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A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara
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ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Wall Street Journal • NPR • Vanity Fair • Vogue • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • O, The Oprah Magazine • Slate • Newsday • Buzzfeed • The Economist • Newsweek • People • Kansas City Star • Shelf Awareness • Time Out New York • Huffington Post • Book Riot • Refinery29 • Bookpage • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus
WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE
A MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.
- Sales Rank: #605 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-26
- Released on: 2016-01-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.40" w x 5.20" l, 1.18 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 832 pages
Review
“Astonishing.” —The Atlantic
“Deeply moving. . . . A wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship.” —NPR
“Elemental, irreducible.” —The New Yorker
“Hypnotic. . . . An intimate, operatic friendship between four men.” —The Economist
“Capacious and consuming. . . . Immersive.” —The Boston Globe
“Beautiful.” —Los Angeles Times
“Exquisite. . . . It’s not hyperbole to call this novel a masterwork—if anything that word is simply just too little for it.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Remarkable. . . . 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. . . . A Little Life announces [Yanagihara] as a major American novelist.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Utterly gripping. Wonderfully romantic and sometimes harrowing, A Little Life kept me reading late into the night, night after night.” —Edmund White
“Spellbinding . . . . An exquisitely written, complex triumph.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“Drawn in extraordinary detail by incantatory prose. . . . Affecting and transcendent.” —The Washington Post
“[A Little Life] lands with a real sense of occasion: the arrival of a major new voice in fiction. . . . Yanagihara’s achievement has less to do with size . . . than with the breadth and depth of its considerable power, which speaks not to the indomitability of the spirit, but to the fragility of the self.” —Vogue
“Exquisite. . . . The book shifts from a generational portrait to something darker and more tender: an examination of the depths of human cruelty, counterbalanced by the restorative powers of friendship.” —The New Yorker
“A book unlike any other. . . . A Little Life asks serious questions about humanism and euthanasia and psychiatry and any number of the partis pris of modern western life. . . . A devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch’s, a few sizes larger.” —The Guardian
“Exceedingly good.” —Newsweek
“A Little Life is unlike anything else out there. Over the top, beyond the pale and quite simply unforgettable.” —The Independent
“Piercing. . . . [Yanagihara is] an author with the talent to interrogate the basest and most beautiful extremes of human behaviour with sustained, bruising intensity.” —The Times Literary Supplement
“A brave novel. . . . Impressive and moving.” —Literary Review
“Enthralling and completely immersive. . . . Stunning.” —Daily News
“An extraordinary book. . . . The truths it tells are wrenching, permanent.” —Evening Standard
“A tragic love story. . . . A transformative experience, not soon forgotten.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Arresting. . . . An extraordinary work of fiction by a writer of tremendous insight. . . . Yanagihara has a keen, incisive eye.” —Irish Times
“Epic in scope, riveting on every page.” —Bookforum
“The most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.” —The Atlantic
“A miracle. . . . Yanagihara’s most impressive trick is the way she glides from scenes filled with . . . terrifying hyenas to moments of epiphany.” —Newsday
“Yanagihara achieves great psychological realism. . . . [A Little Life] seems to levitate out of history, edging towards the mythic or incredible.” —The Spectator
“An American tragedy for our time, a haunting plea for redemption.” —Toronto Star
“Devastating. . . . [A Little Life] 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.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A touching, eternal, unconventional love story. . . . A hymn to serious, lifelong friendship” —The Financial Times
About the Author
Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking. Willem held up a hand in greeting to him, but the man didn’t wave back.
In the bedroom, Jude was accordioning the closet door, opening and shutting it, when Willem came in. “There’s only one closet,” he said.
“That’s okay,” Willem said. “I have nothing to put in it anyway.”
“Neither do I.” They smiled at each other. The agent from the building wandered in after them. “We’ll take it,” Jude told her.
But back at the agent’s office, they were told they couldn’t rent the apartment after all. “Why not?” Jude asked her.
“You don’t make enough to cover six months’ rent, and you don’t have anything in savings,” said the agent, suddenly terse. She had checked their credit and their bank accounts and had at last realized that there was something amiss about two men in their twenties who were not a couple and yet were trying to rent a one-bedroom apartment on a dull (but still expensive) stretch of Twenty-fifth Street. “Do you have anyone who can sign on as your guarantor? A boss? Parents?”
“Our parents are dead,” said Willem, swiftly.
