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brice_mo 's review for:
Things in Nature Merely Grow
by Yiyun Li
Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the ARC!
“Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that can sometimes reach the unspeakable."
Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow both respects and refutes language’s failure to carry pain, offering readers the comfort of recognizing that sometimes there is none to be found.
Yiyun Li lives with unspeakable loss. Both of her sons have committed suicide, placing her squarely in the abyss. Everything about her life is now defined by the worst-case scenario coming true, or, as she puts it, “extremity.” She wakes up every day and continues to go to work because there’s no other alternative. There’s nothing to be said, and yet something must be said.
I suspect readers unfamiliar with Li’s work will be shocked—maybe even horrified—by the sharp edges of the author’s pragmatism. She believes that euphemism, including the word “grief” itself, is a waste of perfectly inadequate language—it’s a harsh reality that people kill themselves; it’s reasonable to use language that forces us to feel the full weight of the situation. Anything softer is, as Li suggests, an imagined narrative, and what is suicide if not the ultimate disruption of the narratives we prescribe?
For readers of Where Reasons End, there’s a familiar disinterest in probing the question of “why,” but the occasional brightness of her dialogue with Vincent—her older son—is absent here. As she notes, her relationship with James, her second son, was entirely different, characterized more by the unspoken spaces between them. Whereas Vincent would have enjoyed “his” book, James would have resented this one. Despite the different relational dynamics, it’s clear that the author has a profound respect for her children’s autonomy, allowing her to eschew anger in favor of an empathy so deep that it will make many readers squirm.
One might be tempted to view suicide as the brothers’ common destination, but Li views it more like a medium, not ending the relationships but transforming them. As always, the author is attuned to what we often overlook—the slight, rhythmic variations in someone’s life after loss. Suicide is seismic, but the pain is felt in the little things. We read of shared lexicons that must be buried with the dead—verbs that stop moving the world in the way they once did.
Regardless of one’s personal experience with suicide, it’s surprisingly cathartic to read about personal extremity in a time of social extremity. The world ends every day and still it goes on—we’re just all more aware of it now. Li’s writing has always clawed away at the veneer we place over the world, but Things in Nature Merely Grow is the first time she has done so with deliberately instructive intent. In one of the late chapters, she writes with gentle wrath about all the well-intentioned forms of selfishness that led people to reach out to her following James’s death. Loss is universal, but more importantly, it is also always singular. Sometimes the most we can do for someone is acknowledge how little we can do for them.
Things in Nature Merely Grow is Yiyun Li at her best, and it’s the kind of book that asks readers simply to receive it—to walk toward loss when it's the only action we can take.
“Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that can sometimes reach the unspeakable."
Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow both respects and refutes language’s failure to carry pain, offering readers the comfort of recognizing that sometimes there is none to be found.
Yiyun Li lives with unspeakable loss. Both of her sons have committed suicide, placing her squarely in the abyss. Everything about her life is now defined by the worst-case scenario coming true, or, as she puts it, “extremity.” She wakes up every day and continues to go to work because there’s no other alternative. There’s nothing to be said, and yet something must be said.
I suspect readers unfamiliar with Li’s work will be shocked—maybe even horrified—by the sharp edges of the author’s pragmatism. She believes that euphemism, including the word “grief” itself, is a waste of perfectly inadequate language—it’s a harsh reality that people kill themselves; it’s reasonable to use language that forces us to feel the full weight of the situation. Anything softer is, as Li suggests, an imagined narrative, and what is suicide if not the ultimate disruption of the narratives we prescribe?
For readers of Where Reasons End, there’s a familiar disinterest in probing the question of “why,” but the occasional brightness of her dialogue with Vincent—her older son—is absent here. As she notes, her relationship with James, her second son, was entirely different, characterized more by the unspoken spaces between them. Whereas Vincent would have enjoyed “his” book, James would have resented this one. Despite the different relational dynamics, it’s clear that the author has a profound respect for her children’s autonomy, allowing her to eschew anger in favor of an empathy so deep that it will make many readers squirm.
One might be tempted to view suicide as the brothers’ common destination, but Li views it more like a medium, not ending the relationships but transforming them. As always, the author is attuned to what we often overlook—the slight, rhythmic variations in someone’s life after loss. Suicide is seismic, but the pain is felt in the little things. We read of shared lexicons that must be buried with the dead—verbs that stop moving the world in the way they once did.
Regardless of one’s personal experience with suicide, it’s surprisingly cathartic to read about personal extremity in a time of social extremity. The world ends every day and still it goes on—we’re just all more aware of it now. Li’s writing has always clawed away at the veneer we place over the world, but Things in Nature Merely Grow is the first time she has done so with deliberately instructive intent. In one of the late chapters, she writes with gentle wrath about all the well-intentioned forms of selfishness that led people to reach out to her following James’s death. Loss is universal, but more importantly, it is also always singular. Sometimes the most we can do for someone is acknowledge how little we can do for them.
Things in Nature Merely Grow is Yiyun Li at her best, and it’s the kind of book that asks readers simply to receive it—to walk toward loss when it's the only action we can take.