“Cut and be cut, neither interested me back then,” writes Agnès Moreau, the narrator of The Book of Goose. Yiyun Li’s extraordinary new novel is a multivalent exploration of friendship and love, experience and exploitation, fate and futility, the slippage between reality and artifice. In the world and in the act of writing, how do we reckon with the terrible otherness of those we love, and the ways in which we wound each other?
As a French expatriate in rural Pennsylvania, the Agnès of 1966 is content to raise geese and shrug off the slights of her American in-laws. But when she learns that her childhood friend Fabienne — fearless and fearsome, compelling and capricious as life itself — has died in childbirth, Agnès takes up her pen to tell the story of the most consequential year of their lives.
“A hard life, unlike what we were taught at school, did not make us virtuous; the hardest life was the most boring, the most unrewarding,” she writes. Less than a decade after the end of World War II, Saint Rémy (“a place where only girls get stuck”) is no picturesque tourist destination, but an impoverished rural village where privation is widespread and death — The Book of Goose is haunted by dead babies, dead mothers, dead siblings, dead soldiers — far from rare. Fabienne and Agnès recognize that this world has no interest in or use for them, aside from their inevitable fate (to work, marry, quite possibly die in childbirth), and so they fashion a parallel world of their own: “How else could we overcome this boredom but to bring ourselves up in our own make-believe, which, as we grew older, had become more elaborate, more exhilarating, and, most of all, closer to the truth?”
But what is the truth? Li undercuts Agnès’s decisive prose style with frequent self-contradictions; even a seemingly straightforward declaration of unreliability — “All worlds, fabricated or not, are equally real. And so they are equally unreal” — may be subject to later revision. Throughout the novel, Agnès values secrecy over openness, observation over action, myth over fact, while the mercurial Fabienne is given to rescinded proclamations and broken promises. As she writes each chapter — they are short, as if composed while a pot of water comes to a boil — Agnès, the reader towed in her wake, seems to be revising toward provisional understanding, slowly paring away bits of peel and flesh to reach the core of what she and Fabienne meant to each other.
This is not a search for origins (indeed, Agnès never explains how she and Fabienne met), but rather a writer’s quest to describe — to know — what wants to evade definition. Sometimes Agnès portrays herself disappearing within their friendship — “She had her will. I, my willingness to be led by her will” — becoming shadow, empty air, as she conflates her desires with Fabienne’s, whether that means testing their endurance by lying on bitterly cold gravestones, or debating how you might grow happiness (like potatoes; misery grows unaided, like weeds). But then sometimes she describes them as two separate people: “We were the perfect pair, one seeking all that the other could experience.” Or, in another version of the truth, they are two halves that (almost) make a whole: “I do not imagine that the half of an orange facing south would have to tell the other half how warm the sunlight is.”
But what if the orange were sliced in two, and the halves separated? When they are 13, Fabienne suggests a new game of make-believe: they should write a book — like Li’s own first book, a collection of short stories — that Fabienne will dictate to Agnès. Although she doesn’t understand why anyone would be interested in reading about lives like theirs, Agnès agrees. It is Fabienne who decides the village postmaster will help them smooth out the grammar and spelling and submit the manuscript for publication, and it is Fabienne who decides that only Agnès’s name should appear on the book’s cover. This act of creation — turning Agnès into an author who is really Fabienne — is an act that will divide them. Their invented world cannot survive its collision with the real.
In Paris, presented to the press as a prodigy, Agnès imagines herself a chimera, composed of both Fabienne and herself: “they could never tell that I was not one girl.” But the artifice is too perfect. Suddenly Agnès is no longer just a girl but a writer, subject to the influence, misinterpretation, and demands of publishers, readers, and critics. “In this new life as the author [. . . ] I faced the never-ceasing pressure to explain myself,” Agnès complains. It is tempting to read Agnès and Fabienne as an allegory of the dichotomy between a writer’s private and public selves, to cast Fabienne as the interior self, wild and unfiltered, unconcerned with the world’s opinions, with no ambition beyond creation, and Agnès as the writer’s exterior self, cautious, validation-seeking, performing. But Li is too brilliant to settle for such a neat reading. Fabienne, despite her bluster, feels keenly the pressure of the world’s scrutiny, and Agnès is not the empty-headed amanuensis Fabienne mistakes her for, but a skillful creator, able to “mimic Fabienne’s voice,” who has adapted her behavior and speech to be the version of Agnès she thinks Fabienne wants: “I made her believe that I was like a vacant house, my mind empty of any thoughts of my own, my heart void of feelings,” she writes.
When Fabienne insists that Agnès accept the offer of a year at an English finishing school, theorizing that the experience could help them write a new book, Agnès must pose as the composite author she and Fabienne have fashioned. The school proves just as stifling as Saint Rémy, its students “transparent creatures,” ruled by a headmistress determined to play Henry Higgins to Agnès’s Eliza Doolittle. In Mrs. Townsend, Li gives us a scathing portrait of a self-obsessed diarist who believes she’s a writer, a tourist who believes a brief sojourn in another country entitles her to assume the trappings of its culture, a martinet who believes control is charity. Agnès, who desires above all things to return to her former life with Fabienne — a life in which she willingly accepts Fabienne’s undisguised orders and insults — realizes the only way out of opportunity’s prison is to write the autobiographical book everyone expects from her, or to give up writing entirely.
But during their separation, Fabienne has torn herself in two, writing to Agnès as herself (aloof, mocking, animated) and as her invented brother, Jacques (melancholy, loyal, ardent). To the reader, Fabienne’s casual cruelties toward Agnès are at once confirmed as an adolescent’s attempt at self-preservation in the face of futile attraction. But to Agnès, the change in her friend is baffling: “Why would Fabienne make it sound that he was in love with me, then? What use did Jacques and I have for love, if not marriage?” Though she imagines an adult life spent with Fabienne — avoiding marriage, finding jobs in Paris — the possibility of erotic love between women seems not to occur to her. Or at least, she cannot name it.
Their reunion is a severing. “The world is never short of knives,” writes Agnès, and later: “The only person who could leave a scratch on me — then, and now — is Fabienne.” Readers of Yiyun Li’s first book may hear an echo of the story “Love in the Marketplace” in Agnès’s quietly desperate desire to feel, no matter the painful sacrifice required. But neither her ability to adapt to any circumstance, nor Fabienne’s gift for making things happen can overcome fate; they must live in the world that is, not the world they made for each other. If The Book of Goose offers any hope in the face of their tragedy, maybe it’s this: When Agnès asks, “who can shorten the distance between two people so they can say with confidence that they have reached each other?” she is describing herself. The writer makes a new world.
[Published September 2022 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 368 pages. $28.00 hardcover]