Where Reasons End belongs to a band of books produced in the forge of intense pain; their authors, aristocrats of suffering—think of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s memoirs of the deaths of her husband and daughter in close succession ... For Li, to apply her own language to suicide means to understand suicide as the most private of decisions, to address it without cheap sentiment or condemnation ... As the title alerts us, this book takes place in a territory beyond reason, in all its connotations—beyond explanation or understanding. The mother does not require them.
A beautifully written book that runs a quizzical eye over the urge to deal with sorrow by writing beautiful sentences, it’s closer to the essays gathered in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life—which deal, by way of Li’s interest in certain Russian and Irish writers, with an experience of suicidal depression—than it is to her more self-effacing novels and short stories ... Nikolai emerges in vivid fragments ... Some of the writing is sharply aphoristic, and there are some hair-raising sentences ... Some readers, she knows, will interpret these dialogues as symptoms of 'insanity or religiosity,' not as high-wire acts performed over an unimaginable drop. The tone is hushed, domestic, affectionate, with no Dostoevskian scenery-chewing or Tolstoyan efforts to nail down the meaning of life. All the same, you get a sense—as one of Coetzee’s characters says of the Russian masters—of being brought to a 'battle pitched on the highest ground.'
Where Reasons End is a book-long conversation between mother and reimagined child: it is a work, in a sense, of denial ... yet even in its raw subjectivity there is a costiveness that is far from the open candor of [Li's previous book] Dear Friend ... Their conversation [the narrator and son Nikolai's], being private and particular, leaves the reader with a sense of intrusion ... While Where Reasons End succeeds neither as fiction nor as autobiography, it achieves something perhaps more valuable: a glimpse of a woman artist struggling, in life, to align herself with the truth ... Where Reasons End is a work of respect, the kind of respect few parents are capable of feeling for their child. Li is a far-more-than-good-enough mother.
... one of the most original and most accomplished American novels of the decade ... It's hard to adequately describe how devastating, and how brilliant, Where Reasons End is. It's something like a metafiction, an essentially plotless novel that asks the reader to interrogate its language, indeed, to call all words into question ... [Li] succeeds, admirably. Where Reasons End is, as it must be, a profoundly sad novel, but Li never descends into mawkishness or sentimentality. She describes perfectly how the death of a loved one takes over the ones left behind, battering the survivors without rest ... Where Reasons End is the rarest of things: a perfect book, a masterpiece of American fiction, and it proves beyond a doubt that Li is one of this country's greatest writers. It's a beautiful look at what happens when language disappears, betrays us, lets us down...
The humor in this book is subtle yet potent, always followed by a lifelike echo of absurdity ... Were it not another cliché, I might call Nikolai a fully realized character; he’s precociously wise as well as a bitter deliverer of harsh truths both petty and philosophical, often at the same time ... Where Reasons End is an interrogation of form—an exploration of what fiction can do and what it can’t—as well as an attempt to understand how both to live through suffering and to write about it.
A stunning exploration of suffering and loss ... The conversation between mother and son is poetic and philosophical, quiet and undemanding ... Here, fiction doesn’t just bleed into reality; it also gives life to the imaginary ... Li’s portrayal of grief as something that doesn’t necessarily have a clear end point might be closer to real-life experience for many ... As an effort to paint a truthful picture of a mother’s grief, Where Reasons End occasionally indulges in a kind of fatalism, wondering whether this particular death was unavoidable. But the novel also takes the crucial step of dismantling a troubling trope in stories about suicide. Knowing she may never find all the right answers, Li’s narrator abandons that search. She writes her child back to life and, in doing so, responds to an act of destruction with an act of creation.
[ Where Reasons End is] one of the most original and most accomplished American novels of the decade ... It’s hard to adequately describe how devastating, and how brilliant, Where Reasons End is. It’s something like a metafiction, an essentially plotless novel that asks the reader to interrogate its language, indeed, to call all words into question ... And [Li] succeeds, admirably. Where Reasons End is, as it must be, a profoundly sad novel, but Li never descends into mawkishness or sentimentality ... Where Reasons End is the rarest of things: a perfect book, a masterpiece of American fiction and proof beyond a doubt that Li is one of this country’s greatest writers. It’s a beautiful look at what happens when language disappears, betrays us, lets us down...
... Li’s readers can expect a spare beauty from her prose, fine-tuned metaphors from an author who knows that great care is required to illuminate subjects as thorny and intimate as grief and depression ... In this novel about the potency of language and love, Li, too, has crafted a world in which the dead are still with us, if only we reach out and speak to them.
