On the other hand, I found the cascading sequence of horrors inflicted on Jude in Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” not too much to bear but too much to swallow-though a huge audience found a lot to like in the story of a baby abandoned beside the trash who grew up to be raped in a monastery before being variously kidnapped, raped again, pimped out, tortured in a basement, and crippled by being deliberately run over, en route to a lifetime of self-harm and eventual suicide. “Gone Girl”? Amazing Amy, perfect daughter and wife turned evil psycho and would-be murder-suicide, is only slightly less unlikely than the flying Kryptonian in tights, but the portrait has such glee and brio that, again, millions of us go along for the ride. This is wildly ahistorical, but for me and millions of other readers it both passes the Superman test and is a big part of what makes the books so enjoyable, and the main character so easy to like (as the real-life Cromwell, apparatchik and bureaucrat and religious ideologue, definitely wasn’t). In Hilary Mantel’s wonderful novels about Thomas Cromwell, the protagonist’s consciousness, perceptions, and psychology are entirely those of a modern man. The test doesn’t apply only to genre fiction, and it’s also the case that the point of maximum unlikeliness can be one of the best things about a fictional world. Mine is something that I call the Superman test: Is what I’m being asked to believe less likely than the character’s being able to fly? The question is not “Is it good?” but “Is this for me?” Most readers have their own standards for how much implausibility they can handle.
This isn’t the same thing as aesthetic judgment-deciding whether a book is good as a work of art.
The Jack Reacher novels deftly ground wish fulfillment in earthbound detail.
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