BOOK REVIEWS

Beware the future in Celeste Ng's new novel, the past in Yiyun Li's and Maggie O'Farrell's, and consider the present in light of a chronicle of the powerful Sassoons

THE BOOK OF GOOSE

by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

There are no literal ghosts in Yiyun Li’s beguiling new novel, The Book of Goose, but the dead possess freakish agency. They haunt creek beds and lance eels with bayonets. They weave snares from willow branches. They pick up drunks stumbling out of bars for who knows what. Their reification is owed to the dark and voluminous imagination of Fabienne, a teenage girl raised in the rough and destitute French countryside in the years following the Second World War. Reliably by her side is her best friend, the impressionable Agnès—also her cruel plaything, and faithful scribe to her stories. Agnès’s loyalty borders on zealotry.

But here’s the thing: Fabienne is dead, too…

Composed in Li’s crystalline, unhurried prose, this worldsweeping tale—which has the texture and atmosphere of a fable—begins in, of all possible places, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Now in her 20s, Agnès is drifting through a barren marriage to a kind if unremarkable husband. “Perhaps it is not his fault that I cannot get pregnant,” she writes to herself. “The secrets inside me have not left much space for a fetus to grow.” An unexpected letter arrives from her estranged mother, still living in France, offhandedly relaying Fabienne’s death during childbirth. As if possessed, Agnès begins a chronicle of their peculiar girlhood relationship, which launched her as an upstart young author from their village to the publishing houses of Paris, and on to a boutique English boarding school, riding a starburst of literary fame. “I never made up stories,” she writes of her books, “but I was good at listening to Fabienne.” Published under Agnes’s nom de plume, Agnès Moreau, the books were composed by both of them.

In excavating the past, Agnès runs up against some questions so moss-covered that to even raise them here feels trite. But they have an urgent contemporary relevance, so here goes: Who has the right to tell a story? Can a narrative have a definite endpoint? How can we find happiness in difficult times? In response to the last, Fabienne offers a workaround: “I have an idea,” she tells Agnès. “We grow your happiness as beet and mine as potato. If one crop fails, we still have the other.” They are also relevant to Li’s own backstory as the survivor of a dark time of persecution in Tiananmen-era China, and the self-portraying chronicler of a series of suicide attempts.

With The Book of Goose, Li— now a creative writing professor at Princeton and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a MacArthur grant—has again transfigured her personal tragedies into a piercing work of art. And while her characters, like the rest of us, can only poke around the edges of these unanswerable questions, there are, as in life, occasional moments of grace and clarity, when the fog vanishes and the answers appear. In one such instance, Li offers a description of happiness that might be called definitive: “to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.” —Daniel Karel

OUR MISSING HEARTS

by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)

The thing is, you never know your world is going to end until it happens—that disaster will strike or be inflicted; that the unimaginable will creep up so slowly it goes unnoticed; that dysfunction will blossom into deadliness; or that peace, quiet, and country club calmness will shatter into a million little pieces—as happened in Celeste Ng’s literary blockbuster Little Fires Everywhere. In her new novel, Our Missing Hearts, it’s millions of lives progressively compromised, crushed, and stealthily snuffed out in a not-so-distant future as China perpetually hovers on the verge of a planet-annihilating war with the rest of the globe. In this dystopian narrative, that standoff has steered the United States into devoting much of its national and cultural defense mechanisms at home to anti-Asian propaganda. By sowing discrimination, public humiliation, and personal destruction, the government implicitly condones violence against anyone of Asian descent and embarks on an insidious program of separating the children of alleged dissidents from their “undesirable” families, who often proceed to disappear under enigmatic and frightening circumstances. Just replay the January 6 hearings, and you’ll know what I mean, and what Ng meticulously, eloquently, and devastatingly gets at in Our Missing Hearts.

