![]() ![]() Yanagihara’s idiosyncratic contempt for what one character calls “the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable.” The conventional trauma novel is built on the talking-cure promise of recovery, but not “A Little Life,” where the absence of Freudian subtext or clever narrative ironies leads to a pure melodrama of survival, in which the faltering consolations of love and friendship are the only checks against limitless suffering. In my view-and I belong to the camp of the novel’s admirers-the key to its potency lies in Ms. The novel’s own editor, Gerry Howard, memorably labeled it a “miserabilist epic,” betraying his discomfort with a work that had brought him and his publishing house so much prestige. ![]() You either found this enormous literary Pietà heartrending and cathartic (countless did it recently made the shortlist of a New York Times reader’s poll of the best books of the past 125 years) or you thought it was grotesque trauma porn. Reactions to the book-over 700 pages about the daily mortifications of Jude, a survivor of child-prostitution rings and one of the most severely traumatized characters ever imagined in fiction-alternate between reverence and revulsion, with very little in between. Since its appearance in 2015, Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “A Little Life” has provoked the sort of boisterous disagreements that American culture usually reserves for movies and television series. ![]()
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