A Little Life

Struggles presented as universal take on a quality of mocking delusion when the excess of protagonists (only male voices) all become famous millionaires at the top of their fields who own fabulous and plural homes and have access to private jets and Alhambra strolls. The decided main character also has riches in an expansive circle of equally jet-setting friends who over the span of decades never give up on him despite constant vehement testing-our-friendship pushback. We're told they remain devoted and compassionate yet none ever actually do rudimentary research on how to, if not guide him to knowledgeable help, talk to him and make steps to reposition the thinking and identity of a friend who has lived through extremities of harm. The glamour and American dreaming has its counterbalance in a childhood filled with horrors heaped on horrors of sexual, physical, and psychological abuse.

On the length, some expert editing could have kept out:

- White-adjacent ‘post-racial' musings offensively put into Malcolm's voice, besides the pretense that it's a story about four friends
- The additional fantasy of a ‘post-queer' landscape
- The transphobic introduction to Edie's party
- All subject-/interlocutor-vague narration from Harold (in fact letters to a painting of Willem's face) that diminishes Harold's character (‘You asked me once when I knew that he was for me, and I told you that I had always known. But that wasn't true, and I knew it even as I said it—I said it because it sounded pretty, like something someone might say in a book or a movie...')
- Dr. Traylor and his sex dungeon. How did Dr. Traylor even get caught? I had imagined Jude's legs being broken by Jude grabbing the wheel from Brother Luke to steer themselves into oncoming traffic to end his contrivedly torturous life
- The continuation of over the top villainous violence in Caleb
- About 50 pages reiterating self-harm
- The author's dismissal of psychiatry except maybe for the truly damaged in Willem's voice
- The jokes shared between Jude and Willem, which all fall unendearing not to mention unconvincing as connection
- A listing of every New York street the characters put their feet on
- How each of their friends die in the end

Even if it had been thoughtfully pruned and calibrated to a relatable scale, the novel's early glimmers of resonance could not survive the author's carrel of privilege and vision for suffering. The exploration of the aftermath of childhood trauma and the role of friendship in the potentiality of healing is weightily disrespected.