Though seemingly a coming-of-age story focused on four college roommates from an elite New England university navigating adulthood, “A Little Life” very soon reveals itself to be an ambitious exploration of how much pain the human spirit can endure. This week, Plague Turners finally finished Hanya Yanagihara’s deeply moving and upsetting magnum opus. Her novel is really about one of the four friends, Jude St. Francis and his troubling childhood as well as his later attempts to find solace after surviving abuse across his early years. We all agreed that this was a four-star read, but for different reasons. Read on for more. —Aline
Caroline Tsai
“Books lied,” Jude reflects in “Dear Comrade,” the sixth section of A Little Life. “They made things prettier.” One might imagine this sentence offset by ironic underscoring: Almost no detail of Jude St. Francis’ life, literary though it may be, could really be described as pretty. Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 Booker shortlisted-novel takes an 816-page-span to unfurl one grueling scene of abuse after another. “Hard to read” is the understatement of the century: Reading about Jude’s youth, one saturated with sexual abuse and trauma, induces a kind of masochistic hypnosis of vicarious pain. We want to rescue Jude, to fast forward, even to stop reading for a moment’s reprieve. When we think it can get no sadder, Jude is kidnapped again, abused again, pushed down a dark flight of stairs, imprisoned in a basement. His story invokes an earlier literary namesake, one whose narrative is also synonymous with suffering: that of Thomas Hardy’s 1894 social realist novel, "Jude the Obscure."
If Hardy’s Jude telegraphed the inability of outsiders to enter the lifestyle of the educated elite, though, Yanagihara grants her Jude with an all-access pass to the Architectural Digest-outfitted luxury of the Manhattan upper crust. Though the novel begins in the derelict apartment on Lispenard Street shared by Jude and Willem, it moves quickly into the spaces of the bourgeois—the Harvard Law School classroom, where Jude meets his professor-turned-adoptive father; the Greene Street loft (“the largest apartment he had ever been in”) that a wealthy sculptor friend’s family sells to Jude; the Marylebone flat that Jude and Willem purchase “when it had become evident that both of them would be doing more work in London.” Anna Kornbluh has written substantially about the architecture of fiction, the ways in which physical blueprints structure the narratives they house; indeed, the ever-expanding, ever-beautified spaces of A Little Life do suggest a man moving from childhood poverty to the material comforts begotten by hard work—a mysteriously (and conveniently) consistent fate among Jude’s cohort of friends, whose ambitious livelihoods range from architect to actor to visual artist.
Still, Jude’s adult life is not comfortable by any stretch of the imagination; the phantoms of trauma, described throughout by Yanigahara as “hyenas,” follow Jude into adulthood with a vengeance. His physical body suffers the toll as intensely as his psychological state, from self-inflicted injuries (Yanigahara delivers pages of brutal, graphic self-harm scenes) as well as scars of old wounds, repeatedly and spontaneously reopened. The grotesque hurt inflicted in childhood does not, as in many redemption arcs, disappear easily into the rear view; rather, it asserts itself aggressively into Jude’s adulthood, compromising much of his physicality and self-esteem.
Luckily, it does not fully eclipse his ability for emotional intimacy, much of which takes the form of poignant relationships with other men—first Willem, Malcolm, and JB, then with his beloved physician Andy, then his adoptive father Harold. Yanagihara is clearly attuned to the ways in which masculinity inculcates a culture of repression and stunted emotionality. In turn, A Little Life creates space for a richly imagined male emotional life, abundant with love, kindness, generosity, and communion—powerful contrapuntal forces opposing a history of abuse, torture, and violation. Though Jude becomes the novel’s natural focal point, Harold emerges as an occasional first-person narrator, presenting a voice of fatherly concern, of care, the first semblance of parental love that Jude comes to know. It is through Harold, and through the eyes of the people who care for Jude, that Yanagihara establishes the balance: The story of redemption is also the story of its witnesses.
Aline
Overall, I thought that “A Little Life” was a text worthy of merit. It resonated with me, but I wouldn’t say reading it was enjoyable. Its plot was simply too devastating for me to take any pleasure from the experience, which I suppose was the intended effect. And yet, there are readers out there who love this book, who take the time to re-read it or purchase its merchandise. Did I do something wrong?
Obviously, Yanagihara is a talented writer, but by the end of the novel I was left asking the question: is it her literary craft that makes this novel so epic or is it just the perplexing, operatic storyline that makes it feel so insistently significant? She’s given Jude a truly unforgettable origin story, and I wonder if it is only this which makes me perceive this book as worthy of praise — a question I had hoped would not go unanswered by the end.
I mainly kept reading due to the book’s central friendships. I was most moved by the lovely passages about Jude’s and Willem’s love, their domestic happiness or the sweet moments of friendship captured in Harold’s narrative. In every other section, I felt like I was racing through to escape the horror. After a while my brain shut down and stopped reacting to Jude’s terrible, violent history altogether. Yanagihara was asking too much of me and I felt numbed down to Jude's pain midway through the novel.
