Life's a Bitch

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life

My first “summer read” of this year. Man Booker finalist and one of the most discussed novels of 2015. 700 pages long, and, every page worth the read.

A coming of age story that spans several decades. It starts with four college friends who have just come to New York to begin their professional lives. Jude, a litigator, Malcolm, an architect, Willem, an actor, and J.B., an artist. Two colored (J.B. and Malcolm), two white (Willem and Jude). Two from a well-off family background (J.B. and Malcolm), one from a poor family (Willem), one with no family at all (Jude).  One is openly gay (J.B.), one ambiguous in his orientation (Malcolm), one apparently very much a women’s’ man (Willem) and one not associated with any kind of relation (Jude). In the coming years, all four become fabulously successful, travel the world, attend glamorous parties, move into beautiful apartments etc.

This is the outer setting against which Yanagihara tells the story of the central character, Jude St. Francis. Step by step, the novel reveals the dark tale of the physical and sexual abuse Jude endured during his childhood and teenage days. An orphan, he was at first abused in the monastery that took him in, then ran off with a monk who prostituted him, landed in a state institution where the abuse continued, worked as a male prostitute along highways, before ending up in the captivity of a sadistic psychiatrist who almost kills him and leaves his legs permanently disabled. When entering college, Jude leaves behind this old life, assuming an almost impenetrable, controlled outer self. While close to his friends, Jude doesn’t give away much about his past to them and, as a kind of coping mechanism, cuts himself on a regular, sometimes excessive, basis. Throughout the novel, Jude witnesses recurrent episodes of intense pain, with his legs finally being amputated. He enters a violent relationship with another man, ultimately leading Jude to attempt to commit suicide. There are, however, also bright spots throughout the story. Andy, his doctor, takes loving care of Jude’s fragile physical condition. Jude’s friendship with Willem is ever deepening and becomes the dominant theme in the second half of the novel. Jude finds a family after he is adopted by Harold, his old Harvard Law professor.

I won’t give away anything about the book's last third or the ending, given how powerful it is. It virtually smacks the reader in the face. This is a very dark, but at the same time beautiful tale of friendship and love. The story has a kind of fairy tale like feel. It for instance does not give any references to real world events. It is set in New York over several decades, but it is never mentioned who is president; there is no discernable change in societal attitudes towards gay people etc. The glamorous setting contrasts nicely with the dark story of Jude. The book touches on eternal themes, such as friendship, love, self-loathing, and the attempt to conceal one’s own weaknesses. The most moving parts are probably about Jude’s almost super-human attempts at self-control, his shame for what happened him in the past, his friends attempting to save him by attempting getting through to him. Overall, probably one of the most powerful novel I have read since Murakami’s Norwegian Wood. Yes, the drama in it and the almost complete lack of irony may sometimes feel borderline kitsch and there is perhaps a bit too much "lifestyle porn". Fuck it, this book remains simply a heart-warming piece. Best read of the year (and perhaps even the last years) up to now.

Next up on the list of modern day (potential) classics: Elena Ferrante's "My brilliant friend" and Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom".

Random movie/ music reference:

I could have gone for Hey Jude, but there was a guy playing Radiohead when I read this book in a riverside bar in central Portugal…

Favorite quotes:

"You understood that proof of your friendship lay in keeping your distance, in accepting what was told you, in turning and walking away when the door was shut in your face instead of trying to force it open again."

"Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged."

"They were his first friends, and he understood that friendship was a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information."

"Was couplehood truly the only evolutionary option? … Thousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?"

"By his age, you had met all the friends you would probably ever have. You had met your friends’ friends. Life got smaller and smaller."

"Everyone had feelings that they knew better than to act upon because they knew that doing so would make life so much more complicated."

"It was something he had never been able to explain to his friends, who marveled at and pitied him for how much he had to work; he could never tell them that it was at that office, surrounded by work and people he knew they found almost stultifyingly dull, that he felt at his most human, his most dignified and invulnerable."

"Relationships never provide you with everything. … You take all the things you want from a person- sexual chemistry, let’s say, or good conversation, or financial support, or sexual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty- and you get to pick three of those things. … the rest you have to look for elsewhere."

"You don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost."

"If you act like you don’t belong, if you act like you’re apologetic for your own self, the people will start to treat you that way, too."