...the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years ... Just as Yanagihara’s characters challenge conventional categories of gay identity, so A Little Life avoids the familiar narratives of gay fiction. Yanagihara approaches the collective traumas that have so deeply shaped modern gay identity—sickness and discrimination—obliquely, avoiding the conventions of the coming-out narrative or the AIDS novel ... In this astonishing novel, Yanagihara achieves what great gay art from Proust to Almodóvar has so often sought: a grandeur of feeling adequate to 'the terrifying largeness, the impossibility of the world.'”
A Little Life becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery ... Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character ... Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life. Like the axiom of equality, A Little Life feels elemental, irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it.
From the moment I picked up A Little Life, I couldn’t put it down. I read the whole thing in three days. When it was over, I felt sorry and reluctant to read anything else. I actually started rereading it—I reread the first twenty pages, and then I stopped, not because I wanted to but because I had professional obligations to read other things ... I was mystified at first as to how I was able to tolerate, let alone devour, a book so devoted to two of my least-favorite literary topoi (pedophilia, lifestyles of the rich and glamorous). Then it occurred to me that perhaps what was so compelling was precisely the combination of the two ... somehow, when I crawled into bed every night with A Little Life, when I read about all the great apartments and great parties and great meals, juxtaposed with the visceral and meticulous story of a child whose trust and body and soul are systematically and deliberately broken by sadists for their personal entertainment, I felt that I recognized something true, and I felt comforted.
[Yanagihara] obtains narrative traction by withholding information. Where did Jude come by his limp, his chronic pain issues? What exactly is 'the injury' referred to time and again? This mechanism sparks the reader’s voyeuristic interest but comes with a sullying sensation. After a while, I understood I was being enticed to watch someone’s terrible suffering from a comfortable distance ... Yanagihara’s success in creating a deeply afflicted protagonist is offset by placing him in a world so unrealized it almost seems allegorical, with characters so flatly drawn they seem more representative of people than the actual thing. This leaves the reader, at the end, wondering if she has been foolish for taking seriously something that was merely a contrivance all along.
His friends are all very concerned with Jude, to the exclusion of being concerned about anyone else, including themselves. There is something unsettlingly infantile and narcissistic about this pre-Copernican conception of Jude’s world, a fantasy construction in which the people who love him are as endlessly occupied by his psychodrama as he is ... The problem with telling rather than showing is not that it flouts an authorial precept set down by Henry James; writers are free to break all rules, including that one, if it improves their books. But such narration is distancing: it leaves us watching what Jude feels, rather than actively sharing in his confusion, pain, suffering. Meanwhile, eking out Jude’s memories of elaborate tortures has the unfortunate effect of turning sadistic tales of child abuse into narrative payoff ... Somehow, against all the odds, just like its protagonist, this book survives everything its author throws at it – and if it doesn’t quite triumph, it has far outplayed the odds.
It's an extraordinary book, one that sucks you in by appearing at first to be a fairly conventional story about four friends, just graduated, making their way in their careers in New York — and then, once you are hooked, turning into another kind of experience entirely, quite harrowing and obsessive, anguishing and unforgiving, an 'emotional horror story', [Hanya Yanagihara] concedes. It leaves you feeling pretty traumatised yourself, aware just how affected you have been by merely reading it ... A Little Life is quite deliberately a fable, not social realism (although set in New York over the past three or four decades, it doesn't mention 9/11, Aids or other obvious reference points), and all the more powerful for it. The truths it tells are wrenching, permanent.
Prepare yourself: This spellbinding, feverish novel sucks you in to the struggle of sensitive, brilliant, young Jude as he tries to survive his never-discussed childhood. That childhood—slowly, hauntingly revealed to the reader over hundreds of pages in a feat of writing that mimics how memory works in those who try to suppress it—turns out to be one long, savage nightmare of abuse. How Jude tries to create a life in spite of it, not just succeeding professionally as an attorney, but also attempting to develop trust and intimacy with a group of friends is one of the most compassionate, moving stories of our time. Yes, you'll feel for Jude and the horrors he endured. But you will also be transformed by the efforts of his ad hoc family of roommates, professors, neighbors and co-workers who never give up on loving him, even when 'proof of your friendship lay in ... turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again.' An exquisitely written, complex triumph.
