![]() ![]() Yanagihara is an excellent storyteller she understands the obsessive feeling that a good mystery produces, and at her best, the cruelty and violence her characters constantly suffer and inflict give the mystery a threatening bite. What makes the page-turning easier in her first two novels- The People in the Trees and A Little Life-is precisely their resemblance to page-turners. The difficulty in a Yanagihara novel lies not in figuring out what’s going on, but in seeing clearly what’s going on, and turning the page anyway. ![]() A Yanagihara novel does not test our ability to untangle long, looping sentences, or follow abstract arguments, but rather to withstand illustrations of emotional and physical distress, which pop up implacably like boxing dummies. They attempt to be less stylistically or conceptually dense than emotionally dense. ![]() In internet terms, her novels are a lot: long, serious, and interested in the psychology of horrible people, or of un-horrible people trapped in horrible situations. Hanya Yanagihara is not merely a maximalist she is more specifically a writer of extremity. ![]()
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