking about the girl who watched us silently, who was so comfortable declining to speak. “I think she was amazing,” she said with reverence. “I wonder what life is going to be like for that girl.”

Wondering about a person, whether real or fictional, often marks the start of a story for Li, who has a habit of speaking about her characters as though they were people she knows personally, people she might have caught up with the week before. Her latest novel, “The Book of Goose,” being published in late September by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, found its origin point in a conversation between two adolescent girls living in postwar France, Agnès and Fabienne, that appeared in Li’s thoughts one day as though it were a private conversation she was eavesdropping on. Fabienne poses a question to Agnès: How do you grow happiness? When Agnès wonders whether happiness can be grown at all, Fabienne admonishes her, telling her: “You can grow anything. Just like potatoes.” Fabienne proposes that the two of them try two different approaches, one growing happiness as though it were a crop of beets, the other growing it as though it were potatoes — a philosophical discussion about the nature of the good life, conducted in their own private terminology. But in acquiescing, however innocently, to this nonsense proposition, Agnès begins the process by which their friendship will be cleaved in half.

“The Book of Goose” is told from a point far in the story’s future, by an older Agnès who looks back on their youth together with a mixture of sadness and amazement. The girls were two halves of one odd, magnetic whole, but the effortless balance between them begins to shift when Fabienne decides that they should write a book together and eventually pressures Agnès to be the public face of the story collection. Agnès is thrust into the spotlight as a prodigy from rural France, embodying an authenticity and a natural talent that others are hungry to manipulate and shape — an experience of literary fame that slyly echoes some of the ways in which others have tried to push Li to write more appealing, commercial novels, where Asian American families navigate broadly recognizable stories of assimilation and ambition. Ultimately, Li admires both characters for their ability to create a path for themselves in an inhospitable time that offered little for women of their class other than manual labor and child rearing. In the lineage of Elizabeth Bowen, who defined flat characters as those who have no alternatives, Agnès and Fabienne fabricate alternatives out of pure imagination — the essence of a writer’s work.

Li narrates from the fringes of her own experience, subverting the notion that a writer should be bounded by her own identity, that identity is both personal property and territory to be defended. She insists on her own uncategorizable perspective, breaking rules in a sly, stubborn way: There’s her almost radical commitment to character and interiority over plot, the way she elides political argument in favor of individual character studies, her personal canon of classic Russian authors intermingled with untrendy British and Irish writers like Rebecca West, John McGahern, Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor. She specializes in the movements, feints and fragile suspensions of what she sometimes calls “life with a lid on” — borrowing a phrase from Bowen — stories capturing the richness and depth of inner life that is not guaranteed an outlet in action, or even outward expression. “Sometimes it feels to me like this almost old-fashioned 19th-century sense of authorship,” the novelist Garth Greenwell, who grew close to Li in 2016 at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, told me, “where one feels that the writer’s attention toward her characters is like what one imagines God’s attention to us would be like. This sort of utterly un-self-concerned, unsentimental love, a kind of brutal attention.”

Li was born in Beijing in 1972, the year President Richard M. Nixon visited China, and her earliest memory is of an earthquake that shook her awake in the middle of the night with its rolling rhythm. She and her family rushed out onto the street, where she saw the entire neighborhood standing together in their underwear and bedclothes. “I think that was the moment that I became a writer,” she told me, “watching all those people.” The youngest of two daughters raised by a father who was reticent about his work as a nuclear physicist and a mother who worked as a schoolteacher, she often preferred the position of an observer to that of the sentimental participant: She was admonished by a teacher for turning to examine the expressions of her classmates during the memorial service for Chairman Mao.