Where Reasons End

October 15, 2018
A grieving mother creates a palpable, imagined son.In her recent memoir, Li (Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, 2017, etc.), a MacArthur fellow and winner of several writing awards, revealed having suffered from recurring depression and twice attempting suicide. The consequences of suicide for the living are central to her quiet, unsettling new novel, construed as a conversation between a mother and her dead 16-year-old son, Nikolai. "I was almost you once," his mother tells the child she desperately and passionately imagines back to life, "and that's why I have allowed myself to make up this world to talk with you"--about sadness, motherhood, memory, and the inadequacy of words. Although he is precocious, articulate, and often impatient--accusing his mother of resorting to clichés--Nikolai never explains his reasons for ending his life, saying only, "You promised that you would understand." But though she knows that "contentment was never a word in his dictionary," understanding defies her: She knows nothing of "the bad dreams he had not told me over the years, the steps he had walked and the thoughts he had gone through on his last day." Searching for words to convey her pain, she finds "no good language when it comes to the unspeakable." "Words provided to me--loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma--never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me," the mother says. A writer, she once had begun a novel in which a woman lost her son to suicide when she was 44. "I had not known the same thing would happen to me when I was forty-four," she tells her son. "Maybe," he suggests, "you've been writing the novel to prepare yourself." She has always written to prepare herself for losing him, she reflects, "pre-living the pain" as if to inure herself to it. But "pre-living is not living," she says. "I will be sad today and tomorrow, a week from now, a year from now. I will be sad forever."A tender, haunting meditation on loss.

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February 1, 2019
Award-winning Li (Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, 2017) offers an arresting and unwavering exploration of nearly unimaginable pain and grief. The novel, which takes its title from Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Argument," is narrated by an unnamed mother who has recently lost her 16-year-old son, Nikolai ("not his name, but a name he had given himself, among many other names he had used"), to suicide. The dialogue that follows between the mother, a novelist, and the version of her son she has conjured as her gifted, exacting, and frequently dismissing sparring partner is a series of extraordinary miniature duels. The two dance around the why of their current circumstance, and their conversations, full of the small intimacies, humor, and arguments of their prior life together, underscore the devastation the mother feels in Nikolai's absence. Although it is unclear if the mother takes any comfort from these conversations, her desperation to understand the unfathomable and the depth of her love for her lost child are unmistakable. Li's intricate, enveloping prose will long haunt readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

Starred review from January 1, 2019

"My mom is an immigrant so she speaks English with an accent," Li's son introduces her to his kindergarten class. "Thank you my dear," she responds, "but I still make a living by writing in English." Despite significant literary accolades, hers is not "an expansive vocabulary," her son insists. "Luckily my mind is not limited by my vocabulary," she replies as she conjures her son--dead at 16 by suicide. "We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time in words." Labeled a novel, Li's stories are many: at three, Nikolai declares he'd live with Li until age 73; at five, he starts a journal labeled "Sixty Years of Nikolai," convinced every book title has to include a number of years because of Li's own A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; at eight, he chides Li's editor that she "should have pressed [his mother] to work harder on the backstories." Memories fade, but these impossible conversations become Li's salvation. "What I'm trying to explain is this: Some people live by images, some by sounds. It's words for me." VERDICT Sentences, paragraphs, pages later, Li transforms tragedy into a desperate miracle of survival. [See Prepub Alert, 8/13/18.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

"My mom is an immigrant so she speaks English with an accent," Li's son introduces her to his kindergarten class. "Thank you my dear," she responds, "but I still make a living by writing in English." Despite significant literary accolades, hers is not "an expansive vocabulary," her son insists. "Luckily my mind is not limited by my vocabulary," she replies as she conjures her son--dead at 16 by suicide. "We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time in words." Labeled a novel, Li's stories are many: at three, Nikolai declares he'd live with Li until age 73; at five, he starts a journal labeled "Sixty Years of Nikolai," convinced every book title has to include a number of years because of Li's own A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; at eight, he chides Li's editor that she "should have pressed [his mother] to work harder on the backstories." Memories fade, but these impossible conversations become Li's salvation. "What I'm trying to explain is this: Some people live by images, some by sounds. It's words for me." VERDICT Sentences, paragraphs, pages later, Li transforms tragedy into a desperate miracle of survival. [See Prepub Alert, 8/13/18.]--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC