A Little Life – [Keep Unique Code/Item Model Number]

A Little Life follows four college friends as they navigate careers, love, friendship and life and death. At the center of the four friends is Jude, a mysterious young man who suffers from severe leg and back pain and whose body is covered in scars. Jude shares little about his own life and his three friends — Malcom, Wilhem, & JB — know better than to ask him about his childhood. The book alternates perspectives throughout, although Jude remains central. As the novel progresses, the story of Jude’s past slowly unfolds to reveal a history of abuse and unspeakable trauma.

I LOVED this book. At 700+ pages it was an emotionally challenging read that takes hold of you from page one and puts you through the wringer. I cried. A LOT. And, I’m not much of a cryer. Yanagihara makes you fall in love with the characters then makes you suffer as they make some horrible decisions, try to reconcile their past, and struggle to find love and self-worth. Jude is portrayed with an emotional sensitivity that I found surprising. Yanagihara gives readers a real sense of how trauma can impact both the victim and his social circle. As a psychologist, I often find myself irritated by portrayals of mental illness in books, but here I found myself amazed at how well the author portrayed a difficult personality profile whose frustrating actions do not take away from the love you feel for him.

It can be a difficult read since there is a lot of disturbing content including multiple forms of abuse. At times, I felt like the author was going a little too far in piling on the abuse history. So many horrific things happened to one of the characters that it bordered on sensationalist and took away from some of the realism of the book. The content isn’t particularly graphic since much of it is left to the imagination, but it is nevertheless heart-wrenching. But while the history of abuse is prominent, the book isn’t about abuse. It’s about relationships and some of them are so beautiful that their warmth makes you cry from the happy moments.

The writing is truly fantastic. Even mundane events are made to shine and descriptions very subtly shift based on which character perspective we are reading. For example, take this passage from one of JB’s chapter:

The other aspect of those weekday-evening trips he loved was the light itself, how it filled the train like something living as the cars rattled across the bridge, how it washed the weariness from his seat mates’ faces and revealed them as they were when they first came to the country, when they were young and America seemed conquerable. He’d watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hears into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine. And then the sun would drift, the car rattling uncaringly away from it, and the world would return to its normal sad shapes and colors, the people to their normal sad state, a shift as cruel and abrupt as if it had been made by a sorcerer’s wand.

JB, is an artist, thus his observations are seen through the eyes of an artist. Other characters focus on different aspects that are relevant to their own important identities. Picking up on these subtleties makes this book that much more special.

Other favorite quotes:

You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies – you know, those little white ones- I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.

Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.

Will you like this book? Here are my pros and cons for the book:

Pros: stellar writing, rich character development, diverse characters (in terms of racial background and sexual orientation), emotionally evocative. Sensitive portrayal of the long term impacts of trauma. I also liked that the book showed a different angle of abuse – how someone so seemingly successful and well-loved can be hiding great pain underneath the surface.

Cons: at times bordering on sensationalist. Yanigahara goes too far in her piling on of abuse after abuse. Yes, there are individuals who experience multiple traumas but it gets to a point where it’s a little much. I didn’t think that was needed to make her point about the long-term impacts of childhood trauma on the lives of individuals. Feels emotionally manipulative at several times.

I’ll be blunt upfront. A LITTLE LIFE (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara is the most soul-wrenching novel I have perhaps ever read. In the novel Yanagihara follows in minute detail the lives of four men who become friends, “a clique,” in college and continue to be close into their late fifties. JB Marion begins his work life as a “receptionist at a small but influential magazine based in SoHo that covered the downtown art scene,” with ambitions to become an artist. Fatherless since he was three, JB is of Haitian descent, tends toward being overweight, and is gay. Willem Ragnarsson, handsome and “liked by everyone” starts out as a waiter, but has his eye set on becoming a professional actor on stage and screen. In ways, Malcolm Irvine is the outlier of the group, still living at home with his parents who are a couple of mixed-race. He is wealthy and determined to become an architect. Malcolm appears to be oblivious of his appeal to others, even naïve, somewhat confused about his sexuality, and unmindful of his financial situation although generous to his friends and others when they are in need. At the core of the four friends is Jude St. Francis who holds the group together—not so much by what he does even though he is considerably bright, loyal, and hard-working, as well as determined to become a prosecutor, but because his friends care about him and Jude has needs. Parentless and with a mysterious past all of which he never speaks about and never having “a girlfriend or a boyfriend,” Jude has trouble with his legs and is frequently in pain. Although he never complains nor asks for help, his friends are very aware of his situation and go out of their way to assist Jude in as tactful of a manner as possible.

