As these things often work out these days, I started reading A Little Life based on a suggestion someone offered someone else on Twitter. This is to say that I came to this tome of a novel much before it was short-listed for the Booker Prize and the accompanying brouhaha ensued. Therefore when I met Willem and Jude house-hunting unsuccessfully in New York in the first few paragraphs, I was ready to go on a 700-plus page odyssey with them and their two other friends — JB and Malcolm — with no prior judgements at all.
Although A Little Life starts off as a story of all four of them, young men who have recently graduated from a prestigious college and are finding their feet in their careers — acting, law, painting and architecture — as the book progresses, its focus converges sharply on the most secretive of them all, Jude St Francis. While everyone knows Jude has had a troubled childhood, and that his limp and a persistent pain are the unmistakable signs of it, no one really knows the details of his upbringing. Jude also always wears long sleeves, no matter how hot the weather, and even before we understand Jude’s journey, we know that he is a cutter, a man who cannot help his nightly instincts to take a razor and slash away at his own arms.
Author Hanya Yanagihara, a 41-year-old whose first novel,
The criticality of the other three characters is eventually reduced to only the parts in which their lives touch Jude’s. Their meetings, dinners, and mostly unstinting friendship are endearing initially and, in my view, exhausting eventually. It is in the languid pace with which Yanagihara reveals Jude’s past that makes her a masterful writer. She divulges just as much as it will take for the reader to plod on for several dozen pages, waiting for the next revelation. This made
Though the book starts as a story of friendship, and indeed friendship is an important part of it throughout, at its core, the novel is a meditation on suffering. Yanagihara’s ability to write lyrically and unflinchingly about suffering is her ultimate triumph. In scene after scene, when Jude steps into the bathroom and picks up his razor, Yanagihara does not leave you with the tools to allow you to imagine Jude’s suffering. Instead she describes his skin and the way the razor tears through it, previous night’s scars and all, in detail that is distilled down to such a visceral level that there is nothing else for you to do but fling the book away and catch your breath.
And when you return to it, it is to the realisation that Yanagihara has not cut you any slack and you must be a witness, closely closeted in the tiny bathroom, with no way of escaping or looking away from Jude’s suffering.
As the story progresses, and the narrative arc contains almost the entire life of the four people, you are tossed from feeling sorry for Jude to wanting to meet him and shake him. But even in maintaining this oscillation, Yanagihara is unflinching. It would seem that nothing good ever happened to Jude when he was young. And for most of his adult life, nothing bad really happens to him. Yet for Jude, there is suffering even, or especially, in goodness, as he struggles with finding himself worthy of it.
It is no mean feat when a work of fiction makes the reader want to physically accost a character. Yet, A Little Life is not without its flaws. For one, it is too long and unnecessarily stretches the narrative arc. The book would have been better if the editor had seen it fit to cut 200 or so pages of it, and made it into a tight little coiled spring. My other quibble is with the fact that while a great deal of time is spent on meaningless diversions, some important characters and relationships are rendered two-dimensional.
The book’s characters occasionally have homosexual relations, and although some reviews have called it the great gay novel, Yanagihara, to her credit, does not go down the predictable path of introspecting sexual identities. It is also, strangely, a timeless novel, no external events, not even 9/11 for a book that is set in New York with characters using the Internet and smartphones, intrude the plot. The real success of A Little Life is in the fact that it highlights the friendships and suffering of men. Had this exact same story been that of four women, it is unlikely that the book would have found a publisher, much less a Booker nod. But, that’s more a reflection of the world we live in, not one that Yanagihara can be faulted for.