WEDNESDAY'S CHILD

“Air oxidizes, water rusts. Time, like air and water, erodes.” Li expands on this premise in a collection of 11 short stories.

Revisiting the territories of grief and loss she’s explored in earlier works, Li places her protagonists in situations of reflection upon the circumstances of their bereaved lives. Mothers contemplate the deaths of children, wives recall long-estranged husbands, and women are haunted by missing friends. An infinite variety of ways to survive—or, at least, march through—devastating loss are cataloged in Li’s cool and measured litany of pain. In “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,” the mother of a teen who has ended his own life opens a spreadsheet of all those she knows who have died in a literal calculation of grief. (The same mother muses upon whether life is just the antechamber for death.) The dead and missing in Li’s stories are not without voice: A woman who is the lone long-term survivor of a teenage suicide pact in which several of her friends died—detailed in “Alone”—realizes the other girls have made themselves more present in her later life through their absence. The bereaved often carry the weight of either casual or calculated misogyny along with their life burdens, and echoes of #MeToo claims underlie other injuries. The relative values of memory and forgetting are examined, too, as one woman does not “indulge” in focusing on the past (in “Hello, Goodbye”) and another muses that memory is actually nonlinear and more of a jumbled haystack of incomplete stories which can only attempt to distract from an absence (“When We Were Happy We Had Other Names”). The cumulative mass of the stories is sobering, a gorgeous almanac of the world of pain.

Quiet, beautiful accounts of journeys through hell.