In defense of A Little Life

I've seen/read many reviews of A Little Life. As we know, the majority or readers like the book, and many find it problematic, saying there's too much tragedy. I want to play devil's advocate and suggest that the excess of tragedy is acceptable with a simple switch in perspective.

Instead of criticizing the relentlessness of the tragedy, I think we as the book community should, not critisizingly, but more or less neutrally, place this book on the far side of the spectrum of "The Amount of Tradegy in a Persons Life".

On the far left is a life with no tragedy, on the far right is a life of relentless tragedy, and in the middle is where most people in real life and in literature are.

A Little Life shows a life that lands much further on the right side than almost all popular fiction, and hopefully all lives of every real person ever.

My "thesis" is that this story should not be criticized simply because it lands on the extreme end of the spectrum. Some thoughts expanding on this are:

1. Out of the multiple billions of humans to have ever existed, I'm sure one of them has had the worst life of all, and while a life that tragic is statistically low, it is a reality and shouldn't be shied away from.

2. If a memoir was published, akin to A Child Called It, about a real person explaining in detail all of their tragedy, people would most likely praise it as "brave" and award it for shedding light on a person's tough life.

3. Literary genres like Splattergore exist, with stories much more gruesome than this, but because those books are niche, serious conversations about those characters struggles don't exist.

4. If a story where someone landed on the opposite side of the spectrum, where their life was almost perfect and had almost no tragedy, I wonder if it would garner the same critiques in reverse.

A Little Life does push the envelope for "mainstream" books as far as unlucky main characters, but relentless tragedy sadly does exist in the real world and I don't think the story should be criticized for being too tragic. I think stories like this should be extremely rare, but judged fairly for what it is, that one unlucky person who had a life much more unlucky than the statistical norm.