One of the most acclaimed books of the year is A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. It’s been nominated for everything and is appearing on many end of the year lists (though conspicuously absent from the Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2015). This praise is well deserved. If I had read enough books to make a top 5 list this year, it would definitely make the cut.
Yet, whenever I recommend A Little Life to anyone, I have to caveat that it’s heavy and potentially depressing. After all, the book's cover does feature a man's face twisted in agony.
The novel follows the lives of four guy friends from their time at an Amherst-type school through their post-graduation lives in New York. In the four decades that the book covers, we see Malcolm, Willem, Jean-Baptiste ("JB") and Jude become successful in their chosen careers as an architect, actor, visual artist and litigator. But the central focus of the novel is Jude St. Francis, the brilliant, if reserved, lawyer. At the beginning of the novel, it's no secret that he has been through a physically traumatic childhood; he has been walking with a cane since college. His friends don't like to press him about it because they can tell he is uncomfortable talking about it. Without spoiling too many details, suffice it to say that Jude's experiences rival that of an entire's season's worth of Law and Order SVU victims.
Yanagihara describes the traumas inflicted on Jude--both by others and by himself--in brutal, unsparing detail. Towards the beginning of the novel, Jude has a bloody accident:
“it was only once they were inside, in the true light, that Willem saw that the dark pattern on Jude’s shirt was blood, and that the towel had become sticky with it, almost varnished, its tiny loops of cotton matted down like wet fur. “I’m sorry,” Jude said to Andy, who had opened the door to let them in, and when Andy unwrapped the towel, all Willem saw was what looked like a choking of blood, as if Jude’s arm had grown a mouth and was vomiting blood from it, and with such avidity that it was forming little frothy bubbles that popped and spat as if in excitement.”
Yanagihara's narrative switches between an omniscient third person and a close third person as it reveals that Jude was the victim of childhood abuse. I couldn't look away. Not only was I riveted by Jude's travails, but I found Yanagihara's prose to be distinctly pleasurable. Yanagihara elevates descriptions of tears, cuts, and other flesh wounds to an art. After finishing the book in a 400 page binge over one train ride, I wondered, is it bad to derive so much pleasure from a story of so much pain?
No. In contrast to shows like SVU, where some of the violence--especially the sexual violence--exists to titillate, the relentlessness of A Little Life serves a different purpose. While the beginning sets up a mystery of what happened to Jude, we get hints of a history of child abuse pretty early on. The central mystery of the novel then quickly shifts from how Jude was mistreated as a child to how his mistreatment affects his ability to navigate the world as an adult. To answer that question fully, Yanagihara takes the reader inside Jude’s mind, and the mind of those who witness his injuries, to see how different people interpret Jude’s experiences.
And so yes, the descriptions are stark, but they show us how Jude interpreted what was happening to him at any given moment. Jude was abandoned by his parents at birth. As a child, he was abused by the first people who take him in. He doesn’t really understand what was being done to him as a child, and so the descriptions are matter of fact. He acted out; he was physically punished and berated:
“One day he went to the greenhouse late. It had been a very hard week; he had been beaten very badly; it hurt him to walk. He had been visited...the previous evening, and every muscle hurt.”
Later in life, when he enters an abusive relationship, he questions how he got there, wondering if he is forever doomed to mistreatment by the people he opens up to:
“In the apartment, Caleb lets go of his neck, and he falls, his legs unsteady beneath him, and Caleb kicks him in the stomach so hard that he vomits, and then again his back, and he slides over Malcolm’s lovely, clean floors and into the vomit. His beautiful apartment, he thinks, where he has always been safe. this is happening to him in his beautiful apartment, surrounded by his beautiful things, things that have been given to him in friendship, things that he has bought with money he has earned. His beautiful apartment, with its doors that lock, where he was meant to be protected from broken elevators and the degradation of pulling himself upstairs on his arms, where he was meant to always feel human and whole.”
These lengthy passages of suffering force the reader to feel overwhelming sympathy for Jude--it would be monstrous not to. But the sheer volume does dull some of the effect. In fact, Jude’s sufferings are almost Christ-like in their proportion. Jude’s saintliness is right there in his name, Jude St. Francis. His sufferings are more than any one person should ever endure. But unlike the more fallible victims in Law & Order who often turn to crime themselves, Jude becomes a successful lawyer, an (arguably) productive member of society. So while readers sympathize with Jude, it’s harder to empathize with him.
Instead, the truly empathetic characters are those surrounding Jude. His friends, colleagues, and teachers feel the need to protect him, especially as they learn about his past. Several chapters of the book are told from the first-person perspective of one of Jude’s Harvard Law School professors and strongest advocates as he describes how his relationship with Jude evolved from when he first learned about Jude’s wheelchair to when he finally learned all the details of his past. We learn that the professor, Harold, has endured a significant loss himself before he met Jude. Throughout the novel, Harold tries to save Jude to compensate for his earlier loss. How others redeem their own failings by loving Jude thus drives the plot. Despite all of the misery described in A Little Life, it is also a story of growth, love, and redemption. That is the ultimate hook.