The agent sighed. “Then I suggest you lower your expectations. No one who manages a well-run building is going to rent to candidates with your financial profile.” And then she stood, with an air of finality, and looked pointedly at the door.
When they told JB and Malcolm this, however, they made it into a comedy: the apartment floor became tattooed with mouse droppings, the man across the way had almost exposed himself, the agent was upset because she had been flirting with Willem and he hadn’t reciprocated.
“Who wants to live on Twenty-fifth and Second anyway,” asked JB. They were at Pho Viet Huong in Chinatown, where they met twice a month for dinner. Pho Viet Huong wasn’t very good--the pho was curiously sugary, the lime juice was soapy, and at least one of them got sick after every meal--but they kept coming, both out of habit and necessity. You could get a bowl of soup or a sandwich at Pho Viet Huong for five dollars, or you could get an entrée, which were eight to ten dollars but much larger, so you could save half of it for the next day or for a snack later that night. Only Malcolm never ate the whole of his entrée and never saved the other half either, and when he was finished eating, he put his plate in the center of the table so Willem and JB--who were always hungry--could eat the rest.
“Of course we don’t want to live at Twenty-fifth and Second, JB,” said Willem, patiently, “but we don’t really have a choice. We don’t have any money, remember?”
“I don’t understand why you don’t stay where you are,” said Malcolm, who was now pushing his mushrooms and tofu--he always ordered the same dish: oyster mushrooms and braised tofu in a treacly brown sauce--around his plate, as Willem and JB eyed it.
“Well, I can’t,” Willem said. “Remember?” He had to have explained this to Malcolm a dozen times in the last three months. “Merritt’s boyfriend’s moving in, so I have to move out.”
“But why do you have to move out?”
“Because it’s Merritt’s name on the lease, Malcolm!” said JB.
“Oh,” Malcolm said. He was quiet. He often forgot what he considered inconsequential details, but he also never seemed to mind when people grew impatient with him for forgetting. “Right.” He moved the mushrooms to the center of the table. “But you, Jude--”
“I can’t stay at your place forever, Malcolm. Your parents are going to kill me at some point.”
“My parents love you.”
“That’s nice of you to say. But they won’t if I don’t move out, and soon.”
Malcolm was the only one of the four of them who lived at home, and as JB liked to say, if he had Malcolm’s home, he would live at home too. It wasn’t as if Malcolm’s house was particularly grand--it was, in fact, creaky and ill-kept, and Willem had once gotten a splinter simply by running his hand up its banister--but it was large: a real Upper East Side town house. Malcolm’s sister, Flora, who was three years older than him, had moved out of the basement apartment recently, and Jude had taken her place as a short-term solution: Eventually, Malcolm’s parents would want to reclaim the unit to convert it into offices for his mother’s literary agency, which meant Jude (who was finding the flight of stairs that led down to it too difficult to navigate anyway) had to look for his own apartment.
And it was natural that he would live with Willem; they had been roommates throughout college. In their first year, the four of them had shared a space that consisted of a cinder-blocked common room, where sat their desks and chairs and a couch that JB’s aunts had driven up in a U-Haul, and a second, far tinier room, in which two sets of bunk beds had been placed. This room had been so narrow that Malcolm and Jude, lying in the bottom bunks, could reach out and grab each other’s hands. Malcolm and JB had shared one of the units; Jude and Willem had shared the other.
“It’s blacks versus whites,” JB would say.
“Jude’s not white,” Willem would respond.
“And I’m not black,” Malcolm would add, more to annoy JB than because he believed it.
“Well,” JB said now, pulling the plate of mushrooms toward him with the tines of his fork, “I’d say you could both stay with me, but I think you’d fucking hate it.” JB lived in a massive, filthy loft in Little Italy, full of strange hallways that led to unused, oddly shaped cul-de-sacs and unfinished half rooms, the Sheetrock abandoned mid-construction, which belonged to another person they knew from college. Ezra was an artist, a bad one, but he didn’t need to be good because, as JB liked to remind them, he would never have to work in his entire life. And not only would he never have to work, but his children’s children’s children would never have to work: They could make bad, unsalable, worthless art for generations and they would still be able to buy at whim the best oils they wanted, and impractically large lofts in downtown Manhattan that they could trash with their bad architectural decisions, and when they got sick of the artist’s life--as JB was convinced Ezra someday would--all they would need to do is call their trust officers and be awarded an enormous lump sum of cash of an amount that the four of them (well, maybe not Malcolm) could never dream of seeing in their lifetimes. In the meantime, though, Ezra was a useful person to know, not only because he let JB and a few of his other friends from school stay in his apartment--at any time, there were four or five people burrowing in various corners of the loft--but because he was a good-natured and basically generous person, and liked to throw excessive parties in which copious amounts of food and drugs and alcohol were available for free.
