Book Review: A Little Life
I recently finished a book that’s been on my list for the better part of a year, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. The novel’s diminutive title belies its heft—both physically and emotionally. A Little Life is the rare truly dense book that races, tumbling along page by page and gaining momentum, reaching an eventual speed that makes the reader almost uncomfortable. It was a book I loved—a rare modern gem that continues to surprise and shock, whose characters are privileged and intelligent without being tedious, which takes place on Ivy League campuses and on the streets of New York City without gratuitous sex, drugs, or philosophy.
When I started the book, it seemed—as critics have noted again and again—that this would be another modern bildungsroman detailing the uncomfortable transition from adolescence to adulthood of a group of privileged, well-educated friends, darting from character to character by chapter, offering third person limited glances of insight into each one by turn. When I began, I thought of The Marriage Plot, perhaps because I’d heard that the novel dealt with issues of mental illness.
For about 50 pages, this seemed plausible, until a noticeable shift: the narration turns to descriptions of the enigmatic Jude, the character whose little life we focus on for the rest of the novel. It soon becomes apparent that this is not a coming-of-age story of four unique ingénues; rather, it is the story of Jude’s traumatic past and his present attempts to deal with it. It cannot really even be called a coming-of-age story, though the book begins in Jude’s early twenties and ends in his fifties. We soon learn that his story is so twisted and gnarled that milestones appear out of order: he enters college—a prestigious one, we deduce—as a teenage prodigy; he is adopted in his thirties; one of his most childish, temper-tantrum moments occurs when he is over 50. Unspeakable traumas, which are slowly coaxed out of his memory and stick willfully in the reader’s own, prove that he was forced to grow up far too quickly, but they also indicate a physical and emotional paralysis; he never truly grows up at all.
Jude’s reticence to let anyone—including the reader—in on the secrets of his past does something unusual: it forces the reader to identify more with the secondary characters than with the protagonist. Although we gain access to Jude’s thoughts via the third person limited narration, Jude himself has erected so many barriers to memory that we are often shut out from understanding. In this way, we identify, frustratingly, with the characters to whom we have little access in this book. By its end, we empathize more with the characters who are affected by the protagonist than with the protagonist himself. It’s an interesting bend of perspective by Yanagihara.
Jude’s complicated past, and Yanagihara’s slow, incremental revelations, do something else: they make the reader understand something Jude never does—that what happened to him in his past is not his fault. That’s a central tenet of Jude’s personality: he refuses to believe that he—even as a child—is not culpable for his actions and for the actions that were thrust upon him. He is resolute in his conviction that if his friends knew the truth about his past, they would not want to know him any longer. We, as readers, prove this untrue before we learn even the smallest sliver of truth about Jude. We find ourselves nodding along with Ana, his first protector, when she says that what happened to him was not his fault—and we wish Jude would agree with us too. This conviction, equal in magnitude to Jude’s own, is a trend that continues among Jude’s supporters and loved ones throughout the book, even as most remain ignorant of the details of his past. As a reader, it’s interesting to align with the supporting characters before you know the truth from the protagonist, but this conviction is not something we ever doubt. We know that everything that plagues Jude's conscience happened before he was 15, and we know, morally if not factually, that he is not to blame.
Manipulations like this make A Little Life a true stunner and an emotional heavyhitter. I stayed up late for several nights in a row, trying to figure out what had happened to Jude and whether he would allow the newfound love and light in his life to eclipse the darkness of his past. I finished the book on a plane, and I cried—twice—in the middle seat, with blatant disregard for those around me. It was a tough book to read, but resonant—it was impossible not to care what happened to Jude.
I did have a few problems with the text, mainly that the sequence of terrible events in Jude’s life were so horrible as to almost be unbelievable. Too many atrocious things happened in short succession, and the characters who committed evil were too one-dimensional. I think Yanagihara was attempting to make the original perpetrator, Brother Luke, a rounder character—akin to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert in Lolita, for example—but it was not particularly effective. She had done such a good job foreshadowing every event related to him that the reader dreaded him and did not trust him before ever being exposed to his true horror.
I had some trouble with the ending, as well, mostly because I thought the final pages seemed out of character with what I had come to understand of Jude’s personality. But that might have been a final manipulation on Yanagihara’s part: to lull the reader into believing that we finally understand Jude, only to prove to us that we never really knew him at all.
Boston Bookworm Rating: 5/5
Have you read A Little Life? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments below.
