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Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. 368 pgs.

Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose is a novel about authorship, control, and the uses of imagination. It is also a novel about the bond between two girls in post-war rural France—though such a description risks making it sound more familiar than it is. What Li presents is not a study of friendship, nor a conventional coming-of-age tale, but rather an inquiry into how identity may be fashioned, transferred, and at times relinquished through the act of storytelling.

The narrator, Agnès, is in her thirties when the novel opens. Upon learning of her childhood friend Fabienne’s death, she is compelled to return to the years of their shared adolescence. They grew up in Saint Rémy, a small village shaped by poverty, loss, and routine. Fabienne was mercurial, incisive, and often severe; Agnès more yielding, almost acquiescent. The balance between them was never equal, though it was constant—Fabienne imagined, and Agnès obeyed.

The central episode in their shared past concerns a book—Les Enfants Heureux, a collection of fictional tales written by Agnès yet conceived and orchestrated entirely by Fabienne. Fabienne had no interest in writing it herself, nor in claiming authorship. Instead, she installed Agnès as the precocious young author, and with the assistance of a local adult, M. Devaux, the work secured a publisher. The world, eager for the spectacle of a literary prodigy, responded predictably: Agnès was summoned to Paris, celebrated, and briefly became a public figure. None of this would have transpired without Fabienne, yet she was never acknowledged.

The novel unfolds retrospectively. Agnès is now living in the United States, married and tending a small farm. She narrates with composure, without overt emotion. That restraint defines the book. There is no nostalgia in her voice, and little inclination to reconstruct the past through sensory detail or atmosphere. Instead, she attends to what occurred—what was said, what was done, and how it was later interpreted. This produces a tone that is quiet yet tautly controlled.

What is most striking is how seldom Agnès resists the version of events Fabienne imposes upon her. Fabienne decrees that she will be the writer; Fabienne chooses the subjects of the stories. Even when Agnès is dispatched to a school in England to sustain the fiction of being a literary girl, she rarely protests. She recognises that the role allotted to her is not her own, yet she performs it nonetheless. This is not because she is weak, but because—as the novel makes plain—the alternatives are few. The world they inhabit offers scant opportunity for girls, and still less for those without wealth or family influence. Agnès submits to direction not out of ignorance, but because such direction affords a fragile form of protection.

Li eschews dramatisation throughout. Even those episodes that might have been rendered as charged with emotion—Fabienne’s death, Agnès’s brief fame, her isolation at the English school—are presented with plainness. When Agnès reflects upon the past, she does not search for meaning; she delineates patterns, behaviours, and outcomes. This approach accords with Li’s wider preoccupation: not with what stories signify, but with how they function. Here, stories act as instruments of arrangement. Fabienne uses fiction to shape Agnès’s life; Agnès uses memory to give shape to Fabienne after her death.

The adult characters, particularly M. Devaux, occupy supporting yet illuminating roles. Devaux recognises potential in Agnès only insofar as she conforms to a narrative he already favours—the solitary, precocious child. He edits the stories to render them publishable; he manages the correspondence; he smooths away anything too disquieting. In so doing, he underscores the novel’s central contention—that fiction is defined as much by omission as by inclusion. The public’s image of Agnès is constructed through successive layers of erasure, with Fabienne effaced entirely.

Li’s prose mirrors this principle. Her sentences are short, declarative, and resistant to interpretive adornment. There is little recourse to metaphor and scant emphasis on physical description. Such restraint may create distance, yet it also yields clarity. The novel does not rely on atmosphere; it relies on structure. Each chapter advances the narrative in deliberate increments, without sudden turns or emotional crescendos. It is a work that demands attentiveness, though not credulity. That discipline, however, can also prove restrictive. The voice is so rigorously controlled that it at times approaches impersonality. Agnès recounts events with precision but seldom with emotional resonance. Her detachment is explicable—she has long been fashioned by others—but it leaves limited scope for tonal complexity. Some readers may therefore find the novel too remote, too fixed in its austerity.

Still, The Book of Goose achieves what it intends. It offers a portrait of a relationship grounded not in affection or mutuality, but in domination and complicity. It shows how fiction may serve not to articulate the self, but to elude reality. And it reveals how adults, eager for a particular kind of narrative, will disregard truth if it accommodates the story they prefer. By the novel’s close, Agnès is wholly estranged from her past. She raises geese, tends her garden, and avoids notice. She is not seeking reclamation. Her voice—measured, final—is the only thing she has claimed for herself. Writing, for her, is no longer performance; it is preservation.

As a reading experience, the novel is more admirable than affecting. It is exacting, intelligent, unsentimental. I was not moved by it, yet I found it rigorous in thought. It resists easy conclusions and rejects the familiar arcs of victimhood or redemption, which makes it resistant to summary. Li has written a novel wholly in command of its materials. It explains no more than it must. It does not apologise for its distance. It offers a lucid account of how stories are used—and of how people, especially the young, are so often used through them. In that sense, it is not merely a novel about fiction, but a novel about what fiction allows us to overlook.

How to cite: Davis, Zalman S. “Fiction as Control: Yiyun Li’s Exacting The Book of Goose.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 14 Aug. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/08/14/goose.

Zalman S. Davis is active in South African literature, working as a publisher, literary curator, editor, and critic. As the founder of Minimal Press, Davis has established a platform that champions diverse voices across genres and languages, with an emphasis on quality storytelling and literary merit. He curates several literary awards, including the Ingrid Jonker: L’Art Poétique Prize for Poetry, the Chris Barnard Prize for Short Stories, and the Diana Ferrus Prize for Poetry in Afrikaans Dialects. These awards have drawing entries from across South Africa and internationally. Beyond his curatorial endeavours, Davis has contributed as an editor, overseeing the publication of various anthologies and literary collections, and ensuring that both emerging and established writers are afforded a platform to share their work. His dedication to literature and language was recognised in 2020, when he received the Koker Toekenning Award for his contributions to Afrikaans and South African letters. Davis’s commitment to the literary arts extends to his role as a critic, where his insights and analyses engage with contemporary South African writing. His work continues to enrich the cultural fabric of the nation—standing as a testament to the enduring power of storytelling across borders and tongues. [All contributions by Zalman S. Davis.]

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