What Makes A Novel Great?

A book review of Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”

When I first started reading A Little Life, I thought it would immediately be placed in my top ten all time books.

As I read on, I felt the way Hanya Yanagihara expressed herself was a feeling I recognized from other great books, and what I called a “quiet reckoning” in John Williams’ Stoner. It’s the melancholic feeling that the writer is reaching out to the universe and asking “is there more than this?” and the world whispers back “there’s less.”

But as the novel progressed, I thought it moved from great to good—perhaps really good, but not quite in the realm of what I consider to be an all time great novel. Why?

Jude, who I’d consider the main character of the novel, lived in a reality I couldn’t relate to, one that seemed so overbearingly sad, so evil, that it edged on unreality. It was a world I didn’t recognize, one that felt fantastical, and obviously fiction.

Every person Jude met—for a large period of his life—from the monastery, to counselors, to truck drivers, to a random doctor, to his first boyfriend, wanted to abuse him. And everyone else, for the next period, wanted to love him. Save for one person in each period, there was no in between with Jude. Everyone wanted to possess him either by force or by the will of their love. What was it Jude possessed that everyone wanted? A purity? But even when that purity was broken, tainted, people still wanted to possess him. It was a world that was made up by a writer to sell a point, or emotion, or message.

And it’s not the lives of these people, lawyers, rape victims, famous artists and actors, that I can’t relate to. When I think of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, I can’t specifically relate to the life of Samuel Hamilton or any other character in the novel, but I can relate to the human emotions that they’re experiencing—a struggle for self-worth or the search for greatness in a universe devoid of meaning.

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