Writing Into the Abyss After the Death of Two Sons

THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW,by Yiyun Li

“Sometimes there is no silver lining in life,” the novelist Yiyun Li observes toward the end of her new memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” an elegant, somewhat aloof rumination on the suicide of her son James at 19, in 2024 — six years after the suicide of his older brother, Vincent, then 16. “Some consolations are strictly and purely for the consolers themselves. Please hold on to your silver linings, as I must decline.”

Li grew up in Beijing, where she was trained as a mathematician, and began her prizewinning literary career in English after moving to the United States in 1996. As befits a writer living in a culture that prefers the foggy euphemism of “passed away” to “died,” she wards off the easy sympathy of prospective readers and rejects platitudes about loss and grief. “Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process,” she writes, “and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.”

She alludes instead to something she calls “radical acceptance,” which seems to entail an awareness of being condemned to exist in the “abyss” that is the aftermath of her sons’ deaths while continuing to apply herself to dailiness, to getting out of bed at the regular time, brewing good coffee, reading — Euclid, Shakespeare, Henry James and Wallace Stevens — and writing.

Li’s new book comes in the wake of“Where Reasons End” (2019), a memoir cloaked as a novel in which she wrote about Vincent (here called “Nikolai”), “an adamant advocate for the Oxford comma,” a baker, a knitter, a fan of the 17th-century English poet George Herbert, someone who hates people who confuse the oboe (which he plays) with the clarinet and, fatally, a seeker of perfection. Both books are written in unembellished, detached prose that is as involved with itself and its imprecision — “One can never take words for granted; one cannot always trust words” — as it is with the obdurate fact of the suicides and the boys themselves.

James, like his older brother, who was also his best friend (there are no other siblings), was a self-evident prodigy, a uzunluk who could read fluently while still “in a diaper,” taught himself Welsh, among a host of other languages, and read the Encyclopedia of the Human Body as a toddler, the better to understand the intricacies of sexual intercourse. Apart from a passing reference to Vincent and James’s “sensitivity and peculiarity,” Li writes about her preternaturally gifted sons as though they were no different from other children; they clearly were, given to witty ripostes and metaphysical asides.