“Hold up,” JB said, putting his chopsticks down. “I just realized--there’s someone at the magazine renting some place for her aunt. Like, just on the verge of Chinatown.”
“How much is it?” asked Willem.
“Probably nothing--she didn’t even know what to ask for it. And she wants someone in there that she knows.”
“Do you think you could put in a good word?”
“Better--I’ll introduce you. Can you come by the office tomorrow?”
Jude sighed. “I won’t be able to get away.” He looked at Willem.
“Don’t worry--I can. What time?”
“Lunchtime, I guess. One?”
“I’ll be there.”
Willem was still hungry, but he let JB eat the rest of the mushrooms. Then they all waited around for a bit; sometimes Malcolm ordered jackfruit ice cream, the one consistently good thing on the menu, ate two bites, and then stopped, and he and JB would finish the rest. But this time he didn’t order the ice cream, and so they asked for the bill so they could study it and divide it to the dollar.
The next day, Willem met JB at his office. JB worked as a receptionist at a small but influential magazine based in SoHo that covered the downtown art scene. This was a strategic job for him; his plan, as he’d explained to Willem one night, was that he’d try to befriend one of the editors there and then convince him to feature him in the magazine. He estimated this taking about six months, which meant he had three more to go.
JB wore a perpetual expression of mild disbelief while at his job, both that he should be working at all and that no one had yet thought to recognize his special genius. He was not a good receptionist. Although the phones rang more or less constantly, he rarely picked them up; when any of them wanted to get through to him (the cell phone reception in the building was inconsistent), they had to follow a special code of ringing twice, hanging up, and then ringing again. And even then he sometimes failed to answer--his hands were busy beneath his desk, combing and plaiting snarls of hair from a black plastic trash bag he kept at his feet.
JB was going through, as he put it, his hair phase. Recently he had decided to take a break from painting in favor of making sculptures from black hair. Each of them had spent an exhausting weekend following JB from barbershop to beauty shop in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan, waiting outside as JB went in to ask the owners for any sweepings or cuttings they might have, and then lugging an increasingly awkward bag of hair down the street after him. His early pieces had included The Mace, a tennis ball that he had de-fuzzed, sliced in half, and filled with sand before coating it in glue and rolling it around and around in a carpet of hair so that the bristles moved like seaweed underwater, and “The Kwotidien,” in which he covered various household items--a stapler; a spatula; a teacup--in pelts of hair. Now he was working on a large-scale project that he refused to discuss with them except in snatches, but it involved the combing out and braiding together of many pieces in order to make one apparently endless rope of frizzing black hair. The previous Friday he had lured them over with the promise of pizza and beer to help him braid, but after many hours of tedious work, it became clear that there was no pizza and beer forthcoming, and they had left, a little irritated but not terribly surprised.
They were all bored with the hair project, although Jude--alone among them--thought that the pieces were lovely and would someday be considered significant. In thanks, JB had given Jude a hair-covered hairbrush, but then had reclaimed the gift when it looked like Ezra’s father’s friend might be interested in buying it (he didn’t, but JB never returned the hairbrush to Jude). The hair project had proved difficult in other ways as well; another evening, when the three of them had somehow been once again conned into going to Little Italy and combing out more hair, Malcolm had commented that the hair stank. Which it did: not of anything distasteful but simply the tangy metallic scent of unwashed scalp. But JB had thrown one of his mounting tantrums, and had called Malcolm a self-hating Negro and an Uncle Tom and a traitor to the race, and Malcolm, who very rarely angered but who angered over accusations like this, had dumped his wine into the nearest bag of hair and gotten up and stamped out. Jude had hurried, the best he could, after Malcolm, and Willem had stayed to handle JB. And although the two of them reconciled the next day, in the end Willem and Jude felt (unfairly, they knew) slightly angrier at Malcolm, since the next weekend they were back in Queens, walking from barbershop to barbershop, trying to replace the bag of hair that he had ruined.
“How’s life on the black planet?” Willem asked JB now.
“Black,” said JB, stuffing the plait he was untangling back into the bag. “Let’s go; I told Annika we’d be there at one thirty.” The phone on his desk began to ring.
