not at all a fun friday night read, but engrossing enough to make me do it anyway.
read for the slow burn character portraits and the complex illustrations of intimacies of all kinds. yanagihara is obviously brilliant; her craft excels in its emotional precision. the overarching story requires some suspension of disbelief - it's a trees, not a forest kind of book - but she makes getting swept into the narrative easy to do.
you do get the sense that yanagihara deploys the characters' traumas primarily as artistic exercises. again, they're effective, but i’d hesitate to recommend a book this long, brutal, and triggering to anyone who didn’t feel in a mental state to receive it.
(may 22, 2021)
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