A Novel With a Secret at Its Center

“You can slash a book,” says the narrator of Yiyun Li’s new novel, The Book of Goose. “There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last. Why not, I wonder.” This feels like a challenge—to take a knife to this book, the seventh work of fiction from the Chinese-born author, cutting right through it to reveal what’s at its heart.

There are many ways of avoiding this challenge—of being distracted from Li’s real project—because of just how many elements she throws into this novel: its primary setting in a bleak, rural postwar France; its dip into the English boarding-school novel; a take on the well-worn trope of “female friendship”; the possibility of a queer relationship never made—a comparison that is really only helpful in orienting the reader toward the themes of desire and self-determination that they share.