My mom studied criminal law at law school and when I described the book's events to her, she said it sounded exactly like the cases she had studied in school. It suggests that this was Yanagihara’s research strategy — copy down as many traumatic events from abuse cases as possible. I know that there are real life Judes out there, but to throw every single one of these misfortunes on one character (and then on to your reader) felt altogether too sadistic. It made me wonder if she must get off on the pain. It also made me think: if you treasure this book, does that mean on some fundamental level you also get off on its pain? Too much muddied water for my taste.
Halfway through my reading, I expected evil to lurk around every corner. This meant that the more I read, the less terrorized I was by the book’s most disturbing content. As I said before, my own mind tried to block out my reaction to these events, as if to process them faster—ironically, I was mimicking Jude’s very coping mechanism. I don’t think I am the only person with this reaction. It makes me question whether it's worth having your reader suffer through all these horrific events if they only end up feeling numbing to the cruelties. Does the violence end up justify itself and does it leave enough room for us to feel its injustice? Had the story been even just a little less painful, I believe that its themes would not have been as buried down as they were.
I would also argue that in a novel this long, it’s a bit disappointing that the other characters are not as fully fleshed out as Jude. Of course, we get lots of Willem and Harold, but J.B. and Malcom, are real characters who go on to live incredibly successful and exciting lives. And yet, we only get a mere taste of them. They barely exist as independent characters and by page 500 I’ve already forgotten why Jude liked them in the first place, other than the fact that they are his oldest friends and artists. I wish Yanagihara had paid them a little more individual attention. For some people, a crystal meth addiction or a trip to Doha to design a museum is worth a single book in and of itself. Should she really have brushed past these events? We must get less than 50 pages about these moments. Even the section on Malcom’s college thesis on the architecture of Alhambra is filtered through the eyes of Willem. I feel like Yanagihara could have cut back on some of the flashbacks of maiming and self harm in favor of deeper exploration of the other characters.
Having said all of this, I stand by my first statement. This is an epic novel that should be praised for all that it achieves.
Caroline Tew
I stand by my post from last week when I said that I would not recommend this book to anyone, but that doesn’t mean I disliked it. When I walked out of my bedroom a few mornings ago, tears running down my face, I told my mom, “You don’t need to read this one.” The final 100 pages of this book destroyed me. I, an easy crier, had yet to shed a tear until that point. And then, I lost it.
But perhaps that was because the final 100 pages offered a plot with an understandable ending. It’s difficult to describe without spoiling (no worries, I won’t), but the ending of “A Little LIfe” deals with the grief of loss rather than the pain and emotional scarring that comes with prolonged childhood trauma. So while the ending of the book was heart-breakingly sad just like the rest of the novel, it also ends on a fairly conventional note. Which leads me to wonder what, after all, was the point of the last 800 pages?
There were other technical issues with the book: Harold writes in the second person to Willem about Jude and this stylistic choice receives no justification, JB and Malcolm are billed as “members of the four” the book will be about but eventually get reduced to mere props, and the reader is forced to witness Jude’s trauma firsthand more times than seems necessary. I wish Yanagihara had committed to either making this book all about Jude or making this book about all four friends. Her half-hearted attempts to give JB and Malcolm depth at the beginning are quickly tossed aside in the latter half of the novel (for instance, there’s a chapter devoted to JB’s addiction to crystal meth, which is essentially never mentioned again).
The constant revisiting of Jude’s trauma troubled me: at what point does this lose ethical and artistic merit and become trauma porn? I believe Yanagihara wonderfully illustrates the complicated worldview of someone who has been deeply hurt for a prolonged period of time and shows how and why they actively reject help and put themselves in mentally or physically harmful situations. However, the book’s real-life presence—and the author’s hand in it—worry me. Yanagihara runs what is essentially a fan account on instagram for the book where people model T-shirts with the characters’ names and, more disturbingly, superimpose the cover onto their own faces (which is concerning considering the cover is almost certainly a representation of Jude’s pain). The account began when the author asked photographers to take pictures of places from the text, including motel rooms where Jude was raped as a child. The commercialization and touting of Jude’s excruciating trauma worries me in a way that I wouldn’t be if I were reading this book in a vacuum. Alas, the real world exists.
All of this to say I am glad I read this book. So many people, readers and non-readers alike, have messaged me to say they read this book and loved it. I’m glad as a reader I’ve read it and can have an intelligent conversation about it. The novel was heart-breaking and painful and intense, and while it certainly had aesthetic issues, it also managed to capture my attention for over 800 pages. There’s something to be said for that.
Looking ahead...Next week we’ll be reading the (significantly shorter) debut novel “How Much of These Hills Is Gold,” by C Pam Zhang.