I'd give A Little Life all of the awards ... Yanagihara's prose is occasionally so stunning that it would stop me, pushing me back to the beginning of a paragraph for a second read. It's particularly dazzling when she visits the complicated mind and spirit of Jude, who becomes the axis on which the book's world turns. Indeed, A Little Life may be the most beautiful, profoundly moving novel I've ever read. But I would never recommend it to anyone ... Some reviewers have questioned how realistic Yanagihara's depictions of the abuse and its aftereffects could be. But no book I've read has captured as perfectly the inner life of someone hoarding the unwanted souvenirs of early trauma — the silence, the self-loathing, the chronic and aching pain ... The best novels point us back to something real — sometimes physical, but more often intellectual or emotional or even visceral ... Watching Jude, not being Jude, reflects wise editing, because Jude is a spectator too. He cannot control his memories — they control him ... Yanagihara's descriptions embodied my feelings ... Jude's inability to address his wounds compelled me to begin to address mine. His struggle to find his peace emboldened me to try to find mine.
Ms Yanagihara draws the reader into the friends’ world, writing in a clean, realist voice that is ascetic in tone and withholding of information ... With its plain sentences and graphic detail that unspools paragraph after paragraph, A Little Life appears at first glance to be a piece of modern hyperrealism. Yet that cannot explain its hypnotic, immersive quality, its grip upon the reader ... At its heart A Little Life is a fairy tale that pits good against evil, love against viciousness, hope against hopelessness. The cruelty of the life Ms Yanagihara describes is trumped only by the tenacity with which she searches for an answer. The love Jude is shown by his friends may not be enough to save him, but friendship—especially male friendship in a gay world—is the only talisman against the dark wood full of bad men and evil spirits.
A Little Life, is a witness to human suffering pushed to its limits, drawn in extraordinary detail by incantatory prose ... Through insightful detail and her decade-by-decade examination of these people’s lives, Yanagihara has drawn a deeply realized character study that inspires as much as devastates. It’s a life, just like everyone else’s, but in Yanagihara’s hands, it’s also tender and large, affecting and transcendent; not a little life at all.
[A Little Life is] a big, emotional, trauma-packed read with a voluptuous prose style that wavers between the exquisite and the overdone ... Ms. Yanagihara’s prose is always ripe with modifiers, as when the book conjures rats that go 'squeaking plumply underfoot'; is it possible for rats to squeak skinnily? A lot of this 720-page book is devoted to torrentially long and powerful descriptions, and without question, they pack a lot of power. But her mixing of metaphors makes for a mess ... A Little Life eventually develops a relentless downhill trajectory. It might have had even more impact with fewer wild beasts prowling through fewer pages. But Ms. Yanagihara is still capable of introducing great shock value into her story to override its predictability.
...an epic study of trauma and friendship written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured ... What’s remarkable about this novel, and what sets it apart from so many books centered on damaged protagonists, is the poise and equanimity with which Ms. Yanagihara presents the most shocking aspects of Jude’s life. There is empathy in the writing but no judgment, and Jude’s suffering, though unfathomably extreme, is never used to extort a cheap emotional response.
[Yanagihara's] prose is a little patchy and the plot is at times almost operatic in its hysteria ... Sometimes books come along that match the times. A Little Life is the perfect chronicle of our age of anxiety, providing all its attendant dramas (cutting, binges and childhood sexual abuse) as well as its solaces: friendship, drugs, travel, love affairs and interior design ... Friendship is the solace in A Little Life, as it is in any life riven with anxiety, and it is rendered so exquisitely lifelike here – replete with beauty and dark currents – that it almost approximates the real thing.
A Little Life never strays from its four principals, and, as other critics have noted, the novel provides so little historical, cultural, or political detail that it’s often difficult to say precisely when the characters’ intense emotional dramas take place. Yet A Little Life, like its predecessor, gets hopelessly sidetracked by a secondary narrative—one in which, strikingly, homosexual pedophilia is once again the salient element ... In the case of Yanagihara’s novel, the 'real' feeling—not only what the book is about but, I suspect, what its admirers crave—is pain rather than pleasure ... as A Little Life progresses, the author seems to lose interest in everyone but the tragic victim, Jude. Malcolm, in particular, is never more than a cipher, all too obviously present to fill the biracial slot.
There is a fatalistic thread that is anchored at the very beginning of the novel, an elegant foreshadowing that tinges everything with a sense of dread ... As the novel delves more deeply into his extraordinarily bleak back story, though, the prose takes on a confessional quality, and it becomes clear that everything is mired in such hopelessness that no matter what bright turns Jude’s life takes, no matter who loves him and how much, his downfall of long ago knows no rescue ... an extraordinary novel, an exploration of how love can restore and renew but never repair. In haunting language that both reflects the beauty of devotion and disguises the horror of total betrayal, Yanagihara has written an American tragedy for our time, a haunting plea for redemption.
