Review | In Yiyun Li’s Must I Go, an old woman tries to solve the unsolvable puzzle that is life
- The narrator reckons with a former fling’s perception of her through the pages of his diary
- In asking questions of human existence, she discovers that life ‘misses pieces and has useless extras’
Must I Go
by Yiyun Li
Hamish Hamilton
4/5 stars
“Posterity, take notice!” So begins Must I Go, the fourth novel by acclaimed Beijing-born novelist Yiyun Li. The opening is a surprise, partly because Li has never seemed the sort to make bold proclamations about the lasting value of her art. If I had to choose a single word to encapsulate her corpus it would be “modest” – and I mean that in the best way.
From her first story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), Li’s writing has generated its quiet force from society’s forgotten people, by recounting their fleeting joys and (more frequently) pains. This could be the execution of a counter-revolutionary in post-Maoist China (The Vagrants, 2009) or the suicide of Li’s own son, Vincent, in Where Reasons End (2019). While Li’s prose is exquisite after a precise fashion, it never blows its own unflashy horn.
All this is enough to put you en garde over that relatively brazen appeal to posterity. This is immediately confirmed when our narrator, Lilia Imbody, smartly wonders whether the phrase is an “exhortation” or a “plea”.
The story doesn’t want to be remembered any more than it wants to be seen
Whatever the case, its author certainly sounds desperate: Lilia adds that “Posterity, take notice!” occurs no fewer than 23 times in the book she is reading. This is the diary of Roland Bouley, whose obscurity is highlighted by the fact that his only publication was printed at his own request by a friend’s vanity press.
Who would possibly want to read such a book, which even after editing exceeds 700 pages? Lilia’s reasons are obvious and prurient. She and Roland had a brief fling 60 years earlier. While the affair was memorable enough for him to record “L” a few times in his diary, it wasn’t significant or unique enough to escape the footnotes of his existence: an explanatory note reduces Lilia to “L, unidentified lover”. What, Lilia wants to know, did Roland’s wife, Hetty, and the love of his life, Sidelle Ogden, have that she didn’t?
Li’s devilish twist on this biographical eavesdropping is quickly revealed. The second chapter ends with Lilia reading Roland’s downbeat entry for June 5, 1962: “No books written, no offspring […] And if there were bastards carrying my blood, they were not known to me.”
To which Lilia offers her own devastating gloss: “No, Roland, so much was unknown to you: your daughter’s birth, your granddaughter’s birth, your daughter’s death.”
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The birth of Roland and Lilia’s daughter, Lucy, is the first of several artfully dropped narrative hooks. Why did Lilia never tell Roland about his daughter? Why did Lucy commit suicide? As she weighs Roland’s diary against her own perspective, Lilia raises several big questions that might be summarised as: are two humans ever on the same page?
How much does anyone know about their own life, let alone that of someone else? How much of those lives are shaped by forces beyond our immediate control, if not our larger responsibility? How does our life story sound when told by others? And most plangently, if pointlessly, how different would we be if we knew all the facts?
While these hypotheticals ripple Li’s narrative, they don’t make much of an impression on Lilia herself. At 81 years old, she sounds formidably sure of herself, all the more so when we meet her equally forbidding, if not entirely convincing, 16-year-old self.
Young or old, Lilia’s voice sounds like a parody of Li’s own characteristically laser-guided prose, only with the author’s humane reserve replaced by a pugnacious, judgmental, if world-weary wit.
“A mother is always a cautionary tale for a daughter,” Lilia says, Dorothy Parkerishly. Or: “She was not afraid of being alone, but she preferred to be alone among people.” Lilia is explaining why she checked herself a little prematurely into a care home for the elderly, but she could equally be describing an almost counter-intuitive need for large groups (three husbands, five children, 17 grandchildren) just so she can keep them at arm’s length.
She is not blind to her contradictions: “Lilia had two voices, one for other ears, one for her own.” This private voice, which Li ventriloquises through her own, is more capable of interrogating life’s uncertainties. What if her childhood had been different, better? Her parents’ marriage more loving? Why did Lucy kill herself?
Lilia being Lilia, she quickly recants her own curiosity as futile: “People asking such questions are only trying to make life into a solvable puzzle. Real life? It misses pieces and has useless extras.”
For Lilia, writing is no better at organising the human jigsaw. Nor is posterity any guarantee of consolation. Even good books go unread and good people are forgotten. What chance does a 700-page diary of a nobody stand?
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“When Roland was alive Sidelle and Hetty must have been like flowers that still bloomed in the sunroom of his mind. But they had become like dead specimens in his diaries when he died. He would, too, once Lilia died.”
This says less about Roland’s writing than Lilia herself. Sixty years earlier, she came to pretty much the same conclusion when considering the evanescence of memory during a face-to-face encounter with Roland: “To be seen by him was different than to be remembered. The moment you want to be remembered by another person you give him the power to forget you.”
Here is the great of advantage of Li’s unassuming fiction over Roland’s overeager diary. Her own novel’s relationship to the truth transcends anyone’s personal interest or any one version of the truth, including that of the writer and the reader. The story doesn’t want to be remembered any more than it wants to be seen, but by seeing and remembering in its own way stands the best chance of achieving both.
Whether Must I Go will be embraced by posterity only time will tell. But this closely observed, slyly comic and quietly gripping story will do just fine for our difficult present.
