A Little Life
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Without a doubt, this is my favorite type of book to read. I love a big ass investment because it usually means a big ass payout. A Little Life is 800 pages and it has very solid ROI.
The back of the book states, “The story follows four college classmates - Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm - as they navigate life in New York City.” I find that misleading, as the book primarily follows Jude. That’s one of my complaints about the novel– I went in expecting a story about four people, and in actuality, it’s really a story about one. I wish that I had more perspective from those peripheral characters, especially because it’s clear that Yanagihara, the author, is capable of very distinct voices (except for female voices… of note, there are pretty much no female characters in the book aside from some girlfriends/wives whose names you quickly forget. That was fine by me although again, I feel that the book could have benefited from more voices in general). I understand that this would have come at the expense of understanding Jude to the depth that we do but A) I feel like we understood him as best as we could and B) okay fine, make it longer.
I have an almost three-month-old daughter, and I finished this book while I was breastfeeding her. It’s an emotional ending, and I cried pretty intensely. We locked eyes, and she cried too, because she’s a baby and she cries a lot…
But really, I felt very moved to communicate to her that I loved her and that I would do everything in my power to help her feel that love. Finishing A Little Life in her presence encouraged me to tell her aloud that she would make mistakes, and I would make mistakes, but there was no mistake big enough in the world in which we couldn’t find some love for each other.
This is why you read books like this. They help you tap into deep, nuanced emotions that otherwise go untapped. I was so completely immersed in Jude’s life that it made me reevaluate my own life and appreciate the love that I’ve given and received. Postpartum life has been blurry and confusing and sometimes numb in its banality; still, at the end of the day, I created another human being who deserves to be nurtured and loved, and when you read about others who experience deep injustice, it makes you want to take those steps to set the world right.
So, that’s my lofty review of this book from a bird’s eye view. I have more technical observations when I get into the granular. Yanagihara experiments with time, taking a fluid approach, referencing both the past and the present in ways that undermine suspense and force you to sit, oftentimes uncomfortably, in the foreshadowed tragedy. For example, he sometimes overtly spells out an incident, then quickly moves on to describe the aftermath, then doubles back to give more detail on the incident itself. So, reading it feels like a slow whittling down of your resolve, having to relive tragedies over and over. Yanagihara dangles sadness on a stick and then slowly reels us in, feeding us more and more details over the course of several hundred pages so that we can’t ever truly come to terms.
It’s so difficult to see who you really are as a person. Jude kept trying, and he also kept failing. We saw that again and again and struggled alongside him. I absolutely love a literary tome, like Infinite Jest, which I’ll continue to think about until the day I die. Books like these take on a three-dimensional quality; you live with the characters. I found myself thinking things like *what happened to Jackson* but like, girl, Jackson isn’t real. This is the beauty of literature! It makes you feel something, and oh baby, I felt something. At the end of the day, this wasn’t Infinite Jest caliber for me. I give it 4 out of 5 flames. I think that it’s absolutely worth reading, but I continue to wish that Yanagihara had given us more access to characters outside of Jude. I have some final thoughts for people who have read the book…
**SPOILERS BELOW**
Points of contention that I’d love to discuss with people:
-Pragmatic issue: How was Jude rescued after he was run over by Dr. Traylor? Did I miss this detail? Wasn’t it stressed that they were out in the middle of nowhere?
-I didn’t love the intermittent sections where Harold is speaking to Willem about Jude. I’m sure this was intended to hint at a harrowing ending for both Willem and Jude, but I didn’t think it really added value in that regard. I also felt like it was too randomly dispersed, in a bad way.
-I personally didn’t buy Willem falling in love with Jude romantically. I thought that was rushed and disingenuous. I was eventually convinced by it, but I actually appreciated their platonic friendship and liked the purity of that. I understood when it morphed into a new category that Willem himself said stood outside of both romance and friendship, but I wish I had seen more gradual glimpses of Willem’s physical desire for him, because it came as too much of a surprise for me to buy
-I really don’t know why Yanagihara bothered putting Malcolm in the novel. I imagine that he wrote a whole narrative of Malcolm that editors cut out.
-The JB perspective was so interesting! We found out he was dealing with obesity and drugs like 300+ pages in. Why?? Feels like a waste of a character
-Of note (not a point of contention), but I like that all four of them became very successful career-wise. I don’t think that’s realistic given their backgrounds and their initial NYC squalor but it made the book more interesting– underdogs doing fabulous things