“Don’t you want to get that?”
“They’ll call back.”
As they walked downtown, JB complained. So far, he had concentrated most of his seductive energies on a senior editor named Dean, whom they all called DeeAnn. They had been at a party, the three of them, held at one of the junior editor’s parents’ apartment in the Dakota, in which art-hung room bled into art-hung room. As JB talked with his coworkers in the kitchen, Malcolm and Willem had walked through the apartment together (Where had Jude been that night? Working, probably), looking at a series of Edward Burtynskys hanging in the guest bedroom, a suite of water towers by the Bechers mounted in four rows of five over the desk in the den, an enormous Gursky floating above the half bookcases in the library, and, in the master bedroom, an entire wall of Diane Arbuses, covering the space so thoroughly that only a few centimeters of blank wall remained at the top and bottom. They had been admiring a picture of two sweet-faced girls with Down syndrome playing for the camera in their too-tight, too-childish bathing suits, when Dean had approached them. He was a tall man, but he had a small, gophery, pockmarked face that made him appear feral and untrustworthy.
They introduced themselves, explained that they were here because they were JB’s friends. Dean told them that he was one of the senior editors at the magazine, and that he handled all the arts coverage.
“Ah,” Willem said, careful not to look at Malcolm, whom he did not trust not to react. JB had told them that he had targeted the arts editor as his potential mark; this must be him.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Dean asked them, waving a hand at the Arbuses.
“Never,” Willem said. “I love Diane Arbus.”
Dean stiffened, and his little features seemed to gather themselves into a knot in the center of his little face. “It’s DeeAnn.”
“What?”
“DeeAnn. You pronounce her name ‘DeeAnn.’ ”
They had barely been able to get out of the room without laughing. “DeeAnn!” JB had said later, when they told him the story. “Christ! What a pretentious little shit.”
Most helpful customer reviews
125 of 131 people found the following review helpful.
"A Little Life" and the nature of tragedy porn
By K. Thompson
I wanted to write a review of this book, even though there are many other reviews already in place, because it obviously brings up a lot of extreme emotions in people and has been pretty divisive, and I wanted to add some food for thought.
Overall, I found it to be an engrossing read; I felt for the characters, I thought it was well written (though not fabulous or outstanding, but decently done, very little purple prose, which I appreciate), and it generated a lot of response from me. I was okay up until the penultimate section "Dear Comrade," which I spent bawling my eyes out over. But the book made me think about larger issues, regarding art and class and sexuality, and I want to address just a few of those issues in my review.
I don't give this book a higher rating, however, because I do think there are some flaws. Certainly it could have been edited more tightly and thus been shorter. Two of the main characters are somewhat short-changed, and I would have liked to have seen further development with them. The initial meeting of the four friends is never fully explained, nor is the meeting and buildup of trust between Jude and Andy, and I would have liked to seen just how Jude came to trust his friends, particularly Andy and Willem, so deeply. Jude's career definitely needed more flushing out; he's a bigshot lawyer but what we see of his personality and private life doesn't fit with that, and I would have liked a better exploration of his life in the courtroom, to make him more three-dimensional as a character. I was also really irked that the novel has no historical setting. It follows these people for more than three decades, but at the very outset, in their youth, they have cell phones and modern technology, so I'm assuming the novel takes you into the 2040s, which is awkward. Also the treatment of queer issues and how society views homosexuality seems very modern but doesn't evolve as the time goes on. Some historical context to anchor the novel, the way key locations in New York anchored it, would have been welcome.
Now, then, to give my two cents on the biggest negative criticism, that this is tragedy porn: Yes, it is a very difficult read. Yes, lots of horrific tragedies are heaped on to the main character, and some may view this as unrealistic overkill. But as someone who works in the counseling profession (though I am NOT a counselor, I just work with them), I can tell you that people who have the history of physical and sexual abuse that Jude has are more likely to face continued abuse as they grow older--they are more likely to get into abusive relationships, for example, and struggle with self-harm and drug abuse. We don't like to talk about these issues, because they are difficult and have no easy solutions. If you think what happens to Jude is unrealistic or overly exaggerated, I have very bad news for you. Child trafficking exists; there are many, many incidents of an authoritative figure--a coach, a doctor, a family member, whoever--taking advantage of young children, sometimes abusing them for years; pedophilic rings do exist, even in America; and of course abuses committed by members in organizations such as the Catholic Church have occurred and continue to occur (and be covered up). I wouldn't say that the suffering Jude experiences is unrealistic. Quite the opposite: These things happen under our noses every day in America. We don't like to face it, but it is reality. We certainly don't like to face the long-lasting consequences; we the public think everything is OK when the pervert goes to jail or whatever, we revel when these bad guys get their comeuppance, but the psychological scarring and warped worldview of the victims continues for the rest of their life. We don't want to acknowledge that some of these victims are going to suffer forever.
