“The Particles of Order”
by Yiyun Li
from the September 2, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
I‘m always excited for a new story from one of our great short story writers. Her most recent collection, Wednesday’s Child, was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, and I’m hoping this story here means she’s already putting together her next collection. This story — which I’ve started but have not been able to finish just yet — takes place in the Devon countryside at a holiday cottage.
The guest from America was to arrive in the late afternoon. Ursula, having arranged the welcome platter, waited until she heard a car slowing down in the driveway, its gravel rinsed all day by the rain, before drizzling some honey in broad strokes on the cheese and the nuts. From the kitchen window, she could see the cabdriver — Timothy today — place a suitcase next to the door, heavy, as demonstrated by his eloquent grimace. Likely he had entertained his fare with one of his two America-related stories: the cousin who’d done life in Sing Sing or the great-granduncle escaping Alcatraz on a stormy night. Visitors from America were rare, or else Timothy would have invented more credible family legends.
Ursula notes how strange it is this woman is coming to stay in January and that she booked it for two weeks. So far I’m very intrigued as Li continues to lay the pieces; for example, the cottage is where a famous writer of mystery novels named Edmund Thornton lived his last forty years, and that’s why most people come and stay, yet the guest from America seems to have no idea who he is.
In her short story Yiyun Li writes about “The Particles of Order.” What are the particles of order? My Oxford dictionary tells me they are “the concept of individual components within a system that contribute to a state of order.” Hmm. This is one of those New Yorker stories that is difficult to figure out and very well written.
So, it’s the order of the physical universe measured up against the sometimes disorder of the human life universe? Although the physical universe is very stable. Usually but not always. And the human life universe is always sees vulnerable to disorder at any moment.
I like the elements of this story because they give it structure. You have the remote quiet countryside versus busy confusion of one’s life they want to get away from for two weeks or more.
Sometimes when one is disappointed in life, they might be looking for order in the midst of the disorder of loss. And there are two women in this story that talk indirectly about life maybe in order to better understand it or if somehow there is any way to make it more endurable and possibly easier to navigate their way forward. The character, Lillian Peng reads Euclid and Geometry to understand the nature of order.
My favorite line is ” . . . what could anyone do with a single fact, which like a point, begins and ends in itself.” That is such a wise observation almost like a definition of one person’s life as a solitary point in the geometric universe. Which is kind of deep and similar to the stark blunt quality of some of Shakespeare’s best existential poetry like in King Lear. So much meaning is compressed into that simple line.
And then there’s the concluding observation, “You needed two points to make a line, more if you wanted to make a life.” In other words, connections. I am probably over simplifying, but order seems maintained by sustained connection between two points. Disorder is any sort of disconnection at any moment between two points connected to one another.
There is much in this story that is pure logic which is only ever a pattern for life but is never life itself. It is sort of a guardedly more positive viewpoint towards aspects of life that can be difficult to understand or endure.
It would great if anyone who read this story can let me know anything I may have missed or could clarify what this story is about. Reading the New Yorker interview with Yiyun Ki about this story is also helpful.
This is a story I’ll need to read many times to continue to process, though my first read was a powerful experience. This is, Li says in her interview, the first story she wrote after she and her husband lost their younger son earlier this year, and, as has been the case since they lost their oldest son, those real experiences (as well, it appears, as the public’s response to those losses) find their way into this story that has as its setting an English cottage where a famous writer concocted murder mysteries.
And William Trevor — or, rather, his work — plays a large role in this story. Li has written in the past about his influence on her work as well as about their real world friendship. I love how much his work comes up in this story about enduring the unendurable.
Larry, I found your comment very helpful as well. I think this is one of the more subtle and powerful stories I’ve read in the magazine in a while, and I need to keep thinking about it!