Readers describe a certain type of book based on what it did to them rather than what it is about. The plot is not mentioned. I was unable to read for a week afterward, they say. On the subway, I sobbed. When I was done, I had to give someone a call. This is how the most emotionally devastating novels function; rather than evoking sadness, they evoke the particular feeling of having truly experienced something, and the fallout is similar to grief. This is neither a coincidence nor a design flaw.
For reasons that are hard to sum up without undervaluing what the book does, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is at the top of almost every list that tries to catalog this territory. It spans more than seven hundred pages and follows four men from their New York college friendship through decades of adulthood, but at its core, it tells the tale of one of them, Jude, a lawyer whose past is gradually and purposefully revealed in bits and pieces that consistently turn out to be worse than anticipated. The reader is not shielded by Yanagihara. Despite the prolonged, graphic, and occasionally intolerable suffering in this book, readers continue to read it, suggest it to others, and give it to trusted individuals. Hundreds of social media threads exist where people describe where they were after finishing it, what they did next, and how long it took to feel normal again. The experience of being emotionally destroyed by fiction in a way that still feels, in some way, necessary has made the book something of a cultural touchstone.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy accomplishes destruction by stripping away rather than accumulating. Pushing a shopping cart through silence and ash, a father and son travel through a burned America in search of a future that might not exist and a coast they might never reach. McCarthy’s prose is renowned for being remarkably spare and nearly punctuation-free, which produces an effect that is both exquisite and profoundly unsettling: the world is reduced to its most basic components, love and survival, with everything else being destroyed. The intensity of the father’s feelings for his son, conveyed in nearly no words, carries a weight that is seldom attained by more complex emotional writing. Readers have consistently described a scene near the end of the book as one of the most devastating things they have ever read, regardless of the time period, language, or culture. Even if you know it’s coming, you can’t get ready for it.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is more subdued than both of these, almost to the point of deception. It opens with three students negotiating the typical conflicts of puberty in a tone reminiscent of a boarding school novel set in England. The nature of their predicament then starts to become apparent, but it does so gradually and reluctantly. It is precisely this restraint that makes the book so eerie. The narrator, Kathy, uses the same calm voice that she employs to describe half-forgotten arguments and childhood memories to describe an unthinkable situation. The emotional energy of the book resides in the space between the horror of what she accepts and the silence with which she accepts it. Reading the last few pages gives you the impression that you saw something that ought to have sparked indignation but instead only caused deep, heavy sadness.
Khaled Hosseini is in a completely different register. A Thousand Splendid Suns follows two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, through decades of war, occupation, and domestic abuse in Kabul. What makes the story so poignant is the unique human scale of their suffering. This is neither speculative nor dystopian. It travels through a recent period of history. The atrocities it depicts took place. Instead of using the formal distance that Ishiguro or McCarthy do, Hosseini writes suffering directly. The result is a novel that evokes the kind of grief typically associated with actual events rather than fiction. One of the most genuinely poignant relationships in modern fiction is the friendship that grows between the two women, which is based more on shared endurance than affection.
Despite their radically different approaches, all of these novels have one thing in common: they refuse to turn away. They do not become softer. They don’t give false comfort. However, readers describe finishing them with something more akin to gratitude—for the experience of feeling something so fully, for the fleeting expansion of empathy that devastating fiction uniquely produces—rather than feeling punished. When describing this genre of books, the Booker Prize literary critic put it simply: they break your heart and then mend it. Not easily, and not at the same time. However, the healing is genuine. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that readers who look for these novels frequently do so because of them rather than in spite of what they do to them.
Alyssa Bennett as editor at vclib.org, oversees editorial coverage of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political commentary. Alyssa brings rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an approachable editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant. Her career spans the intersection of literary journalism, political writing, and educational publishing.