In an especially moving passage, [Li] lists words that are no longer in her dictionary, among them ‘always’ and ‘forever’ ... Where Reasons End provides no escape from grief, as novels did from depression for Li during her breakdown. However, it does still provide ‘some kind of freedom.’ In it, the protagonist is free to converse with her son, even though he is dead; she can ask him questions and find his answers coming to her in her writing.
The dialogue often pitches thesis against antithesis, but it is saved from the aridity of philosophical debate and given the emotive warmth of fiction by Li’s pitch-perfect rendering of the conversation between mother and son. She catches every cadence just right ... Nuanced argument can dissolve in an unexpected burst of humour, collapse from the weight of grief inspired by Nikolai’s loving use of 'Mommy', or be sent off course with a jostle of filial disrespect ... Words may indeed fall short [to properly describe the grief of a mourning mother], but Li’s talent opens our eyes to what glistens in the depths of their shadows.
The book brims with love, empathy, and longing. The result is beautiful in the same way that sitting in a silent church pew is beautiful ... These conversations are a pleasure to read. They unfold naturally: intimate, playful, and affectionate ... Aesthetically, Where Reasons End is an austere novel, but there are passages with heavy weight. There are parts that begin to feel redundant and repetitive ... Ultimately, Where Reasons End is a tremendous act of empathy. Despite Li’s own warning to herself that a parent should never write about a child, she has channeled something powerful and true here. Her empathy and courage are what make the book work. Anyone who has ever wished they could talk again to someone who is gone will find solace in these pages.
[The book] may sound maudlin, but Ms. Li... is too good an artist to fall into sentimentality. With these exchanges, she captures the haunting nuances of grief, the unique aches of a mourning parent, and the ways the living struggle to hold on to the dead ... But the beauty of this book is that it does not dwell in a state of gloomy interiority. It is a dialogue in which Nikolai also has a voice, and he is relentless in ensuring his mother does not indulge in clichés ... Memoirs often demand something from their readers: absolution for flaws, sympathy for travails, admiration for triumphs. Novels tend to be more generous, but Where Reasons End is an especially rare work of alchemy. With this book, Ms. Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art.
Set against this absorption with mortality are reminders of [Nikolai's] vitality. Highlighting it, Li, whose prose normally eschews vibrant colour adjectives, vividly flecks remembered [colorful] scenes ... Responding to Nikolai’s just 16 years with aching intelligence, Where Reasons End is a remarkable novel of memory and mourning.
The writing is raw and deeply affecting; Li’s free-flowing recreation of the sparring, sometimes prickly back-and-forth between a highly intelligent, perfectionist teenager and his mum is interspersed with her acknowledgements that it is all a construction, and that, at the crucial moment, language fails her...
The tone is both astringent and faintly mischievous, recalling the dialogue in a JM Coetzee novel or the wordplay of Ali Smith and Lydia Davis. Language is relentlessly inspected for imprecision as the boy... chides his mother’s new embrace of cliches and adjectives ... On any given page, the back and forth draws you in, yet you almost wince to recall the context, which intrudes in detail both tragic and bittersweet ... Li’s narrative experiment proves admirably fit for purpose. A novel in which nothing happens is liable to be dismissed as the result of a writer playing for time. Here, for all his mother’s insistence that Nikolai has nothing to say sorry for, the single defining event is the one thing we wish hadn’t happened; playing for time is the point.
This is a hard book to read. The narrator stares unblinking at her terrible grief, and yet evades it, and not only thanks to the words that mother and son bat back and forth like shuttlecocks ... The lost boy is in the pages of this novel—and far beyond it, too.
As always, Li writes with a shimmering and deeply felt precision ... it feels now as though [Li's] whole writing life has been paring down towards this more intimate form. Its compression is hard won, the result both of harrowing lived experience and of moving through realism to something a bit like autofiction, insistent on its integrity. She is no longer creating characters, but giving us their voices in a kind of sustained present, never concealing the fact that we are reading words typed on a page. And her sustained investigation of the relationship between thought and feeling has become the central drama ... It’s moving to hear the narrator, who has sought linguistic precision all her life, placing her faith in the shadows beneath the surface of language.
In a text whose sole purpose is navigating loss, this laser-like focus on semantics can be both surprising and mildly aggravating. Instead of revealing the details surrounding Nikolai’s death or giving his mother real estate to openly grieve, Li builds mini fortresses of words as barricades against unwieldy emotions ... By the end, the combination of the book’s emphasis on minutiae and its predisposition toward circular philosophizing had a numbing effect that — at least for me — felt both eerily familiar and deeply unsettling. But to be fair, that’s kind of Li’s point. After all, isn’t that what mourning — and writing or talking about death — is? A maddeningly individualized and mostly inexplicable experience?
