23: Where Reasons End

A book by Yiyun Li

I read Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li because Max Porter told me to. For the uninitiated, Max Porter is the author of 2015’s astonishing Grief is the Thing with Feathers, and the similarly mesmerising follow-up, Lanny, which came out in 2019. And he didn’t literally tell me to read Where Reasons End (at least partially because he’s not someone I know personally). But he recommended it on Twitter. And because I think he’s brilliant, and he was telling his followers Where Reasons End was brilliant, I assumed I would think that too. There was also the fact that he was speaking from a position of strength having written his own wildly inventive short novel about grief based on a tragic, lived experience.

Because that is what Where Reasons End is. Written in the wake of the suicide of Li’s teenaged son (and dedicated to him: “In memory of Vincent Kean Li (2001-2017)”), the novel takes the form of an imagined conversation between the narrator, an author and teacher, and her teenaged son, Nikolai, who has recently taken his own life. It is set in “a place called nowhere”. Nikolai is not the boy’s real name, but “a name he had given himself”. At times, the narrator gives us glimpses of how life now unfolds in the wake of her indescribable loss—“I was a generic parent grieving a generic child lost to inexplicable tragedy”—but mostly she spars with her lost son.

And sparring it is. This is a remarkably unsentimental novel. There is needle between the pair, mostly coming from Nikolai, who is not an immediately sympathetic character. Precocious to the point of annoying, he is often rude to his mother. At one point he tells her: “No offense, but you don’t have an expansive vocabulary.” At another: “I don’t want to feel the obligation to befriend you.”

Where Reasons End is also often achingly beautiful. Both mother and son are lovers of words and wordplay, which is clear from the opening page: “Endear, I thought, what an odd word. Endear. Endure. En-dear. In-dear. Can you out-dear someone?” There are individual sentences in the book that could be hung on a gallery wall and be stared at for hours. Take: “Then the button came undone, and the coat was no longer new.” Or the phenomenally loaded barb: “Dying is highly unnecessary too.”

Then there’s the intensely realised meta-ness of the whole thing. It is, of course, not possible to disconnect a novel about a mother who has lost her son to suicide from an author who has recently lost her son to suicide. And Li does not ask us do that. It is wilfully and desperately acknowledged: “In the novel a woman lost her child to suicide when she was forty-four. I had not known the same thing would happen to me when I was forty-four.”

On the back cover of Where Reasons End, Max Porter is quoted. “Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art,” he says. He wasn’t alone in praising it upon its release in early 2019. NPR’s Michael Schaub called it “the rarest of things: a perfect book”. Anne Enright went for “a remarkable human document” in the Irish Times.

I expected this book to leave me devastated. It did not, and almost exclusively because of my dislike for Nikolai. It is a book I admire hugely and the true-life story in the background is heartbreaking. But (I am almost ashamed to say) the book itself did not move me as I expected it to. My scrawled note on the final page reads: “Not sure I got it. The kid’s just mean.” While that may be reductive, it’s not untrue.