Mainly set in New York City, as A LITTLE LIFE unfolds, Yanagihara brings into the fold other characters of importance including a doctor, Andy Contractor, and a former law professor, Harold Stein and his wife Judy, all of whom play important roles in in the novel, as well as a host of minor characters. It is, however, the four friends who remain central to the story, especially Jude and Willem, roommates in college and who remain the closest of the friends. The bulk of Yanagihara’s novel is told in chronicle order, but as the novel progresses, there are more flashbacks and memories, some of which get repeated with added detail as they surface, most of them revolving around Jude who becomes more and more the novel’s central character.

When thinking about tragic characters in prose fiction, no one comes my mind as being more tragic than Jude Fawley from Thomas Hardy’s JUDE THE OBSCURE (1894/1895) which may be the motivation for the author’s name for her main character—Jude, “the patron saint of lost causes.” Although readers soon come to the realization Jude is a physically and emotionally scarred individual, Yanagihara’s revelations about the details of Jude’s history are painfully slow in coming—mirroring the complexity and rawness of those very memories which haunt and torment Jude. They are memories which have shaped, or rather distorted, his life. In one flashback the author reveals twenty-five years in the past, Ana, Jude’s now deceased “first and only social worker” warning Jude during a hospital stay, “…you have to talk about these things while they’re fresh. Or you’ll never talk about them… and it’s going to fester inside you, and you’re always going to think you’re to blame. You’ll be wrong, of course, but you’ll always think it.”

There are relatively few highs in Jude’s life and when they occur, the reader is bound to find them tearful moments of joy. The increasingly close friendship between Jude and Willem with both of them at the zenith of their careers is complex—filled paradoxically with the bounty which human relationships can contain along with enormous peril. Unfortunately, most of Jude’s life is a series of unrelenting, dreadful, terrifying, shattering lows and betrayals accompanied by self-destructive impulses which become worse and worse, adding to a man’s already burdensome childhood, youth, and life-long post-traumatic stress. Jude’s is a portrait of suffering beyond comprehension and the brutal perpetrators of his torments throughout his life are the epitome of unfathomable, monstrous human behavior.

Thus, A LITTLE LIFE does not make for easy reading. It is emotionally jolting and at the same time riveting. So vivid are Yanagihara’s expose of the quartet of characters, the reader becomes one with them, making it a quintet. The author’s characters are real to life, the dialogue is vivid and genuine, and the quality of the writing as well as the tone of the novel is unswerving. Although Yanagihara’s central characters meet with sometimes staggering personal and professional successes, there are also failures and tragedies, both past and present, and always a dire cloud which encircles them all, especially Jude. Due to her immense and encompassing narrative skills, readers will eventually brace themselves so that whenever a horrifying revelation is made about Jude’s secret past or his present, there is likely worse to come.

A narrative trick Yanagihara pulls a little over a quarter of the way into the novel and again at the half-way point, moving from an omniscient narrator to what clearly is a first person although not readily identifiable narrator, is bound to strike the reader as both curious and possibly even portentous. It is left up to the reader to recognize and interpret for themselves the meaning of the author’s temporary changes in point of view. She does the same switch near the book’s conclusion which eventually brings the work to its shocking climax and even more emotionally numbing, traumatic end.

Clearly, A LITTLE LIFE is not for everyone. even though the novel is a modern masterpiece of writing and prose fiction and a work which will haunt the reader for a long time. The most resilient reader may very likely find there are times when they simply must close the book and exit the bleakness of the world Yanagihara creates before picking the book up again. Others may discover there are times when they simply want to throw the book across the room. Some readers may find the book impossible to finish because it is so emotionally draining. Regardless of the reader’s reaction to the novel, A LITTLE LIFE is an incredible accomplishment and a work which haunt the reader for a long time.

[NOTES: (1) A LITTLE LIFE has recently been declared one of “The 20 Best Novels of the Decade” by Emily Temple for The Literary Hub on December 23, 2019. (2) The book’s cover photo is from a series of photos taken in the 1960s by Peter Hujar. The photo is titled “Orgasmic Man.” The photo is purposefully ambiguous. Is the man depicted experiencing joy or pain? (3) A stage adaptation of A LITTLE LIFE ran in Amsterdam in 2018 and 2019 with limited runs, only, most of which were in Dutch.]

Livro entregue em perfeito estado. Infelizmente, a qualidade é muito inferior se comparada aos livros nacionais. As capas são moles e as folhas lembram papel de jornal. Porém, já comprei ciente disso.

A Little Life is an emotionally intense and beautifully written novel that delves deep into the lives of four friends navigating love, loss, and the shadows of their pasts. Hanya Yanagihara’s portrayal of suffering and resilience is both poignant and unforgettable. The characters are so vividly drawn that their joys and heartbreaks feel deeply personal. While the themes can be heavy, the book’s exploration of friendship and loyalty is incredibly powerful. Be prepared for an emotional ride, but it’s one that stays with you long after the last page.