A Little Life

As someone whose self-professed taste in books is “very long bummers”, this feels like something I should have read ages ago. It's been out for nearly ten years now, so I have seen both the hype cycle and the backlash and after reading it I understand each of them. It tells the story of a group of four friends from college: Malcolm (an architect), JB (an artist), Willem (an actor), and Jude (a lawyer). When we first meet them, just a few years after they've graduated, they're all struggling to find their places in the world, striving for success while working to rise above their childhood demons. And no one has more childhood demons than Jude. This book has been called “trauma porn” as it relates to the life story Hanya Yanagihara creates for Jude, and it's not an unfair criticism. However bad you think it could be, it's worse. As a reader, I found the section in which Jude has been taken on the road by a quasi-parental figure who abuses him while claiming to love him (and does even worse than that), ping-ponging around the country in a series of motels, to be reminiscent of Lolita...but while Lolita leaves most of the actual crimes to the imagination and is narrated by the abuser, A Little Life brings it out into the open and is narrated by the abused. It's shocking, and horrifying, and not even the most shocking and horrifying thing to be recounted in the book's 800+ pages. But it's not all despair and unimaginable cruelty to children. Jude, and indeed all of his friends, find success. They find love. They have friendships that feel real, with periods of closeness and periods of estrangement. People care for each other and are kind to each other. They are happy sometimes, and sometimes not. Life is not just one thing, it's lots of different things, often at the same time, and I feel like this novel captured that beautifully. That being said, I do agree with some of the criticism. The level of trauma visited upon Jude becomes almost numbing in its depth. There is a lot of aspirational lifestyle content that got repetitive (especially, for me, the food, which is something I tend to find boring to read about). I don't think I could ever recommend this book to anyone. It needs just about every content warning possible. I can well understand why some people hate it. But I found it highly compelling and genuinely moving.