“A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara
“A Little Life” is a big commitment, but not for obvious reasons. At 720 pages, Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel (after 2013’s “The People in the Trees”) is compulsively readable. Yanagihara casts a potent spell, crafting characters for whom we care and ache and who always seem to be a page-flip away from slipping through our fingers. I burned through “A Little Life” with a blend of anxiety, dread, awe and delight. The premise initially feels well-traveled: four 20-something-year-old friends, formerly college roommates, scraping by and dreaming big in New York. Willem is an aspiring actor, JB an aspiring artist, Malcolm an aspiring architect, Jude a lawyer with a degree in mathematics.
The novel follows them over the next three decades, through their shifting friendships and ambitions. Yanagihara’s pacing is so elegant, her prose so economically lovely, that I would readily have followed her through what initially looks like familiar territory. But then the narrative pulls in a new and horrifying direction as Jude’s story takes center stage. With Jude, Yanagihara has given us what so many blurbs promise but few novels deliver: an unforgettable protagonist. Jude cherishes his friends, but he cannot share himself entirely with them. His past, his unexplained physical handicaps and even his racial background are compelling mysteries. Gradually, Yanagihara allows us deeper and deeper inside the sanctum of Jude’s past. This is both a privilege and a torment. The reader should be prepared to let Jude’s voice – unassuming, self-effacing but completely indelible – burrow inside their heads and stay there for a long time after the book is over. Jude, JB, Willem and Malcolm offer insight on friendship, personal ambition and the anxieties of growing up, themes many recent novels (e.g., Zadie Smith’s “NW;” Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad”) have tackled with similar elegance; but Jude, with his extraordinary history and apparent lack of ego, holds a discomfiting mirror to our contemporary angst. Yanagihara treats all her characters, even the most self-absorbed, with compassion, but some of their concerns (and ours) – At what point does pursuing one’s dreams become irresponsible? – seem trivial in the light of Jude’s experience.
There is something Gatsby-esque in Jude’s determination to build a life for himself – any life but the one he tries to leave behind him. My quibbles with this novel are few. Malcolm’s perspective is abandoned fairly early. The wild success of all four friends’ careers tested my suspension of disbelief. Descriptions of Jude’s compulsive behaviors, and of the friends’ endless cycle of parties, dinners and globe-hopping vacations, eventually grow repetitive. (If there were any fat to trim from the novel’s length, it would be here.) None of this greatly lessens the book’s hypnotic pull.
This is a book that merits its own support group. There were moments when I wanted to throw my copy across the room, when Yanagihara’s unrelenting vision of human struggle felt sadistic.
At times my relationship to the book felt toxic, as if I were reaching out again and again to a suffering loved one who refused to accept help. Yanagihara pulls the reader into a kind of codependency: despite the pain it entails, it is incredibly difficult to stop reading, to stop caring. The pain never quite stops seeming worthwhile.
“A Little Life” is one of the most powerful explorations I have read of love’s survival in the face of unbelievable trauma and loss. Its greatest strength (and also its sharpest blow) is that it finally does not oversell love’s power to save us from ourselves.
