A Little Life

A Little Life

Author	Hanya Yanagihara
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	2015
Pages	720
ISBN	0385539258

A Little Life is a 2015 novel by American novelist Hanya Yanagihara. The novel was written over the course of eighteen months.^[1] Despite the length and difficult subject matter it became a bestseller.^[2]

Plot summary

A coming of age story, the novel follows the lives of four friends in New York City after they have graduated from college. Malcolm, a struggling architect from a wealthy biracial family, still lives at home. JB is a painter of Haitian descent. Willem is an aspiring actor whose parents were Danish and Icelandic. And Jude, of ambiguous ethnicity, works as a lawyer. While the four friends remain connected, Willem and Jude are especially close, in part because they are both orphaned and have no money and therefore must share a small one bedroom apartment.

Despite Willem and Jude's closeness, Jude remains largely unknown to his roommate and the rest of the group because he reveals nothing about his childhood or his life prior to meeting his friends. Because of an incident he refers to only as a car injury, Jude walks with a limp and has nerve damage in his spine that causes him great pain. He also self-harms by cutting extensively. Nevertheless, he manages to become a successful lawyer and develops a close relationship with his former law professor and mentor, Harold, and his wife Julia. When Jude is thirty, after knowing him for nearly a decade, Harold and Julia ask him if they can adopt him. Jude consents, but the time before the adoption is filled with bouts of self-harm as he struggles against his feelings that he is essentially unworthy of affection.

As the men enter their thirties, they each become successful in their respective fields, while still maintaining their friendship. However, JB becomes addicted to crystal meth, and when his friends decide to stage an intervention, he mocks Jude by doing a crude imitation of his limp. Despite JB's apologizing profusely, Jude finds he cannot forgive JB, and Willem refuses to either. Only Malcolm remains friends with all the men.

While Jude continues to be professionally successful, his friends and family question his lack of romantic relationships as he enters his forties. Willem confesses to being baffled that he does not even know if Jude is gay or straight. Feeling alone, Jude begins a relationship with a fashion executive named Caleb, whom he meets at a friend's dinner party. Caleb is disgusted by Jude's limp and the increasing use of his wheelchair, and the relationship quickly becomes physically as well as emotionally abusive. Jude finally breaks off the relationship after Caleb rapes him, but Caleb stalks him, meeting him a final time, humiliating him at a dinner he has with Harold, and then brutally beating and raping him in his apartment, leaving him for dead. Jude refuses to report Caleb for what he has done, believing he completely deserved what happened, and ultimately, only Harold as well as Jude's doctor, Andy, know the truth of the relationship.

Although Jude's body manages to heal, the rapes cause him to flashback to his childhood. Raised in a monastery, he was repeatedly raped and abused by the brothers; one of them took Jude away, promising to build a happy life with him, but ended up forcing him into years of child prostitution. After he was rescued by the police, Jude was placed in state care, where he was continually abused by the counselors there. Jude finally decides to kill himself but is unsuccessful. As a result, Willem comes back home and begins to live with him again. Jude continues to refuse therapy but begins to tell Willem the least traumatic stories about his childhood, which Willem finds disturbing and horrifying.

As they continue to live together, Willem begins to feel that he is falling in love with Jude and wants a relationship with him. He eventually does start a relationship with Jude, and Jude is happier than he has ever been before. However, Jude continues to have difficulty telling Willem the worst of his childhood and also has problems being intimate with Willem. He eventually forces himself to submit to sex with Willem, but he continues to hate it and begins cutting himself more than ever. In an attempt to curb his cutting, Jude decides to burn himself, giving himself a third degree burn that requires a skin graft. The wound is so severe that Jude's private physician, Andy, tells him he must inform Willem, or else he will do it himself. However, before Jude can tell Willem, Andy accidentally divulges the information. Willem is horrified, but after a difficult fight, Jude finally confesses to Willem that he does not enjoy sex and tells him about the years of sexual and physical abuse he endured. He also reveals that the damage to his legs was caused by a Dr. Traylor, who picked him up after he ran away from state care and held him captive for 12 weeks when he was 15, eventually running him over with his car.

After Jude's revelation that he does not enjoy sex, Willem begins sleeping with women but maintains his romantic relationship with Jude. The two settle into a comfortable life together, which is shaken when Jude's legs become worse, and he must reluctantly amputate. Over the course of a few years, Jude manages to learn to walk again with his new prosthetics. Willem dubs this period in their life "The Happy Years," and the two experience genuine happiness together. However, while picking up Malcolm and his wife from the train station for a visit, Willem is involved in a car accident with a drunk driver which kills all three passengers.

With Willem dead, Jude descends once again into self-destructive habits, losing such an excessive amount of weight that his friends and family stage an intervention. Though they are able to get him to gain weight and to attend therapy, he eventually succeeds in committing suicide.

