A Novel With a Secret at Its Center

“You can slash a book,” says the narrator of Yiyun Li’s new novel, The Book of Goose. “There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last. Why not, I wonder.” This feels like a challenge—to take a knife to this book, the seventh work of fiction from the Chinese-born author, cutting right through it to reveal what’s at its heart.