When immigrants tell their own stories, they do a better job than when other people tell their stories. SHOCKING. Also, I am super pumped to read Behold the Dreamers. I haven’t read enough litrature by Cameroonian authors!

Vulture’s got their fall entertainment generator again! I love this thing. You can sort by FEELINGS and I LOVE FEELINGS.

Speaking of which, if you’re having feelings about Nate Parker, Birth of a Nation, and the rape charges against Parker from his college years, April Reign has a great piece at Essence on consent and remorse. Vulture has a roundtable on the question of Is It Still Okay to See Birth of a Nation? Ugh okay and I can’t stop adding things on to here but we live in an amazing age for cultural criticism, so also here’s Noah Berlatsky on separating the art from the artists and the wondrous Morgan Jenkins on the complexities of the case.

The guy who wrote I Kissed Dating Goodbye is slightly, but not totally, sorry.

A book about which I felt politely(ish) horrified at first and now find really deeply annoying because the more famous and praised it becomes, the more it feels exploitative of actual survivors of rape, has been optioned for a TV series. Like maybe talk to some survivors of childhood sexual abuse before making this show, producers.

A primer on what’s going on with the Hugos, and what WorldCon is doing to fix them.

Ruth Ware on the reason she always writes unreliable narrators (it’s because they’re the most honest kind).¹

Happy Friday to you all, and have an excellent weekend!

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Around page 150 of Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life, which follows four friends from their college years into their fifties, I wrote the following in my notes:

I am more excited about Hanya Yanagihara and her work and her career than I have been about any author in a really long time.

Around page 200 I wrote this:

Is Jude’s suffering perhaps a tad overwrought? It is starting to seem like everything bad happens to him forever. Maybe we should spend some time with one of the other characters.

Page 200 Jenny was right, and Page 150 Jenny was — well, hope springs eternal, and maybe Yanagihara’s third book will be back up to the standard of The People in the Trees. But as for A Little Life, describing Jude’s suffering as “a tad overwrought” is like describing Dolores Umbridge as “a tad unpleasant.” Yanagihara employs a plot strategy of which I was very fond when I was eleven, which was to think of as many dreadful fates as I could and heap them upon my protagonist one after another. Then when I ran out of ideas, I killed the protagonist off and wrote heartrending scenes of her friends-and-relations mourning her wretched life and too-early passing. I did this because I was eleven. I am not sure what Yanagihara’s problem is.

We learn early on that Jude is physically frail, due to an unspecified injury in his past, and that his family isn’t in the picture. Over the course of seven hundred pages, Yanagihara unfolds a cartoonishly woeful backstory to explain all of this. When you first start to recognize the way Jude’s abusive past is tearing him apart in the present, it’s heartbreaking. After two or three wicked villains have gotten through abusing him just because they’re evil, you start worrying that if the author doesn’t right the ship, you’re going to find yourself in the unenviable position of describing a depiction of child sex abuse as silly in your eventual review.

The maddening waste is that Yanagihara’s writing is elegant and evocative, and she’s able — at times — to capture with precision and delicacy the true, messy emotions between her characters. And the kind of story that she’s (I think) trying to tell is a kind of story I want to see more of. I want a story that doesn’t pretend there’s a straight path out of trauma into healing that you travel once and then you reach the end and you and your trauma have no further business to transact. I want a story that places serious value on relationships other than romantic ones. I want a story about loving someone who cannot always see his way clear to continuing to live in this world.

Ideally, of course, these stories would reach me unencumbered by several metric tons of lunatic melodrama. But in this I am evidently destined for disappointment.

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