A Little Life

A Man Booker finalist in 2015 as well a National Book Award finalist, Hanya Yanagihara's novel has been called "subversively brilliant" "dark and disturbing" "an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery" " the arrival  of the great, gay novel" and yes, it is all those things but so much more.

I hesitate to even attempt to write about the profound emotional experience of reading this novel.  Some novels move me to tears and occasional sniffles; A Little Life moved me to great, heaving sobs, with both its horror and its absolute beauty. 

The story opens with four recent graduates of a prestigious Ivy League university working to establish their adult lives in New York City.  Over the course of the next thirty years, Willem, Malcolm, JB and Jude all reach levels of professional success beyond their wildest dreams, but their emotional lives are really the focus of the author.

It would not be right to deprive any reader of experiencing the unfolding of this story: the highs are lovely and the lows are shocking and desperately sad.  But, and this is crucial, the story is beautifully written; the suffering of Jude, the main character is extensively detailed, but it is the very foundation that Jude's life is built upon and therefore quite necessary to the story.  As Jude's experiences as a child are slowly revealed to his three friends, who deeply love him,  they each in their own way try desperately to support and emotionally nourish him.  The friendship between Jude and Willem that slowly evolves into love, is one of the most beautifully portrayed love stories I have ever read.  But can wounds this deep ever really be healed?

Yanagihara deals quite capably with many other complex issues in addition to abuse: racism, sexual identity, male relationships (both hetero and gay), marriage, and especially love (sexual and non-sexual).

A favorite passage:

Relationships never provide you with everything.  They provide you with some things.  You take all the things you want from a person--sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty--and you get to pick three of those things....the rest you have to look for elsewhere.  It's only in the movies that you find someone who gives you all of those things.  But this isn't the movies.  In the real world, you have to identify which three qualities you want to send the rest of our life with, and then you look for those qualities in another person.  That's real life.  Don't you see it's a trap? If you keep trying to find everything, you'll wind up with nothing.

Well said.

In closing, I will just say yes, this deeply affecting novel will remain VERY high on my list of all-time reads that have impacted me in memorable ways.  I'm  one of those readers who believe that when we experience stories that move us, that change or deepen our understanding of others and the world around us, we are reaping the ultimate benefits that reading can offer us: a broadening of perspective, a deeper sense of compassion, and a better understanding of the biases that are in all of us. 

My rating: **** (4 out of 4)