Between the Lines: How Much Suffering Is Enough?

Published every Friday, Between the Lines is a weekly column by Namrata. This week, she writes on fictional agony, literary greatness, and the lives writers ask their characters to endure.

We were discussing books when someone said that in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, it feels as though every terrible thing imaginable happens to Jude. The conversation moved to Premchand’s Godaan, with someone observing that hardly anything good happens to Hori, its protagonist, and yet the novel is considered a masterpiece. I have been thinking about these two remarks ever since, partly because they seem to touch upon something we rarely discuss when we talk about books we admire. We are willing to accept that fiction can be devastating, that a writer might take us into the darkest corners of human experience and leave us there for a while, but somewhere along the way we begin to wonder about the terms of this arrangement. How much suffering can a writer ask us to witness before we start questioning the purpose of it? And when a character’s life seems to consist of one misfortune after another, at what point does our attention shift from the person enduring it to the writer who keeps making it happen?