Take Ng’s 12-year-old, half Chinese-American Noah Gardner, nickname “Bird,” living under the omnipresent PACT, or Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act, which insists that everything is hunky-dory, and the nationalistic fearmongering it spreads is just a sunny-side up way of keeping everyone happy and safe. Bird picked his nickname when he was younger, and his family was happy and intact. After his poet mother, Margaret Chu, abandons her husband, a brilliant former linguistics professor who now files books in a university library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his father refuses to call him that anymore. Missing his mother terribly, Noah revives his nickname, both out of defiance and out of a young boy’s propulsive sense of hurt.

Like others who seemingly go missing, Bird’s mother’s departure was more like a forced vanishing, since she was associated with a resistance that still simmers underground and whose members venerate her poetry, especially the powerful, stabbing clutch of words “our missing hearts.”

Growing signs of dissent have started to appear in the form of banners or writing in chalk, many containing those three potent words, which Noah takes as a sign that his missing mother is somehow trying to communicate with him. He also witnesses a strange set of coincidences at his father’s library, which most decidedly does not stock her books. There, Bird glimpses people leaving tiny bits of folded paper inside books within the stacks, while a young librarian helps him find a book of Japanese fairy tales with stories that his mother used to tell him. These events give Bird the courage to leave home for New York to track his mother down.

Bird arrives in a New York you know and don’t know. Chinatown resembles an abandoned war zone, while the Upper East Side “looks

like a fairyland,” with a beautiful Asian woman walking a small dog until “a tall white man” and his fist come “out of nowhere… The woman crumpling, turned to rubble.” He experiences a Park Avenue lined more with fortresses than the expensively impregnable apartment buildings they really are. But Bird has a slip of paper with the word “Duchess” written on it and an address, and he’s the kind of young man who won’t take no for an answer, not from a totalitarian regime’s powers that be who believe they know what they have in store for him, not from a doorman. The “Duchess” turns out to be Dodo, his mother’s friend and flatmate from when they were young and led an arduous but happy and creative downtown existence. Dodo and Bird’s mother are still close, so close that Dodo gets him to a mysterious hideaway where Margaret is engaged in activities that will sweep Bird into a mysterious world where nothing is what it seems—that is, until dark corridors and hidden liberation plots give up their ghosts and those seeking to avenge them. Bird sees and retrieves there what he needs in order to move forward, so that even when Margaret disappears once more, he knows what to do.

Celeste Ng has written another wonder of family lost and found, and about the force of words and art that connect and set free. —cEliA mcgEE

THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT

by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf)

The brief, introspective life of a young woman during the Renaissance in Italy is explored in Maggie O’Farrell’s remarkable latest novel. From the very outset, in a historical note, we are told the sad fate of the achingly real Lucrezia de’ Medici, born in 1545 into a long line of Florentine nobility and married off at 13 genuine humanity and gives life to a person whose brief existence could have easily been lost to obscurity. —Allison Escoto

(O’Farrell makes her 15) to a far older d’Este in need of an heir. In the deceptively domestic opening scene, the couple make stilting, excessively proper conversation over dinner even as Lucrezia quietly, devastatingly realizes that her life is in danger at the hands of a moody, mercurial husband. Seated across from Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, Modena, and Reggio, she understands with a “peculiar clarity, as if some colored glass has been put in front of her eyes, or perhaps removed from them, that he intends to kill her.” Lucrezia’s story leading up to this is recounted in alternating time lines: her childhood in Florence as part of a large, powerful aristocratic family and her life as a terrified newlywed, torn from her roots and at the mercy of a man who is an unpredictable mystery to her. Her new existence brings her ominous sisters-in-laws and the task of navigating the complicated history of a tumultuous extended dynasty with treacherous politics. The titular marriage portrait, commissioned by Alfonso, is the device through which O’Farrell allows us a glimpse into Lucrezia’s growing powers of perception and burgeoning emotional maturity. Though the story’s players are based on real figures, the time and distance that stretch between then and now are more of a barrier here for O’Farrell than it was in her previous, astonishing work, Hamnet, which won the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award. But she still manages to infuse the novel with strikingly vivid detail—minute aspects of life in a Renaissance court captured with a delicate attention to every one of the senses. Lucrezia’s rich inner life, her budding creativity as a painter, and an insightfulness that belies her age are treated to O’Farrell’s elegant, transporting prose. Lucrezia passes the time when no one else is around painting scenes from her imagination, only to paint over them to hide her true passion from prying eyes charged with surveilling her, and forms an instant connection with an apprentice portrait painter who speaks in the same provincial dialect as the cherished nursemaid who raised her and whom only she can understand. Granting us access to these small, significant moments, O’Farrell endows Lucrezia with a

