The editor of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel A Little Life has taken to the pages of the New York Review of Books to defend his author from a review that claimed the novel “duped” its readers “into confusing anguish and ecstasy, pleasure and pain”.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and the National book award in the US, the novel tells the story of four college friends in New York, one of whom, Jude, is revealed to have had an “unspeakable” childhood. It has split reviewers: the New Yorker said it “feels elemental, irreducible – and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it”, while Alex Preston in the Observer called it “a devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch’s, a few sizes larger”. But writing in the New York Review of Books this month, the critic and author Daniel Mendelsohn found that “the abuse that Yanagihara heaps on her protagonist is neither just from a human point of view nor necessary from an artistic one”, and that “Yanagihara’s novel has duped many into confusing anguish and ecstasy, pleasure and pain”.

The preposterous excess of humiliation and suffering... defies verisimilitude and alienates the sensible reader Critic Daniel Mendelsohn

Gerald Howard, Yanagihara’s editor at Doubleday, responded in a letter published in the new issue of the magazine, objecting to Mendelsohn’s “implication that my author has somehow, to use his word, ‘duped’ its readers into feeling the emotions of pity and terror and sadness and compassion”.

“In the first place, as we all know and as Nabokov on numerous occasions was pleased to remind us, art is at bottom an elaborate con game, but one whose techniques are designed to lead us by degrees into a realm of authentic emotion and aesthetic bliss, which justifies the con,” wrote Howard. “When I have felt like crying while reading a novel by Charles Dickens (take your pick) or, to cite a book in a wildly different register, John Williams’s Stoner, have I been ‘duped’ by those authors? If so, I look forward to being duped in similar fashion many, many times in the future.”

Mendelsohn replied to Howard’s criticism, saying that that “it can be neither pleasant nor easy for Gerald Howard to have to defend his author’s now popular and acclaimed book against a complaint that he himself made as it was being written: that the preposterous excess of humiliation and suffering heaped on the protagonist by its author (along with the character’s improbable array of compensatory expertises) both defies verisimilitude and alienates the sensible reader”.

He pointed to an interview with Howard in Kirkus Reviews, in which the editor reveals that he told Yanagihara that Jude’s suffering were “just too hard for anybody to take … You have made this point quite adequately, and I don’t think you need to do it again.”

“My larger point was that Yanagihara’s slathering-on of trauma is, in the end, a crude and inartistic way of wringing emotion from the reader – an assaultive repetitiveness that can hardly claim to be one of the ‘techniques … designed to lead us by degrees into a realm of authentic emotion and aesthetic bliss’ that Howard rightly mentions as a hallmark of a genuine novelistic achievement,” writes Mendelsohn. “For this reason I believe Ms Yanagihara achieves her effects dishonestly.”

The critic admitted that another word might have been better than “duped”, suggesting “cheated” or “pandered to”, ending: “Mr Howard can take his pick. One only wishes that he had imposed as stringent an editorial oversight on his author as he would do on her reviewers.”