...the novel feels rather claustrophobic for all its length. There is no context other than the one created by these men’s lives and their relationships. One might be forgiven for thinking there was no homelessness in New York, no poverty or crime, no political shenanigans or artistic failures, only successes and rather pampered lives, the taste of uni to be discovered in a Soho restaurant, paintings to be admired at openings — and of course all the bloody scenes of cutting and rape. Past horrors drive the story forward even as the present becomes ever more dreamy. And yet this insularity works in terms of achieving the author’s stated goal of drawing us into the singular realm of the emotional lives of these men. Reading A Little Life is indeed an immersive experience ... it falls apart at the end: the only thing surprising about the tragic conclusion is it took so long to get there. Still I read it compulsively, often moved by its grave intelligence and storytelling power.
... unsparing ... There is a fairy tale quality to the wealth and fame these men achieve, but like all fairy tales there is an underlying darkness ... Jude is a character that calls into question the redemptive narrative arc we too often expect from stories of trauma. Yanagihara would argue that this isn’t a story about trauma but about life. Either way, she asks the tough questions: how do we live, and why?
... astonishing ... The foursome's dynamic relationships comprise a lush backdrop for the greater drama gradually unfolding in the decades of Jude's adulthood ... In a story with many moving pieces, Yanagihara fleshes out each character with an empathy that fully embraces their desires and revulsions, so that every break of trust, every tender moment, every secret revealed reverberates across the novel's dazzling panorama. Still, she never loses sight of its enigmatic hub: Jude St. Francis ... The power of Yanagihara's prose levitates even the heaviest of sorrows. She is a master observer of the human psyche, in all of its fits and starts, and A Little Life vibrates with the hope of personal redemption, delivering something far greater than its humble title presumes.
There is nothing little about this novel—not the lives depicted within it or the size of its author’s ambitions and talents. And not the page count, either. It is a hulking doorstop of a book, perfect for the reader who likes to burrow into a book for weeks at a time ... a novel that delves deep into all the moments that make up a life, from the quiet to the loud, the glorious and the shameful, exploring the things that make a person who he is while simultaneously breaking him as well. Monumentally epic in its detail and scope, it is a book about friendship, courage, redemption, aging, desperation, family, love ... Written in luminous prose that is becoming Yanagihara’s hallmark, A Little Life is a gorgeous book that is, at times, shockingly horrific in its subject matter ...[Yanagihara's] first novel seems rather tame when compared to the torments explored here. There are moments of lightness and beauty, yes, but do not go into this book expecting it to do anything other than break your heart—albeit in the most exquisite fashion. This book is not for every reader, but if you can withstand the maelstrom that is A Little Life, you will be rewarded with a thrillingly good read.
Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel asks for a kind of immersion at odds with the practices of contemporary attention-deficit culture. A Little Life is epic in scope, riveting on every page, and frequently stomach-churning in its explorations of pain and loss ... The novel is narrated mostly in a highly functional third-person past-tense mode that borders at times on melodrama but that is capable of great beauty and horror, nowhere more than in Yanagihara’s deliberately repetitive descriptions of Jude’s attempts to control his pain through self-cutting ... A Little Life brought me to tears more than once; it is a book that asks the reader to feel as fully as Jude does, with a deep aesthetic and ethical purpose of observing and witnessing the pain of others.
... here, Yanagihara carries us through nightmarish scenarios not only with beautiful writing but also with a group of four instantly engaging characters who together form a collective, sympathetic protagonist ... Nonetheless, with such heavy layering of brutality, knowing what’s coming can remove the desire to read on; more than once I held A Little Life with shaking hands. Yanagihara has a particular ability to conjure the type of person we would all rather pretend did not exist ... Yanagihara stretches our empathetic elasticity even to painful limits; when the nightmare is over, we are armed with a new flexibility ... Emerging from horror, persistent and enduring, is a touching, eternal, unconventional love story.
[A Little Lifeis long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience. As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night ... While A Little Life is shot through with pain, it's far from being all dark. Jude's suffering finds its equipoise in the decency and compassion of those who love him; the book is a wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff.
A Little Life is not misery porn; if that's what you're looking for, you will be disappointed, denied catharsis. There are truths here that are almost too much to bear — that hope is a qualified thing, that even love, no matter how pure and freely given, is not always enough. This book made me realize how merciful most fiction really is, even at its darkest, and it's a testament to Yanagihara's ability that she can take such ugly material and make it beautiful.
How often is a novel so deeply disturbing that you might find yourself weeping, and yet so revelatory about human kindness that you might also feel touched by grace? Hanya Yanagihara’s astonishing and unsettling second novel plunges into an epic yin-yang of life, following a tightly knit group of four male college chums who settle in New York City to make their marks ... It’s not hyperbole to call this novel a masterwork — if anything that word is simply just too little for it.
If this book is about slow death by sexual victimization, it is also concerned with healing, love, tolerance and fidelity ... There is no other quite like it. Its singularity raised eyebrows and some controversy about whether Jude the character suffers unendurably at the hands of the author. That criticism is difficult to reconcile with reality. Can an author cause graver injury to a character than the world has caused to countless innocents? ... Surely Jude’s pain was unbearable. He is, like Edward St. Aubyn’s character Patrick Melrose, a vessel for the pain and a mirror of it. A Little Life is full of variations on injury, with perhaps the most queasy-making being teaching a child to cut himself for relief, and giving him the tools to do so, layering a means for compulsive self-harm on top of other injuries.
You must read this book. Go now and buy it and take it with you wherever you're going this month. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's emotionally harrowing (peep the cover, friends). But it's also the first book I've come across in some time that made me want to read it under the table at every meal, no matter who I was sitting with. The novel is complex and deeply engrossing, following four friends from their college years through adulthood, with one deep and closely held secret hanging over all of their heads. There's also much about families, those you're born into and those you construct, which makes it perfect reading for this time of year. As long as your family doesn't mind you reading at the table.
Yanagihara revels as well in the atmosphere and minutiae of her characters’ respective industries: The early pages of A Little Life zing with the heady energies of architecture firms off Madison Square, communal art studios in Long Island City, and Chelsea eateries where pretty actor/waiters sportingly deflect come-ons from gay male patrons. Few novels have so stirringly captured the unfettered angst and exhilaration of gaining a toehold in New York City ... Yanagihara puts us to the empathy test. Jude’s physical and psychic injuries are so exhaustingly inventoried that I found my compassion giving way to impatience with his hamster-wheel marathon of self-flagellation and mulish refusal to seek help ... Alternately devastating and draining, A Little Life floats all sorts of troubling questions about the responsibility of the individual to those nearest and dearest and the sometime futility of playing brother’s keeper. Those questions, accompanied by Yanagihara’s exquisitely imagined characters, will shadow your dreamscapes.
A Little Life is not a little book—at 720 pages it’s a massive, sometimes maddening read—but it is a little bit of a bait and switch: Roughly halfway through, the other characters move to the margins, and Jude’s story takes over. Yanagihara pulls back the black curtain of his childhood slowly and with great care; by the time every dark corner is illuminated, it’s devastating. But she begins to lean too hard on his tragedy and let Life’s other compelling narratives slip away ... It’s a shame to say that the final chapters sometimes feel like a slog when the book has so much richness in it—great big passages of beautiful prose, unforgettable characters, and shrewd insights into art and ambition and friendship and forgiveness. Flaws and all, it’s still a wonderful Life.
Emotionally harrowing yet full of rather implausible sources of comfort, A Little Life somehow throws readers between the most unlikely extremes of horror and joy that life holds, making for a compulsively readable if artistically flawed sophomore effort ... A Little Life is ambitious, and its flaws are commensurately major: the indistinctness of many secondary characters, the lapses and odd elisions in the narrative. The story’s themes tend toward the trite ... But the triumph of A Little Life’s many pages is significant: It wraps us so thoroughly in a character’s life that his trauma, his struggles, his griefs come to seem as familiar and inescapable as our own.
Structurally, there are missteps: Early diversions into Malcolm’s and J.B.’s points of view are interesting but unnecessary as the book’s focus narrows to Jude and Willem. And passages in first person from the perspective of the law professor who becomes Jude’s adoptive father are somewhat jarring. But these narrative lapses by no means reduce the book’s power. A Little Life is a harrowing novel with no happy ending, yet Yanagihara writes so well that it’s difficult to put it down, even in the midst of sobbing. Somehow, it’s an ordeal to read and a transformative experience, not soon forgotten.
As in her previous novel, Yanagihara fearlessly broaches difficult topics while simultaneously creating an environment that her audience will find caring and sensitive. Not all readers will embrace this work, given its intense subject. However, for those strong of stomach or bold enough to follow the characters' road of friendship, this heartbreaking story certainly won't be easily forgotten.
