Debate erupts as Hanya Yanagihara's editor takes on critic over bad review of A Little Life

Editor Gerald Howard leaps to defence of Booker-shortlisted novel, after critic Daniel Mendelsohn claimed ‘the abuse that Yanagihara heaps on her protagonist is neither just nor necessary’ in the New York Review of Books

The editor of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel A Little Life has taken to the pages of the New York Review of Books to defend his author from a review that claimed the novel “duped” its readers “into confusing anguish and ecstasy, pleasure and pain”.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the National book award in the US, the novel tells the story of four college friends in New York, one of whom, Jude, is revealed to have had an “unspeakable” childhood. It has split reviewers: the New Yorker said it “feels elemental, irreducible – and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it”, while Alex Preston in the Observer called it “a devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch’s, a few sizes larger”. But writing in the New York Review of Books this month, the critic and author Daniel Mendelsohn found that “the abuse that Yanagihara heaps on her protagonist is neither just from a human point of view nor necessary from an artistic one”, and that “Yanagihara’s novel has duped many into confusing anguish and ecstasy, pleasure and pain”.

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