Asian American Literature Fans

A Review of Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End (Random House, 2019).
By Stephen Hong Sohn


Readers have been lucky insofar as we’ve been graced with two publications from Yiyun Li in the last three years, but the circumstances that may have fueled this creative productivity are perhaps not ideal. Yiyun Li’s latest, the novel Where Reasons End (Random House, 2019), plumbs the depths of a parent who has lost a child (through suicide). The narrator, who remains unnamed (but in metafiction styling, there is a direct reference to an author who wrote A Thousand Years of Good Prayers) and is a proxy for the author herself, attempts to work through the death of this child (Nikolai) in part through the act of writing. The narrator is of course entirely aware of the limits of this practice but nevertheless returns inexorably to the fact of the words: that her child may be made again, however flawed, inaccurate, limited (flawed and limited are words that the narrator and Nikolai actually debate) in this creative construct.

The point is that the narrator can at least come as near to this thing she has created, this proxy for her child: it can become this type of comforting presence, at least so she thinks. But words (and stories and characters, however fanciful) make demands on the author, a fact that we are reminded of, because of Li’s past, absolutely effulgent work of creative nonfiction (Dear Friend, I Write to You in My Life to Your Life). The character Nikolai, the proxy son, that the author has generated through words, is ever demanding, constantly poking holes in the narrator’s logic, pushing her to consider the precision of her phrases. The back and forth between the narrator and Nikolai takes on the verbal sparring more often seen in plays, but Li reigns the narrative back in through brief reminiscences peppered throughout: a memory of the “real” Nikolai bounding down a street, the “real” Nikolai and his incessant desire to bake, the “real” Nikolai and his love for music. The character Nikolai often then intrudes upon the narrator’s own reminiscences, sometimes suggesting that these memories are inaccurate, maudlin, or entirely unnecessary.  

If there is evidence of a mind in absolute and utter grief it is in this never-ending interplay between character-Nikolai and the narrator-Li. At some point, there is a moment when the narrator and character-Nikolai discuss the problematics of eavesdropping, a subject which the narrator used to talk about at events and readings. You can’t help but realize that the readers are in on this intimate conversation, a form of eavesdropping that, though certainly painful, we understand is a more expansive way that the character-Nikolai might be resurrected, made recognized. In this more public act of exhibition, the collapse between the fictional narrator-Li and the author-Li has perhaps generated her most intimate work, one that reminds us that writing will always be a form of failure: it is in the striving that one is reminded of its limits and its possibility. And, after reading this particular work, I realized that I’m all about the adjectives. 

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu