Once in a great while I'll read a book that is so good, I'll stand up in my apartment and say out loud "SOOOOOO GOOOOOOOD" like I'm some kind of demon being showered in virgin's blood.
A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara's 720 page doorstop of a novel, is such a book. Reading it was an ecstatic experience for me. It's a very intense, emotionally hardcore book, but written so well that it grips your heart and slithers into your brain.
A Little Life is the story of four college friends who move to New York City and begin to pursue their careers. They are: Malcolm Irvine, the biracial son of wealthy parents, who works at a fancy architecture firm; JB Marion, a temperamental, gay artist who acts like a spoiled baby at times because he was raised by his overly accommodating mother, aunts, and grandmother; Willem Ragnarsson, an aspiring actor with dead parents who is as kind and gentle as he is handsome; and Jude St. Francis, a law student who eventually becomes a vicious litigator. Jude was abandoned near a dumpster at birth and raised in a monastery. He remains closed off about his past, even to his closest friends, and suffers mysterious pains and ailments.
Although the book follows all four friends into mid-life, A Little Life is Jude's story. From the get-go it's clear that something went terribly wrong in Jude's childhood, but Yanagihara reveals the extent of the horrorshow of his life slowly and tantalizingly. The reader finds out he cuts himself. That he's never had a girlfriend or boyfriend. That the agonizing pains he experiences in his back and legs stem from a "car injury" (note, not an "accident", an "injury"). Because Jude is so taciturn around his friends, Yanagihara makes the reader feel like they're being let in on a secret--a terrible series of secrets. And she does a cruel thing as well: she makes the reader feel an enormous connection to the characters, and to Jude in particular, so that when all is revealed, his pain is your pain. Much like his friends who are loyal to Jude for decades, the reader feels helpless, angry, and frustrated at Jude's stubborn insistence that his past will haunt and cripple him until his death. I can't speak for other readers, but I felt like I had fallen in love with him by the end of the book.
Some readers won't like this. A Little Life has been described as "excessive" and "tragedy porn", and I see exactly where that sentiment is coming from. The sufferings heaped on Jude are so constant and awful, that the book seems almost Biblical or Shakespearean. A Little Life is undoubtedly about pain and the repercussions of abuse...but it's also about hope and grace and friendship. More details on this later.
Despite the heaviness of its plot, A Little Life is staggeringly beautiful and unique in its vision of the world. I was drawn to book from the first moment I saw its cover:
When I first saw it, beckoning me from a table in Barnes & Noble, I thought the cover image was of woman. I drew closer and saw that it's actually a picture of a young man. It seems clear that he is in some kind of emotional agony or pain. In fact, the cover shot is titled "Orgasmic Man" and is a photograph by Peter Hujar, who did a series in the late 1960's of men's faces while they...well, you know. What you're looking at here is not the face of a man at a nadir of pain, but rather at a zenith of pleasure. But who could really tell the difference? And that's what makes both the cover of the book, and the story inside the book so compelling--the story examines both extremities in life: a childhood of abuse that leads to a lifetime of emotional and physical pain, paired with explorations of love and friendship and hope so sweet that it almost feels painful. The two extremes are so intimately entangled that it's hard to differentiate them in the end.
Plot spoilers below! I'm not kidding!
It's not hard to guess at the generalities of Jude's past, but the almost baroque intensity of his abuse is shocking. He is sexually and physically abused by the monks who raised him. He is then abducted by one of the monks, Brother Luke, and taken on a cross-country trip where Luke allows him to be raped by men for money. Interestingly, in his memories, Jude refers to these men as "clients", not rapists or abusers, which makes sense given Jude's internalizing of what happened to him. He grows up thinking, as Brother Luke tells him, "You were born for this." He believes he was born to be used and that he deserves all the pain he receives.
Jude is rescued at age 12, only to be sent to a home for boys where he is further sexually and physically abused. He escapes and hitchhikes (using his body as payment, naturally) across the country until he is kidnapped and held captive by yet another adult man who tortures him and attempts to kill him, which results in a spinal injury that a doctor describes as an "insult to the body". It is only then that Jude St. Francis, age 15, is actually rescued by a social worker and sent to college at 16, where he meets Willem, Malcolm, and JB...and he begins to try to distance himself from the horrors of his childhood.
And then, despite his strangeness, his inability to discuss his past, his self-hatred, Jude is shown unconditional love by many friends throughout the rest of his life. In his adulthood, he is legally adopted by his mentor from law school, Harold, and Harold's wife. He is surrounded by friends and is considered almost scarily competent at his job. In perhaps the most surprising turn of events, his decades-long friendship with Willem shifts into something more as he and Willem enter their late-40's. I suspect some readers will call bullshit on this, as Willem is essentially heterosexual until he, conveniently, and almost by sheer force of will, falls in love with Jude.
The fluid sexuality of the characters in A Little Life, as well as the unrealistic cruelties and love shown to Jude, in addition to the fact that the story seems to take place in a continuous present day (the book covers five decades, but there are no indications of what year it is. Computers exist when Jude is a child, suggesting that the end of the book happens around 2050), mark the book as existing somewhere outside of our current reality. I referred to the suffering in the book as "Biblical", and indeed other reviews have described the novel as "mythic", or even possibly set in an alternate reality. I don't think Yanagihara intended the book to be speculative fiction, but I do think that--not unlike the world created by director Peter Strickland in my favorite movie of 2015--she created her own version of reality in the service of telling this story.
And like Strickland's Duke of Burgundy, which takes place in a world without men, A Little Life is almost entirely free of women. There are female characters--the social worker who rescues 15 year old Jude is a woman; Jude's adopted father Harold has a wife, Julia; and there are various female friends and girlfriends who enter and exit the story. But the number of lines spoken by women in this 720 page book probably amounts to less than 10 pages. But I don't believe this authorial choice is sexist or misogynist. I believe Yanagihara stripped women completely out of the picture in order to focus on what it means for men to love other men, as friends or as something else. And also to focus on the ways in which men destroy other men, as Jude is systematically dismantled by the endless series of men who beat and rape him.
Whether Yanagihara's insights into male love and male hate are accurate or not, I can't say. But I love the relationship she creates for Jude and Willem--the friendship that is *more* than friendship, but is not a traditional romance either (especially since Jude can't stomach sex, and he and Willem have an affectionate, but ultimately celibate relationship). It did make me wonder: are there men out there who have friendships like this? Women are at least given the freedom to be openly affectionate with one another. When I visit my best friend, we sleep in the same bed together and think nothing of it. We say "I love you" to each other and mean it. Do men who don't identify as gay have this? And what would the world be like if they did?
/End spoilers
A Little Life is like no other book I've read before. It seized my heart and then took a scalpel to it, slowly, painfully, and elegantly tearing it apart. As I mentioned above, extremes of love and pain are explored in A Little Life, yet it doesn't feel cheap or melodramatic or inauthentic--at least not to me. In fact, the characters felt so real, that it was hard to accept that the book had to end and there would be no more fussy Malcolm, or bitchy JB, or gentle Willem, or tortured Jude. Those 720 pages are all there is, and it's just not enough for me.
Grade: A+