Two of the many themes in this novel deal with this idea of "tragedy porn" in an oblique way. The first is that life is not fair; this theme is pretty explicitly stated, even by Jude, fairly early on in the novel. I'm reading this book, particularly the difficult "Dear Comrade" section, and thinking, "My god, life is so unfair! This isn't fair!" And that's part of the point. There is nothing about life that is fair. We are all going to suffer in our lives. We are all going to be or going to know someone who has been abused in some manner, who will attempt or be successful at suicide, who has (sometimes quite severe) mental illness, who struggles with drug abuse, who has been in an abusive relationship, who is injured or killed in an accident, who suffers from a debilitating illness or disability. Life is quite unhappy. I am reminded of a story once told of the Buddha; a grieving mother came to him asking him to heal her dead child, and the Buddha told her to bring him rice from the household of someone who has never been visited by tragedy. She couldn't find anyone in her village untouched, and thus the teaching: All will suffer. No one is exempt from life's ugliness.
The second section in the novel, "The Postman," lays out a lot of themes and world views of the characters, particularly Jude and Harold, and is worth a revisit and a closer read, or, if you are reading it for the first time, you should pay particular attention to this section and keep it in mind as the book goes on. I think a close read of this section might affect your opinion of the novel overall. I think "The Postman", with its discussion of the law and debate between Jude and Harold, is probably the most enlightening as to what the book is really about.
Second, the criticism of the book as tragedy porn is somewhat mirrored in the novel, as artist JB makes a successful career in his paintings, particularly those of Jude. We as readers can criticize the book as tragedy porn, but we are remiss if we do not recognize that within the novel itself, JB uses his friend Jude as tragedy porn. For JB, as with Yanagihara, Jude is subject matter, and JB uses his chosen art medium to comment on Jude. Is this exploitative tragedy porn? Is it wrong of JB to use Jude as material in his paintings? Is it wrong for Yanagihara to use Jude (who is fictional, of course) as material in her book? Both are capitalizing on Jude's pain; within the worldview of the book, JB becomes successful off Jude's suffering, and obviously in our world, Yanagihara has crafted a successful book off Jude's suffering. Of course, it's different because we readers know Jude is fictional, but within the book's world, JB and Jude are both quite real. Is it acceptable for JB to paint and profit off his friend? Is it acceptable for Yanagihara do the same, or is the author crassly manipulating her readers? Is Yanagihara just toying with the emotions of the reader, just piling on the pain in an overwrought manner to elicit a cheap response? I don't think so; I get this sense of manipulation from other authors (such as Jodi Picoult, Mitch Albom, and Alice Sebold), but this novel doesn't feel like cheap manipulation to me. It somehow feels more authentic and sincere.
I think this theme of exploiting tragedy particularly interesting if you carry it further into the real world. Where is the line between tragedy porn and art, or is there even one? I am reminded of some harrowing famous photographs, specifically: the photograph of Phan Th' Kim Phú, the young Vietnamese girl captured running through the street of her village, naked and burned by napalm dropped by South Vietnamese forces during the Vietnam conflict; and the photograph of a starving child in Africa being stalked by a hungry vulture. Do you consider these images tragedy porn? After all, the photographers won prizes and became famous for their work (Kevin Carter, who took the latter photograph, later committed suicide, and his suicide note suggests he was driven to it by his guilt at seeing and photographing such images). Do you believe that these photographs are not tragedy porn because their raw, visceral subjects provide commentary on greater societal and political issues? Is it okay to exploit suffering if you are "proving a larger point"? To me that is the true definition of tragedy porn--capitalizing on the immense suffering of others to further one's own cause! Or perhaps we should step away from "art", and consider: I know people who were shot in the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007. At a candlelight vigil, one of my friends was in a small group mourning the loss of a dorm-mate, when a cameraman came by, lowered the boom mike into their circle, and recorded their crying. Tragedy porn? Exploitation? Journalism? Gun massacres are headline news, of course, as was the Vietnam war and the photo of the African child--does that make it okay? Where do you personally draw the line in the matter? I'm not looking to pick an argument, I merely think this is a topic worth exploring, and every person is going to have their own red lines on the issue.
