A Little Life isn’t the type of book you want to read alone. Or at least, you might read it alone, but then it winds its way into the fabric of your brain to such an extent that naturally you want to discuss it with others. I was about halfway through when I found myself tweeting that I cared for Jude St Francis —the unfortunate protagonist— as though he were my own child and could it get any more brutal? (Yes, in case you're wondering).
I
naively thought, initially, that I was the only person who’d be talking to twitter
about it. Then I saw lots of other tweets and felt as though we were all
partaking in some kind of cyber bleeding heart cry-off about Jude’s life (which
was probably far from most of ours) and I felt a bit cringy about the whole
thing. But still, for me the point of literature (and art in general) has
always been to make you feel. I know
trashy page-turner detective novels do that, as do badly ghost-written misery
memoirs with titles like Mommy, No,
but what separates ‘A Little Life’ from those things is the way in which it
creates such an epic, complex portrait of a person’s life whilst avoiding any
clichés about redemption or a linear path to healing.
A
blurby synopsis for the unfamiliar: A
Little Life begins as though it is going to tell, equally, the stories of
four male friends living in New York, all of them fresh out of a top university
and on the road to star careers. There’s JB, a gay painter, the Brooklyn-born
son of Haitian immigrants; Willem, an actor/waiter of working class
Swedish/Icelandic origins who stopped talking to his parents after his disabled
brother’s death; Malcolm, an architect with a trust fund; and Jude St Francis,
about whom little to nothing is known. Jude is dubbed ‘the postman’ by JB who
describes him as ‘post-racial’ and ‘post-sexual’ as his sexuality and ethnicity
are a mystery. Indeed, almost everything about Jude is a mystery, particularly
his life before college, yet it becomes apparent early on that Jude is deeply
troubled. He has ‘episodes’ in which he is incapacitated owing to problems with
his legs from an undisclosed accident, he self-harms regularly and brutally and
his arms, leg and back are covered in scars. As the novel continues it hones in
on Jude and details about the horrors he experienced in the first fifteen years
of his life slowly unfold.
The
author, Hanya Yanagihara, has been accused of being gratuitous with the novel.
I am not really one for such arguments, but there were times reading it when I
thought, ‘this is too much’. I don’t think anyone should have to censor themselves,
but it did almost feel over the top how much abuse Jude experienced. Of course
what he went through could happen to
someone, but it’s almost like Yanagihara put him through every horrific thing a
person could go through and then when she was done with that, she added some
more.
So
why would anyone want to read such a book? Why is this the most compelling book
I have read in years? Well, it isn’t actually 730 pages of Jude being tortured,
what happened to him in his early life does unfold slowly but it’s intercut
with his adult life and is very much a book about how trauma lives on in a
person if it is never confronted, how anger can implode and turn in on itself.
Jude never directs his rage at those who harmed him, always at himself.
The
self-loathing, anxiety and illumination of the way in which the past chokes us
in the present is very universal and relatable, whether you have suffered
anywhere near as much as Jude or not. Perhaps in some way the fact that Jude
has seemingly gone through everything means a person can relate to him having gone
through anything.
A Little Life is also very much a book
about friendship, where a traditional sexual/romantic relationship is not at
the centre. Jude and Willem do eventually become lovers, but one of the acts of
love Willem imparts on Jude is ceasing to have sex with him when he realises it
can only cause Jude pain. Hanya Yanagihara has said herself she doesn’t believe
in marriage (always a stance that gets the thumbs up from me) and the book challenges
the normative notion that to be whole as a person one must be in a
sexual/romantic relationship, or that one must have sex, or that not enjoying
it is a flaw to be corrected.
Even
Willem and Jude’s relationship is an extension of their already deep friendship
and whilst JB and Malcolm do not play as big a role in the novel as they appear
to at the beginning, the importance of their relationships to each other and to
Willem and Jude as friends, is just as important, if not more so, than their
romantic relationships. In this way the novel is one of the best takes on
queer, non-normative family since Michael Cunningham’s A Home At The End of the World (which fans of A Little Life should read if they haven’t already). Whilst A Little Life rejects any kind of
redemption narrative, the moments of solace in Jude’s life are all provided
through friendship.
Despite
the gratuity of some of the book, I think there is a something pretty beautiful
in the honesty it displays — life is sad, life is painful, life is difficult,
trauma is hard to survive intact and always leaves an imprint. There is
something sort of wonderful and cathartic in the rawness of confronting that head
on without flinching.
The
book also gives a pretty non-clichéd take on suicide, resisting a black and white idea of a better or worse option. Harold (a key figure in Jude’s life who adopts Jude in his
thirties) says of his own desperate attempts to keep Jude alive: ‘. . . you can
see that it is costing them, you can see how much they don’t want to be here,
you can see that the mere act of existing is depleting for them, and then you
have to tell yourself every day: I am doing the right thing.’
Thanks
to hormones, I have been physically unable to cry since October (and I used to
cry all the time) with only two exceptions, both when reading A Little Life. Reading it is sort of a
traumatic experience but it’s also beautiful, enraging, devastating and
enthralling; pretty much everything it is to be alive.
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