... powerful ... One of the most arresting aspects of this novel is the way in which Li subverts expectations ... The book gets repetitive after a while — much is made of Latin derivations, and some of Nikolai's dialogue is too stilted even for a sophisticated teen — but its message is nonetheless a sobering one. Nothing can ever fill the hollows formed by tragedy, though the desire to fill them is every bit as keen as the loss. If even a fraction of the emptiness is replaced, then the quest is worth the effort ... Anyone who has ever lost a loved one — that would be all of us — will relate.
It’s a terrifying prospect for anybody who makes a living by making people up, that they should come to depend on the validation of their characters. But this idea is central to Li’s new novel, Where Reasons End ... Where Reasons End is not about ‘how’ or ‘why’ – the ‘unanswerable questions’ to which suicide gives rise – but about whether fiction can give us back, even briefly, somebody we’ve lost ... There’s nothing like plot here ... The circular dialogue, which pushes forward but gets you nowhere, seems to mimic the mother’s Penelopean knitting, and is at once painful and insouciant; the philosophical bleakness, the relentless control of tone, is both grave and funny. Words ‘live on the page, in a two-dimensional world’; look at them too closely, press too hard for meaning, and they’re likely to unravel ... Li is an escape artist, but she is also a mother who won’t permit the escape of her son. The only place she can keep him is in fiction.
Where Reasons End reads like a long poem; Li utilizes the ambiguity and imperfection of words to comment on the ineffectiveness of language, but also as a topic of conversation between mother and son. In each of their disagreements, Li challenges the basis of her writing style, linguistic tendencies, and worldview ... By shifting the conversation into the realm of fiction, Li makes the ineffable both tangible and ordinary, and thus more easily dissected ... Li leaves us wanting more, but that yearning seems to be the point. Li’s work is as singular as it is devastating.
The form of this book is certainly novel ... Li described Dear Friend as an 'anti-memoir', and this designation is crucial to our understanding of Where Reasons End ... The most important reader of this deeply moving book is undoubtedly Yiyun Li’s son.
...a devastating and yet strangely inspiring meditation on life, love and death ... At the heart of Where Reasons End is a courageous search for truth. The mother, the narrator, resists taking advantage of her authorial power to create an idyllic relationship with her son, Nikolai, in favour of something more complicated and real ... Ms Li has created a new place for grief. But do not expect slick logic or a lyrical panacea for sorrow: be prepared for painful, eloquent searching and riddles unsolved.
Where Reasons End uses conversation as the mode to better explore her narrator’s grief ... It is possible to read each chapter in isolation, but the novel accrues meaning as each conversation is layered upon the others ... There’s a lightness here, which lifts the novel out of melancholy, as we recognize the back-and-forth between mother and son, as we see the love that they have for each other ... It is fascinating to consider the way in which Li implicates the reader here ... Li transfers those more negative emotions to the reader. It is an uncomfortable place to be ... our emotions ricochet back and forth, mimicking, perhaps, the way that the narrator is feeling as well ... Li helps the reader to look directly at grief, to consider other ways of understanding such an enormous loss through the creation of something new. And in doing so, she makes a beautiful thing, a work of art.
...an arresting and unwavering exploration of nearly unimaginable pain and grief ... her desperation to understand the unfathomable and the depth of her love for her lost child are unmistakable. Li’s intricate, enveloping prose will long haunt readers.
There is a certain seclusion to Where Reasons End. The familiar is mystified and philosophized. It’s a harrowing read that requires time, patience, and utmost focus; I find something devastatingly new whenever I return to this kind of book ... has no plot, no arc, no drama, no suspense. Just strings of words that keep your eyes glued to the pages and have you intermittently close them to fully digest some parts ... a fine blend of profound pain and beauty.
The conversations do not directly address her grief, but instead are plausible representations of a real exchange between a parent and an almost-grown child: digressive; discursive; filled with memories and private jokes ... The effect is first mesmerising and then haunting because we know these are the things Nikolai’s mother can no longer say to him, even when they seem things not notably worth saying in the first place ... [a] disquieting, delicate, affecting book ... the power of the story stands alone.
Heart-wrenching ... Like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Li’s novel tries to find a language to reckon with the unspeakable reality of death. The novel succeeds in Li’s approach of skirting the subject in favor of something between the dead’s nostalgia for life and regular small talk. This is a unique, poignant, and tender evocation of life as touched irrevocably by death.