I should also note here that I did not find parts of the book to be that tragic. Don't get me wrong, Jude (and others) seriously suffers--but there are many points of happiness and contentment, and two major events that happen to Jude are things I would consider glorious and wonderful. I won't name them, to avoid spoilers, but the book does have some happy moments among all the tragedy; and Jude is blessed with some amazing friends (we should all be so lucky for that!) as well as some horrible abusers. And after all, isn't that what life is? Hence "A Little Life"! It has its glories and its tragedies, but it is a little life all the same. We are all leading our little lives, and we will all experience both joy and tragedy.
So anyway, this is a very small summary of some of the emotions and thoughts this book provoked in me, and that is the reason I enjoyed it so much. While it did have some flaws, it made me THINK, and I like book that makes me think. This book had me squirming and crying at some parts, and laughing and smiling at others, but ultimately it gave me a lot of food for thought, and I appreciate that.
387 of 429 people found the following review helpful.
A Little Life
By KarenRachel
I finished A Little Life in late January and can't stop thinking about it. It is the best book I have ever read about trauma and abuse and is one of the best books I have ever read. It is a brutal book, a deeply wrenching, beautiful book. It is a gentle book with not one false step in its characterization of a young man, Jude, trying to live fully, deeply, morally while haunted and debased by childhood sexual abuse. Sometimes I read in short spurts too disturbed to continue and too teary to see the page and at other times I read late into the night unable to tear myself away. At times I could barely breathe while reading and not just during the horrific descriptions of abuse but also while witnessing the love that Jude's friend and mentors and lover have for him. The author is brilliant at the getting the details right. Whether it is a description of a sumptuous meal, a day at the office, a fight between friends or an everyday conversation it is completely described. I love that A Little Life is so ordinary and extraordinary at the same time and not showy or flashy
or manipulative which could easily happen given its
themes. It is one of the hardest books I have ever read and it is one of the most humane. I thank Edelweiss for giving me this opportunity to read and review A Little Life.
520 of 579 people found the following review helpful.
Empathetic, but Ultimately Devolves Into Tragedy Porn
By Jon Huff
My thoughts about this book are complicated. On one hand, it's beautifully written in many ways. On the other hand, it's a bit overblown in its writing, too. There are lovingly rendered details that create a lovely mental picture... and then the passage goes on... and on... until sometimes it devolves into lists. Lists that sometimes feel endless in their length and actually don't end up contributing much of anything to the story.
I really did come to care for the characters in the book, which I think makes the book all the more cruel. I was prepared for a harrowing story. The book blurb broadcasts that loudly enough. I thought the portrayal of abuse and its consequences and the reverberations of it throughout a life were well done in many ways. The interplay between the characters and how their lives intertwine feels so real. But there is a point in the book where it all just starts to feel like tragedy porn. Tragedy porn that feels a great empathy for all those involved and is filled with well-defined characters... but tragedy porn none the less. In the end, it just feels sort of crassly manipulative... or, at least, misguided.
I went from being a bit confused by the book juggling the four main characters (something that, structurally just ends up being kind of weird since two characters are basically dropped for most of the story... though I guess I understand their detailed set-up to an extent) to getting really involved in the characters we WERE following and being absorbed into the book and then, finally... almost hating the book by the end. The sorrow inflicted on the main character (and then to the characters around him) becomes, frankly, almost laughable. But not mirthful laughter. It's the sort of laughter you utter because you're not quite sure how else to react to what's being presented to you. There is a point where the movie in my mind of this book went from an artful indie film to a cheap LIfetime movie. I am sure there are people who have been through this much tragedy and pain or more, but that's not the point. In the context of this book, it just feels like the author was worried we wouldn't understand the main character's pain unless it was magnified x100.
The result is something that just feels so over the top it seems to demean so much of the character work that goes on here. It also feels a bit demeaning to people who suffer abuse. I feel like people could be equally as affected and pained in their ongoing life for so much less. The author feels the need to take the abuse to such freakish levels here that it just feels insulting in a way I can't quite pin down. As if this is what is required for someone to be so thoroughly negatively impacted in their life. Or that we, as readers, could not actually empathize with someone if the horrors inflicted on them weren't so over the top.
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