... a powerful and often painful story, one that harkens to the novel’s original mantle of presenting a life in full, and the struggle of individuals against both social restrictions as well as their pasts.This is not a novel from life (or at least not explicitly so, like it is for the autobiographical fiction of those above) but it somehow feels like one. It could be said to render a great service and example to that model, namely imagination, the conceptual leap over one’s own direct experiences — and the invention of characters as opposed to narrators or personas ... The book, in its scope and size, uncovers something vital about that connection between adult life and duration, but it does that without appealing to a strictly mimetic relationship with duration or repetition itself. Rather than narrate characters making breakfast, or checking email, Yanagihara measures the business of their lives with the metric of love.
What begins as an atmospheric bildungsroman set in a mythically ahistorical New York City morphs by slow degrees into a harrowing meditation on otherness and the redemptive possibilities of survival and friendship ... The genius of A Little Life is the way it entices readers to adopt Jude’s habits of mind, to read through the hideousness for the moments of exquisite human loveliness that routinely puncture his suffering ... n this world, characters shimmer and burn in proportion to their deviation from the norm. And in Jude St. Francis, Yanagihara may have just given literature its most vivid and extreme queer protagonist.
Yanagihara's most impressive trick is the way she glides from scenes filled with those terrifying hyenas to moments of epiphany. 'Wasn't it a miracle to have survived the unsurvivable? Wasn't friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely? Wasn't this house, this beauty, this comfort, this life a miracle?' A Little Life devotes itself to answering those questions, and is, in its own dark way, a miracle.
This is a wonderful book that is perhaps 100 pages too long. It requires you to have a strong stomach and a roomy book bag. It's about four college friends who move to Manhattan after graduation, and it tracks their rises, falls, and intersections over the course of at least four decades. Jude St. Francis and his severely troubled past becomes the magnet around which the story orbits, and it is in the flashbacks to his childhood and the abuses he suffered that the reader is challenged to keep reading. Don't be daunted by its heft or subject matter: this is a book worth giving your time.
Excess seems to be the point. Yanagihara has said that she sees Jude as a survivor for whom recovery from abuse is impossible. As for sensationalism, it’s true that there’s a sterile quality to her descriptions of Jude’s abuse ... the only character in A Little Life who seems possessed of anything like “emotional truths” or a sense of irony, the only supporting player in this elaborately ethnically diverse cast who doesn’t seem like a stereotypical middle-class striver plucked out of 1950s cinema, is JB.
A Little Life, is hurtful. That’s because, among other things, it is the enthralling and completely immersive story of one man’s unyielding pain ... Yanagihara’s close study of those lives and Jude’s trauma makes for a stunning work of fiction.
A Little Life is a heavy read, both in terms of its subject matter and its actual weight. It clocks in at a meaty 700 pages, but perhaps the most astounding aspect of this [...] is that every single page feels justified ... Yanagihara's writing thrives in the details, painting the walls of each character's internal life with an abundance of care ... A Little Life is an epic of the intimate ... when we walk away from A Little Life, we are left stunned that a work of fiction can feel so rich and so deeply, beautifully lived-in.
This may be an obvious criticism to level against a 700-page book, but it is too long. Yanagihara's descriptions are never gratuitous, but as the multitude of metaphors for Jude's suffering stacked up I grew desensitized ... At times its unabashed sentimentality put me in mind of the least appealing aspects of American cinema, yet it isn't fair to dwell on the faults in what is, primarily, an extraordinary work of fiction by a writer of tremendous insight. A Little Life , although occasionally overemotional and exhausting, is always fascinating ... Strangely timely in its timelessness, this is a novel essentially about the resonance of a single 'little life' and the mark it leaves behind on so many 'little' others.
A Little Life explores just what the title implies — the little bits of the little lives, so big when looked at close up, of four characters who live together in college and keep alive their friendship for decades after … Because they are so alive on the page, it is a joy to live alongside them. But because they are also so self-aware, so often confused and self-loathing and anxious, it can also be a torment … The level of abuse Jude has undergone and the amount of success his friends attain over the course of the novel's three decades is almost too amazing to be entirely believable, but it doesn’t matter.
With the return of the big novel, Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life is the one that truly earned its weight in paper: her saga of four friends in New York pinned us to the sofa until the last page. Few contemporary novelists are as deeply acquainted with their characters' inner lives as Yanagihara, who is brave enough to write both big and dark, with an ending that elegantly counters our culture's fixation on redemption stories. Can we really overcome our pasts? Can our friends save us?
