“Carbonara, or cacio e pepe? I trust you on food recommendations…” a friend said as we caught up at a regular lunch haunt. Cue proud grin. “More than I trust your advice on books, at this point.” Ouch. Awkward silence.

Me, incredulous: “Seriously?” (And, unsaid: “How dare you?”)

She: “That book you were shouting about on Facebook. I went out and bought it on your recommendation, but couldn’t get past page 10.” At which she brought out of her bag a – crashing onto the table – the indicted book: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. All 640 pages of it.

We went back and forth for a few minutes, arguing (me) why it was the most heart-rending, unputdownable book I’d read in a long while, and (she) that it was merely a fictionalised version of abused-childhood memoir A Child Called It.

I’ll spare you the ping-pong. My friend did promise to give it another go. But, curiously, I found myself agreeing with quite a few of her criticisms of the novel. I even volunteered a few of my own.

Fast-forward by a couple of days and I was chatting about this same book to a few friends who had also been obsessed by it, on a Messenger private chat.

We seem to spend so much of our conversation time in virtual chatrooms, be they on Messenger, Viber, WhatsApp... All custom-created, often overlapping chatrooms: one for parents whose kids are in the same class, another for lunch date friends, another for work colleagues and ad hoc ones set up just for a few days such as this one, to discuss a book we’d read.

Surely, I’m not the only one who, while holding simultaneous, separate conversations has mistyped a comment meant for one group, into another…

But back to it. Basically, we all chipped in criticisms about A Little Life. An overwritten chapter here, a lack of credible, well-rounded female characters there… Which led me to wonder: if there’s so much in the novel I disagreed with and that I didn’t quite like, why then was I praising it wildly on Facebook and expending book-cred with my friends, badgering them to read it?

Because I found myself saying, I had enjoyed – loved – reading the book. It’s as simple as that. The book worked for me. No matter the deficiencies on a technical level – real or perceived – it all came together and the author managed to create a story I immersed myself into and couldn’t let go of.

There are beautifully-crafted, technically brilliant books that simply don’t come together

And that is what should be asked of a book.

There are beautifully-crafted, technically brilliant books that simply don’t come together. Books that leave us, the readers, cold. Or ones that we appreciate intellectually, but that we don’t relate to on an emotional level.

Then there are the books like A Little Life – not an inferior novel in any way, even shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize – for those who lay stock in such markers – that grab you and make you cry in public if you make the mistake of reading on outside the house. Which you will, because you will just need to read that one more chapter.

This is not just idle musing, in case you’re wondering. This dilemma is one I come across regularly at work, when reading what I call ‘naked manuscripts’.

When you pick up a book in a bookshop, there are plenty of pointers to influence you instantly as to what you should think of it: the author’s name and reputation, for starters.

The attention to detail in the book’s production which, although it shouldn’t say anything about the quality of the writing, often does on a subconscious level. Any awards the book might have won or been shortlisted for. An important blurb.

On the other hand, when I receive a manuscript from an unknown, unpublished author, I’m reading it blind. No pointers to tell me in advance whether I’m reading the next García Márquez or the next bin liner.

I receive it printed out on word, often raw and in need of some level of editing and with all the typos that proofreading will eventually cleanse it of.

And it’s easy to get it wrong. We all have, at some point, and we generally have the scars (read: lost sales, as the book went on to become a bestseller with a competitor) to prove it.

So, one of the guiding principles when assessing these naked manuscripts is the very simple question: does the novel work? Yes, the technical criteria are important decision influencers, but there’s something unquantifiable too, that gut reaction that a reader either has or does not.

Now, if this doesn’t convince my lunch friend to give A Little Life another go, and prove me right, I don’t know what will. If you’re reading this: I bet you lunch that you’ll enjoy it.

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