The Art of the Joyful Tearjerker

Last fall, while leaving a critic’s screening of the film Hamnet, I was confronted just outside the door by the production company’s chirpy PR handler. “How was it?” she asked, as if the rivers of mascara streaming down my cheeks weren’t a clear enough signal. “Oh God,” I blurted out, before turning heel toward the bathroom. How to properly describe the garment-rending despair I’d felt in those 125 minutes?I had known what I was in for. The Maggie O’Farrell novel on which the movie was based had left me in a similar state both times I’d read it. The allure of the literary tearjerker wasn’t new to me either. When I was about 12 and my older sister recalled sobbing in front of her college library over Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes, I raced to read it. (I was not deterred when my mother fretted about its “dead babies and dead dreams.”) I wanted the raw emotion, and the release, that my sister had reported. And I would seek it out again and again: in Thomas Hardy’s grim Jude the Obscure in my early 20s, in Hanya Yanagihara’s unrelenting A Little Life in my early 30s. Now that I’m in my early 40s, Hamnet—which chronicles the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son—had found me, but it had moved me for more unexpected reasons. Mixed in with its heartbreak was an oddly complementary sensation of joy, and along with all the snot came a kind of neon ecstasy.O’Farrell’s new novel, Land, provokes that same unlikely combination in ways that annihilate critiques of her work as “grief porn.” If the raison d’être of the tearjerker is to lure the reader into disorienting sorrow, O’Farrell’s fiction has a more complicated calling—her characters are endowed with a dignity that gives their despair power and meaning. She knows that anguish cannot properly infiltrate a reader who isn’t experiencing the full spectrum of emotions: disappointment, amazement, contentment, frustration, pride, and even unbridled bliss.Irish literature is well known for its sad tales (in addition to McC