... epic ... This is a novel that values the everyday over the extraordinary, the push and pull of human relationships—and the book's effect is cumulative. There is real pleasure in following characters over such a long period, as they react to setbacks and successes, and, in some cases, change. By the time the characters reach their 50s and the story arrives at its moving conclusion, readers will be attached and find them very hard to forget.
There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection ... The phrase 'tour de force' could have been invented for this audacious novel.
It's a brave novel that refuses both redemption and the redemptive power of storytelling, but as the focus narrows to Jude and his confidante, A Little Life loses some of its interest: Yanagihara finds less material in intimacy's failure to overcome all ills than she does in the mental contortions her characters perform in order to avoid intimacy. Even so, in its simultaneous insistence on the intractability of suffering and acknowledgement of the pleasure of love and friendship, this is an impressive and moving novel.
There's something so familiar yet foreign in this novel that starts with four young male graduates of the same prestigious New England university as they start their post-college lives in New York City. I was once a young man in graduate school at NYU, experiencing many of the things the protagonists do — chasing intense work dreams while my personal life was a cauldron of steamy passion, longing for the essential connections of my complicated friendships. I can't think of another book that reflects the core of male friendships so well, straight or gay. While I don't relate to every generational nuance of these characters' world, I know their emotional undertow, and this big (720 pages!) book has pulled me in like no other this year. In addition to immersing myself in Hanya's prose and — no spoilers — the devastating plot twists, I could look at the cover for hours. I don't know whether the man in the cover photo is experiencing intense pain or intense pleasure. I only know I feel like a voyeur, unsure if I should be sharing such intimate human emotion. What a perfect marriage of cover and writing.
Too heavy to take in a suitcase or carry on a plane, [this 720-page book] demands to be read at home. It was worth not leaving the house. Ninety pages in, I was hooked by the beauty and pain in the writing and had already cried twice. ... As a woman who went to all-girls school most of her life, I don't pretend to know much about male friendships, but Yanagihara describes the intimacy, tensions, and love between these four men so tenderly that months after I finished the book, I still find myself thinking about and missing them as if I know them. It’s not just me ... Even after hundreds of pages, you too will want more.
The people I know who have read A Little Life did so under the same kind of spell I experienced. Whether they loved the novel or couldn't take it, whether they soaked in the pain and abuse heaped upon the main character or recoiled, they found themselves turning pages as if suspended in time. I would sit down, crack the book, and before I knew it several hours and 150 pages had vanished ... We keep reading, less out of any masochistic impulse than because Yanagihara's prose brings us bracingly close to the consciousness of her characters. It may seem like a cruel trick, making us care so greatly for the doomed. But I consider A Little Life one of the most affecting reading experiences I've ever had, right up there with Revolutionary Road and A Fan's Notes in its ability to make me question long-held perceptions and the stability of the ground beneath my feet.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is an unsparing novel that follows the lives of four college friends as they achieve the successes they once dreamed of and strived for. There is a fairy tale quality to the wealth and fame these men achieve, but like all fairy tales there is an underlying darkness. The darkness at the center of this novel emanates from Jude St. Francis, a successful lawyer by any measure, but a man who remains an enigma to friends and family nearly to the end. The reader bears witness to the aftermath of the childhood abuse Jude St. Francis suffered, and barely survived, with the understanding that the brutality of the witnessing cannot compare to the experience itself. Unable to heal himself, or be healed by others, Jude is a character that calls into question the redemptive narrative arc we too often expect from stories of trauma. Yanagihara would argue that this isn't a story about trauma but about life. Either way, she asks the tough questions: how do we live, and why?
Yanagihara's editor has publicly described the book as a 'miserablist epic', and the label is apt. Surprisingly, the actual events rarely feel gratuitous in the moment of telling, even at their most baroque. There is no question of this being a work of realism. It is more akin to Greek tragedy ... But the violence and excess do serve a purpose in A Little Life , which elevates by the unflinching finale into what can only be described as a masterpiece of endurance. Yanagihara is not a sadist; rather, she is interested in pushing reader empathy as far as it can go, and interested in putting the concept of friendship under tremendous, vice-like weight. How much can we endure for each other? Do we stay alive for the wellbeing of our friends? Are friends enough to insulate against the injustices of the world? These questions are left hanging, ambivalently, but rarely have they been asked with such memorable force.
