![]() ![]() Yanagihara’s book takes the sense of the contemporary from one, and its grandiosity and stakes from the other. If they weren’t so firmly rooted into culture and curricula, the characters and drama would seem exaggerated, even melodramatic. In that case you might favor the second category, the Dickens/Dostoevsky ticket. Or the writers I listed could represent an exhaustion of imagination, the final triumph of mundane lived experience over fictional invention. You might choose to see this attention to life as a refreshing return to relevance or contemporaneity in fiction. There seem to be generous and ungenerous ways of looking at this moment. Often favoring qualities like minutia, repetition, stasis, neurosis, they don’t tell a story so much as narrate events. The “life novels” of today seem to hew so close to life as to cut into it. ![]() ![]() Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel A Little Life emerges between the contemporary “life novels” (of Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Shelia Heti, Heidi Julavits, and newly imported stars, Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard) and a much older model of fiction, situated firmly in the 19th century: that of Dickens and Dostoevsky. ![]()
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