A Little Life (2015)
Why this one?
This has the relatively rare honour (?) of having appeared on both the Booker and Women’s Prize shortlists without winning either. It lost out in 2015’s Booker Prize to Marlon James’ epic A Brief History of Seven Killings and the following year in the Women’s to Lisa McInerney’s debut The Glorious Heresies.
With Yanagihara recently releasing her third and much-anticipated novel To Paradise, I thought it was finally time to get around to reading this, her second, and undoubtedly most talked-about novel. I was intrigued by its reputation as almost universally critically lauded but seemingly somewhat polarising because of the difficulty of its subject matter.
Yanagihara was born in 1975 in LA to parents from Hawaii and Seoul. She made her name in the 90s as a writer and editor, primarily for Conde Nast Traveller, before publishing her debut novel The People in the Trees in 2013. Following the huge critical and commercial success of A Little Life, she surprised many by taking a new role as editor at the New York Times style magazine T, saying of writing alongside a full-time job, “I’ve never done it any other way.”
Thoughts, etc.
A Little Life begins in a familiar enough mode, detailing the lives of four clearly exceptionally talented young men, brought together as roommates at university in New York: JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; Willem, an aspiring actor; and finally Jude, a mathematical genius and eventual lawyer. It’s clear from early on that much of the novel’s intrigue is going to revolve around Jude, who despite his many talents is clearly suffering - with both serious physical and mental health issues resulting from initially undisclosed past events.
As it develops, it comes to focus more directly on Jude, and all of the other characters largely come to be defined more in terms of their relationship to him. We learn relatively early on that he has suffered severe abuse as a child, the nature of which is slowly expanded upon in increasingly horrific detail. Crucially, he is unable to reveal the truth of his life to anyone - instead taking refuge in long hours of work as a lawyer and in persistent self harm. While he enjoys the love of many friends, and ultimately adoptive parents in the form of mentor Harold and his wife Julia, he is unable to overcome his trauma. Throughout we’re given hope that through a series of positive developments Jude may be able to begin to face his past and at least begin to enjoy his life, but this - ultimately - isn’t that kind of novel.
This is a genuinely remarkable book, and it’s very hard to say much about it that hasn’t already been said many times by others. It’s more than 700 pages long but never feels like an imposition on your time. I, like many others, found myself devouring it at pace, unable to turn away and bereft when the pages ran out. You read on in part because of the magnificence of the storytelling, and the brilliance of the central characters (Jude, and to a lesser extent Willem - the others fade to the sidelines relatively rapidly;) but also in hungry desperation - a wild hope that something, however unlikely, can bring some kind of solace to a loveable character who considers himself only worthy of hate and disgust.
You approach the back end of the novel and a section called “The Happy Years” with your hands over your eyes, hiding behind the metaphorical sofa and filled with dread. And you are suitably rewarded at this section’s conclusion, with a “gasp-inducingly unexpected” (NYT reviewer, thanks) intervention that surpasses even your most pessimistic guesses as to what might bring those “Happy” years to an end. You read the final pages howling with anger at the cruelty of the thing.
It’s a bizarrely compelling read for something that is so brutal. It’s written with such beauty and tenderness, but describes such devastation and suffering that it’s near impossible to describe the emotion of reading it. It rattles along like a barely-contained tension coil, always threatening to explode but somehow maintaining an unflinchingly calm eye over proceedings. It’s exhausting and exasperating and yet at the same time absolutely wonderful.
It falls away from perfection for a number of reasons - most of which would render any other book in less expert hands almost entirely unreadable. The characters around Jude are thinly drawn and verge on cliche. The central set of four all achieve success and wealth beyond realistic comprehension (as well as the majority of them feeling reasonably overprivileged to begin with.) And as mentioned, it’s simply relentless in its brutality to the point where you do begin to suspect you’re being emotionally manipulated (to put it mildly.) Yet despite all this it somehow works, and works brilliantly, and you leave it begging for more. Strange and beautiful.
Since its release, A Little Life has been adapted into both a 4-hour long play (in the Netherlands) and a musical (in Malaysia) - I can’t imagine those will be the last adaptations of this modern classic.
Score
9.5
I gave A Brief History of Seven Killings, that year’s Booker winner, a 9. Both are incredible books, though could hardly be more different.
Next up
Back to the Women’s Prize with Anne Michaels’ 1997 winner Fugitive Pieces.