THE SASSOONS: THE GREAT GLOBAL MERCHANTS AND THE MAKING OF AN EMPIRE

by Joseph Sassoon (Pantheon)

What, I wonder, does it say about our modern times that we live in an era of dynastic nostalgia? We can’t get enough of the Gettys. We call for the Carnegies, vamp for Vanderbilts, murmur for Mellons, and run to the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. We regard the rise of each with awe and tend to their intrafamilial turmoil with delight. There are literally Carnegie Library bookshelves filled with tomes devoted to these families and, of course, plenty of prestige television too. To add to this cast of generational plutocrats, here come the Sassoons.

Markedly different from other dynasties in a number of ways, the original Sassoons were Baghdadi Jews, from the Middle East, whose wealth derived from the 19th-century opium and cotton trade in China and India before being leached away by succeeding generations who turned away from industry and embraced, instead, both Englishness and dissolution.

Also of note and differentiation, they, like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s vast and trunkless legs of stone, had been remanded to the obliviating sands of time. That is, until one Joseph Sassoon, hitherto a professor of history and politics at Georgetown University and best known for such page turners as Anatomy of Authoritarianism in the Arab Republics, received a letter from another Joseph Sassoon, this one of Kirkcudbright, Scotland, who “declared himself a descendant of Sheikh Sassoon ben Saleh Sassoon and believed I might be also and therefore hoped to hear from me.” Hearing from Joseph Sassoon, the other Joseph Sassoon did just that, and thus began a research project that has culminated in this strangely bloodless but nevertheless intriguing, if not a little infuriating, account of centuries of Sassoons. Some of the arc will be familiar to followers of the wealthy but, due to the global nature of the Sassoon enterprise and their carefully preserved Sephardic Judaism, there is novelty still. The aforementioned Sheikh Sassoon ben Saleh Sassoon, for instance, was the financial advisor to Dawud, the mercurial pasha of Baghdad in the 1820s. When Dawud fell from favor with the Ottoman rulers, Sassoon and his sons, David and Joseph, were forced to flee. David eventually made his way to Bombay—then run by the East India Company—and through a mixture of assiduous research, canny business acumen, and hard work, founded what would become Sassoon & Co. (This will be for many the familiar part.) As an actual Sassoon—as opposed to hair care titan Vidal, who, for the record, is not—Joseph Sassoon chronicles in meticulous detail how David, though he began in textiles, made his first fortune in trading opium between India and China. From this core business grew others, including shipping and insurance, but opium remained, until it was outlawed in the early 20th century, the furnace for the Sassoons’ wealth. Sassoon devotes a great deal of space to the piousness of his forebearers. They are learned in the Talmud and—before assuming arch Englishness—observant. But time and time again, throughout the relatively short but astonishingly eventful reign of Sassoon & Co., he sees world events solely through the lens of profit made or lost. The First Opium War in China, for instance: good, since it mercilessly pried open that country to the lucrative trade. The American Civil War: also good, because the cotton shortage drove up prices from Sassoon’s holdings in India. In this the Sassoons, here including both the family and the author, seem totally indifferent to any moral consideration. And absent that moral compass, another dynastic family can’t help but spring to mind: the cutthroat modern day opioid traders, the Sacklers, whose own vast sums were accumulated off the suffering of others, and, for that matter, far closer to home. —joshuA dAvid stEin