When do you put a novel down, and when do you continue despite not liking it?

I put down “A Little Life” after reading one quarter of it. I picked it up after I found it highly recommended by New York Times readers and critics in a best-of list.

The blurb that drew me in went like this:

“At the core of this gutting novel about four male college friends is a heart-wrenching question: Can a person ever recover from unspeakable trauma? The story focuses most intensely on Jude, a lawyer who has suffered a string of horrific events.”

I should have taken the blurb seriously. Why would I sign up to be “gutted?”

I slogged through the first parts that introduced child molestation and hinted at more child molestation, rape and torture to follow. I then found out what else was in store from an article:

“Trauma theory finds its exemplary novelistic incarnation in Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” (2015), which centers on one of the most accursed characters to ever darken a page. Jude, evidently named for the patron saint of lost causes, was abandoned as an infant. He endures—among other horrors—rape by priests; forced prostitution as a boy; torture and attempted murder by a man who kidnaps him; battery and attempted murder by a lover; the amputation of both legs. He is a man of ambiguous race, without desires, near-mute where his history is concerned—“post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past,” a friend teases him. “The post-man, Jude the Postman.” The reader completes the list: Jude the Post-Traumatic.”

For me, the article the above quote came from was more worthwhile than the book. It criticized the “trauma plot”:

“The trauma plot flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority. The solace of its simplicity comes at no little cost. It disregards what we know and asks that we forget it, too—forget about the pleasures of not knowing, about the unscripted dimensions of suffering, about the odd angularities of personality, and, above all, about the allure and necessity of a well-placed sea urchin.”

Again, why read this? I look back on another novel focused on abuse and victimization, “The God of Small Things,” which featured child molestation, but also police torture, incest, spousal abuse, inter-cast violence, murder, and so on. But that novel had the virtue of being much shorter.