A Little Life

The sustained examination of suffering and whether it can generate meaning — Dostoevsky and Yanagihara are both asking whether a universe that allows this much pain can be morally coherent

The refusal to look away from violence done to bodies — Morrison's account of slavery's physical legacy and Yanagihara's account of childhood abuse share a formal commitment to the full scale of damage

Multiple perspectives on the cost of living as someone for whom ordinary life is experienced as unbearable — Cunningham's Woolf sections share Yanagihara's understanding of suffering as a form of interiority, not weakness

The cost of self-concealment, the damage done by refusing to name what you are — Baldwin's David and Jude both live in states of radical non-disclosure that cost them everything

Yanagihara's subsequent novel — similarly ambitious in scale, similarly interested in the limits of love and the persistence of damage across time, different in its structural approach

Another massive, maximalist novel about a child permanently marked by catastrophe — Tartt and Yanagihara are the period's two clearest arguments for literary fiction without length limits