New Yorker Fiction Review #312: "Techniques and Idiosyncrasies" by Yiyun Li

 

Review of the short story from the March 17, 2025 issue of The New Yorker...

The more I read of Yiyun Li -- and at this point I've read and reviewed seven of her stories in The New Yorker -- the more I like her. To me her writing demonstrates the kind of timeless sensitivity and insight into the human condition that is one of the hallmarks of a truly gifted writer. Someone who themselves is complex enough, and has thought deeply enough about life, that they can enrich your experience of your own life simply through writing fiction. It's a talent that seems more rare than it ought to be. 

"Techniques and Idiosyncrasies" is an odd story and does not have a conventional plot structure. It's more of a meditation or rumination on how we learn to deal with grief over time and -- in some ways -- it is about how writers learn how to portray grief through fiction, although this last one (in my opinion) could have been developed slightly better. 

In the world of the story, the direct action concerns a middle-aged writer (somewhat famous, we are meant to think?) named Lillian, aged 51, who goes to the doctor and finds there is a new nurse working the office instead of the former one she had become accustomed to. Lillian, we gradually learn, has lost both of her sons to suicide, and quite recently. During the process of the doctor visit, Lillian looks back at her past and examines several incidents that relate to her current situation, as well as studying the face of the new nurse, and the doctor, to see if their reactions to her have changed or betray new information about how they see her. Like I said, it's not a "what happened" kind of story. 

However, it is very much about something. Death is referred to at least 25 times, in a variety of forms. The word death, itself, as well as the word suicide, murder, and a few other euphemisms for death are laced throughout the story to a degree that would make it sound macabre. But it's really not. What's at the heart of this story's obsession with death is how we deal with grief.

Lillian, in the face of the almost unthinkable suicide death of both her sons (her only children), has implausibly learned how to joke and to focus on small, mundane things as a way to cope. 

One of the "keys" to understanding this story can be found in the following line, about a third of the way into the story:

"The unfathomable is unsettling, and that makes the most banal thought a shelter."

With this line, Lillian (or to be more specific, Yiyun Li) is articulating her prescription for coping with grief: thing of things in small, logical terms. For in the very next line:

"Those who don't think of themselves as monsters feel less uneasy if catastrophes can be explained as consequences."

It took me a few times reading that sentence to fully understand it, but...given the context of the rest of the story, it makes sense. Lillian goes on to relate a few childhood instances -- one of them involving witnessing the torture of a hedgehog -- which forced her to learn how to numb and harden herself to her feelings and to grief. 

At some level this is also a story about writing and writers, as evidenced by a few moments of intertextuality. Yiyun Li mentions Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen and American writer Patricia Highsmith (twice). I've never loved referencing other writers or artists in a story unless the plot specifically concerns them. I feel like it's alienating to the reader who might be unfamiliar with those authors. In this case, I get the Patricia Highsmith references, because I am familiar with her work. But, luckily, one does not have to be familiar with Elizabeth Bowen's work to understand the quote Yiyun Li uses. But I'm sure knowing more about her work would add to one's understanding of the story. 

I rarely read short stories twice, but I read this one twice and may go back to it a third time. There is still a layer of meaning I'm not sure I've tapped into here. Something that cannot be articulated easily and, perhaps, is not meant to be articulated easily. 

Illustration by Na Kim.