After I had finished The Book of Goose I discovered that I had read Yiyun Li’s collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, back in 2015. It had been a book club choice, but I was reminded, reading the notes that I made at the time, that none of us thought much of it – and we cover a wide range of reading preferences and proclivities. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised that The Book of Goose was such a disappointment. It deals with the friendship between Fabienne and Agnès, who live in a remote village in post-war France. They are set apart from other children in the village – Fabienne is wild and uncontrolled and Agnès acts as her partner in crime. Fabienne develops the idea that they must write a book – which she does and which is eventually published under Agnès’s name. Its reception is rapturous, the public fascinated with the girls’ macabre stories of rural life.
The problem for me is that this scenario seemed to be a dead ringer for the relationship between Elena and Lila in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. And I wasn’t the only one to notice it: virtually all the reviewers commented on it too. But for me it was deeply disturbing – it seemed as if Yiyun Li had taken those characters and that relationship and transported them from Naples in the ‘40s to rural France in the ‘50s. It seemed like theft and it made the story she was telling feel inauthentic, as if she had produced a great exam paper by copying someone else’s work.
After the publication of Les Enfants Heureux Agnès is, somewhat improbably, whisked off to a finishing school in Surrey under the charge of a headmistress not unlike Miss Jean Brodie. So we seem to move from one instance of literary theft to another. And from here the world of the novel is reduced to a fable without any descriptive immediacy, as if Yiyun Li were writing an outline for a novel to be written, rather than the novel itself. I found it incredibly tedious – nothing actually happens during the time Agnès is at her finishing school; there is no evocation of place; in short nothing to keep me, the reader detained.
When Agnès demands to return to her village and to Fabienne she finds that Fabienne no longer believes that their friendship has a future. Which gives rise to a farrago of emotion – but that outpouring of emotion has no basis in event or circumstance – no basis in anything outside the fevered minds of Fabienne and Agnès. This must be intended as the high point of the novel– but to me it just seemed to be a fictional invention, and I had no time for it.
After which Fabienne runs away with the circus (no, really? Couldn’t the author do better than that?) and Agnès, rather randomly and without much to-do, marries an American. This story – The Book of Goose – is told by Agnès, now living in America.
It could be that Yiyun Li has in mind stories of cultural deracination – she came from China to the US in her twenties. And also of the problems of authorship – the two girls are like figures in a zoo, the object of everyone’s gaze. And there is the added zest that although Agnès is named as the author of the books which the girls produce, Fabienne is in fact the brains behind their plan – so when they are parted Agnès is unable to produce anything of interest. The Book of Goose proves that she can do it after all. Which all goes to show that it could have been a really interesting story. Only it isn’t.
A writer reading 