Houses of indifference

In 2015, Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel A Little Life was published to a critical response so effusive as to seem almost hyperbolic. Jon Michaud of the New Yorker described the novel’s depiction of the Promethean repetitiveness of trauma as ‘elemental, irreducible’; Garth Greenwell declared in The Atlantic that ‘the great gay novel’ had finally been written. Even critics who viewed the novel less favourably acknowledged its extraordinary affective force. In one of the few unflattering reviews, Daniel Mendelsohn of The New York Review of Books savagely describes the novel as ‘little more than a machine designed to produce negative emotions for the reader to wallow in’.