Structure of Novel

A Little Life is divided into seven separate parts, and follows a chronological narrative with flashbacks frequently interspersed throughout. The novel’s narrative perspectives shift throughout the story’s progression. During the beginning of the novel, a third person omniscient perspective privileging one of Jude’s, Willem’s, JB’s, or Malcolm’s thoughts is utilized. As the story gradually shifts its focus towards Jude, its perspective molds entirely around each character’s interactions with Jude and the experiences of Jude himself. This literary perspective is punctuated by first person narratives told from an unspecified future by an older Harold. The novel follows Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm from their mid-twenties all the way to their late fifties, spanning a total of three decades. Each member of the “Hood Hall Boys” become incredibly successful in their own chosen field, with Malcolm as an architect, JB as a figurative painter, Willem as an actor of stage and film, and Jude as a litigator.

The title of each section is as follows:

1. Lispenard Street

2. The Postman

3. Vanities

4. Axiom of Equality

5. The Happy Years

6. Dear Comrade

7. Lispenard Street

Themes

Relationships Among Men: The evolution of the relationships between Jude, Willem, JB, Malcolm, and Jude’s adopted father Harold are detailed extensively throughout the novel. Jude’s life in particular is populated by men who love and care about him, men that exploit and abuse him, and men who fall in the liminal spaces of these categories. The social and emotional lives of each male character are the fabric that weaves the novel together, creating an insular narrative bubble that provides few clues about the historical moment in which the story is situated.^[3]

As a result, Yanagihara confines the reader’s perspective and emphasizes the examination of the distinct interior lives of each character and the people that populate and influence their lives, with few women dispersed throughout the story. As a result, the novel can be considered a rumination on the strengths and the limits of romantic love, friendship, and relationships among men, with Jude as its focal point. Despite these various iterations of relationships and attempts to connect with Jude, his existence is often punctuated by isolation and loneliness in dealing with trauma and pain. His few attempts to reach out and connect with others during his adult life – such as with Caleb Porter midway through the novel – result in yet another cycle of sexual abuse and trauma. Jude’s flashbacks to his abusive experiences with Dr. Traylor, Brother Luke, boy's home counselors demonstrate the moral and affective extremes of abuse and exploitation that he experiences. Yet the novel invites juxtaposition by way of narration from Harold who shows a father’s unconditional benevolent love to his adopted son.

Trauma, Recovery, and Support:

In an article written for New York Magazine, the author Hanya Yanagihara states that “…one of the things [she] wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never got better… [for him] to begin healthy (or appear so) and end sick – both the main character and the plot itself”.^[4] Jude’s first sixteen years of life, plagued by sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, follows him for the rest of his life. His trauma directly affects his mental and physical health, relationships, beliefs, and the ways in which he navigates the world. Haunted by his own memories, he struggles to move beyond the damage the past has wrought upon his body and psyche.

Other than Ana, Jude’s deceased case manager who predates the novel’s beginning and Willem later in the novel, he divulges almost none of his past to those in his life until after his death. The failure to understand Jude’s trauma and the subsequent frustration that stems from Jude’s inability to build mutual networks of support among his friends and family is a constant point of tension in Yanagihara’s novel. Jude’s friends - such as his doctor Andy Contractor - are constantly plagued by doubts about the ethical choices that he makes in allowing Jude to live independently while harboring the knowledge of that Jude consistently exhibits physically self-destructive behavior that risks exacerbating his already poor health. Throughout the novel, Jude constantly apologizes for his actions and inability to take the help that would be given to him.

Chronic Pain, Disability, and Self Harm

A Little Life is exceptional in that it depicts the everyday experience of living with trauma, chronic pain, and disability. In doing so, A Little Life demonstrates their inherent intersections with one another. As a direct result Dr. Traylor running him over with a car, Jude’s injuries to his spine have long term effects that trouble him for the rest of his life. Among numerous health problems, Jude is prone to episodes of intense pain due to severed nerves in his back, lesions forming on his legs, and difficulty walking that requires a number of treatments as the novel progresses. Jude’s insistent inclination towards independence manifests in the ways he constantly resists and fights his body as it breaks down with age. He continually attempts to take control of his body and his emotions by continually self-harming, mainly with a razor. His life is structured around pain and the anticipation of pain. As Jude grows older, he loathes the increasing dependence he must have on devices such as wheelchairs, canes, and relying on the care of others.

Reception

The novel received positive reviews from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications.^{[5][6][7][8][9]}

In The Atlantic, Garth Greenwell suggested that A Little Life is “the long-awaited gay novel”: “It engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera. By violating the canons of current literary taste, by embracing melodrama and exaggeration and sentiment, it can access emotional truth denied more modest means of expression.”^[10]

In the London Review of Books, Christian Lorentzen referred to the main character's "gothic inverted fairytale origins" and "ghastly litany of childhood sexual abuse." The characters, he wrote, "seem like stereotypical middle-class strivers plucked out of 1950s cinema." He asked in regard to a minor character who became a crystal meth addict, "What real person trapped in this novel wouldn't become a drug addict?"^[11]

Yanagihara appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers to discuss the work.^[12] In July 2015, the book was selected as a finalist for the Man Booker Prize^[13] and made the shortlist of six books in September 2015.^[14]

Awards

• 2015 Man Booker Prize, shortlist^[15]
• 2015 National Book Award for Fiction, finalist^[16]
• 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, shortlist^[17]
• 2015 Kirkus Prize in Fiction, won^[18]
• 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, shortlist^[19]

References