A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
5 out of 5 stars.
Subversively brilliant and disquieting, 'A Little Life' is certainly not "little", but rather is a brave (and successful) achievement of Yanagihara's at telling the traumatic life story of the distraught yet lovable Jude St. Francis. This novel tests the limits of human endurance, looks at the core of memory and tyranny, and unquestionably leaves it's readers sinking in a pool of torment.
Surrounded by his three friends - Willem the actor, Jean-Baptiste (JB) the artist, and Malcolm the architect, the quatuor’s male friendship is explored with claustrophobic intensity, quickly driving Yanagihara’s harrowing story from a seemingly light and warm all-American bildungsroman to one of the most disturbing novels I have read; all within the first 60 pages.
Jude St. Francis, as we soon learn, was dumped in a garbage bin as an infant, beaten and raised in a monastery, and repeatedly sexually abused from the age of 8. Yanagihara brittly describes, inch by inch, Jude’s complete story, leaving no details to spare from the reader, and abandons us with either grim nightmares or sleepless nights. (This is not a novel for the faint hearted, and is warned to be a ‘trigger for depression’).
What is striking about 'A Little Life' is it extends far beyond a traumatic baseline; rather it poses this question: how does one navigate desire when all sexual pleasure has been forever stripped away and turned into the stuff of nightmares, and yet the deep longing for love remains?
In many ways, Jude appears reticent and frail, yet as he says himself, he is also an optimist. Though his nights are driven by bathtub selfharm sessions, he refuses to end his life, taking pleasure in mere bouts of existence, in "watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved," or in standing "barefoot, in the kitchen, everything quiet around him," where his "small, ugly apartment would feel like a sort of marvel."
Progressively, the novel takes shape as a story between Willem and Jude; a story of their love. In both these men, Yanagihara has created irreproachable kindness and empathy, both showing affection and devotion towards the other running so deep that one can only envy such a relationship. The horrors of Jude's story are confessed in a tantalizingly slow manner as the reader takes shape as Willem, unveiling Jude's past and gaining his trust. Although tested to their limit (at some points, I felt nauseated to the point I needed to close the book for a couple seconds of deep breathing), and spending most of their time crying out to a dismantled Jude, who is "so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden clump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest," or shuddering at his horrific use of "the edge of the razor to saw through tough, webby scar tissue," the reader feels guilty in wanting to know more of his atrocious past, feels guilty in becoming transfixed with such trauma. The past seems to drive the novel forwards as the present becomes ever more dreamy.
However the greater effect 'A Little Life' provides is in delivering a tale where no positive end is reached. At no point does it offer any possibility of redemption and deliverance (beyond it's spare few tender moments). It speaks of a moral universe where no spiritual, glittering solution is found, and thus delivers a hearbreakingly real story. Though Jude's long list of horrors have been admitted by Yanagihara as being "exaggerated," so has the love. "I wanted it to reach a level of truth by playing with the conventions of a fairy tale, and then verring those conventions off path," admits the author in an interview. Devilish perhaps, but nonetheless frighteningly powerful; certainly beyond any modern novel of the likes today.
I admit having been abruptly hit, as I closed the book's 720th page, by the surprise that Jude is never freed through psychological healing (or any healing for that matter). And though after long contemplation I realized the level of trauma he experienced would never have allowed him to find solace, I recognized that much, much too often in novels is the main character saved.
Yanagihara's final message to her readers is distressing: love, although grand, is certainly not enough.
