[Not A Fiction] Book Review: A Little Life

This picture looks like it’s depicting a sobbing miserable man but is actually a photo of a man orgasming. That basically sums up A Little Life.

I started reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara because I read a callout post about it saying that it had a nigh-sadomasochistic focus on gay male suffering, and I was like “I love that shit.” I read the first four hundred pages in bits over the course of two weeks, and then spent six hours devouring the next four hundred pages interrupted by sobbing on my baffled husband about how much I loved him.

Major spoilers ahead! Content note for discussion of abuse, rape, mental illness, sex trafficking, and suicide.

A Little Life Is Whump

A Little Life is about a man who is so handsome, and so brilliant, and so very very sad, and he suffers oh so beautifully, and he endures his suffering with such bravery and fortitude, while all around him people give him hugs and whisper to each other “oh! That a man who is so beautiful and brilliant is also so sad! And yet he endures it with such bravery and fortitude! How much we admire him! How understandable, how sympathetic, how deeply valid his suffering is!”

Which is to say that it’s whump.

I make this point because I think many of the people who hate A Little Life don’t like whump, and are just reading it because it was nominated for a National Book Award. Let me be clear: if that description doesn’t sound appealing to you, there is nothing for you here. That is what the book is about.

Some of my friends say of books they like, “the author’s really writing with her dick here.” It’s a compliment, if perhaps a backhanded one. Stories the author wrote with her dick aren’t necessarily sexy (although they often are). It’s a general sense that the author is writing what gives her a warm squidgy feeling deep inside, without shame or embarrassment or worry about the bounds of good taste.

It’s when the author writes “and then the cold and distant genius gets turned into a six-year-old and loses his ability to control his emotions, gets hugs and headpats, and indulges his secret love for sweets—” Or “and then the black woman discovers she’s the secret long-lost heir to King Arthur because she’s descended from a slave raped by a 19th century Arthur descendant, and she also has cool magic powers from her African ancestry, and also two men are in love with her and both of them are bi and one of them has purple eyes—” Or “and then he has to guard the man he’s in love with and can never have, while the man is sex-pollened and repeatedly stabbing himself with a sword as a desperate attempt to try to keep control, and outside the sex demons are acting out his sexual fantasies, and this all reinforces the book’s themes about virginity and purity and the difference between reality and image—”

Anyway. What I mean to say is that Hanya Yanagihara is absolutely writing with her dick.

But Yanagihara is also a close and sharp observer of people, in a way that most authors who write with their dicks really aren’t. She’s working within the literary fiction tradition, which rewards precision and accuracy about what people really do and think. Whump is a profoundly Romantic genre, in the literary criticism sense: archetypal, larger-than-life, often melodramatic. But Yanagihara brings to it a deeply Realist sensibility: careful description of the common and the familiar, in a way that makes the reader go “ah! That’s exactly what it’s like.”

The contrast between Romanticism and Realism creates a tension that pervades the book and provides a lot of its interest. Yanagihara revels in her protagonist’s beautiful suffering. But throughout the novel something tugs her back. People get frustrated with Jude in a way that’s rare in whump. His adoptive father and his lover both feel utterly at a loss about how to deal with him. Far from being noble, Jude’s self-sacrificial stoicism is cruel. He isolates them, shuts them out from his inner world. He makes the people who love him helpless.

A scene that has stuck with me is the one where Jude’s lover William, in a fit of despair, grabs Jude’s razor and cuts himself across the chest. As a severely mentally ill person who has watched my loved ones deal with me, it felt like a stab in the gut. That is what it’s like for them. Yanagihara captured it perfectly.

“Realism” Is Not Realistic

One of the criticisms that comes up over and over again about A Little Life is that Jude’s suffering is unrealistic.

To be sure, Yanagihara makes some factual errors in the process of giving Jude his exuberantly traumatic childhood. Given the scarcity of adoptable babies, it seems implausible that a healthy child would be left to be raised by a monastery. Jude is sex-trafficked in a way that is very realistic for a twelve-year-old or thirteen-year-old, but unrealistic for an eight-year-old.

But, ultimately, people aren’t objecting to Yanagihara’s poor understanding of the economics of child sex trafficking. People are objecting to the long list of Jude’s marginalizations: Ethnically ambiguous. Queer. Physically disabled. Mentally ill. Suicidal. Self-harmer. Poor. Foster care kid. Abandoned at birth. Survivor of physical and spiritual abuse. Survivor of sex trafficking. Survivor of child sexual abuse. Survivor of attempted murder. Survival sex worker. Survivor of domestic violence in adulthood.

It’s a long list.

But Jude is not “the unluckiest man alive.” Almost everything on that list is correlated moderately to strongly with everything else on that list. It is in fact very common for a poor, nonwhite kid to be a victim of multiple kinds of abuse, to be coerced into sex work by a pimp or by poverty, to wind up in the foster care system, and to struggle with mental illness and physical disability in adulthood as a consequence. It’s boring! You’ll never sell a memoir off that!

One debate about A Little Life includes the section:

Frankie: …I was so struck by how the early chapters signal forcefully that this is going to be a realist novel set in very real contemporary New York. Not just New York, not just a fairy tale version of New York, but literally Lispenard Street, literally SoHo. Another thing that many haters of this novel take issue with is the way it sort of careens from realism to something very, very not realism —

Peyton: But that’s by design!

Frankie: — without any warning, really. I mean, we start out on Lispenard Street and suddenly we are in a rape monastery in, where is it, Montana? The evil monastery? Do we know what state it’s in, the evil monastery where Jude is found in the trash and raised?

Peyton: The foster home was in Montana. I don’t know if we know where the monastery is.

Frankie: It’s such a fairy tale idea, this evil monastery where Jude is raised as an orphan. And I personally cannot reconcile the evil monastery with Lispenard Street, do you know what I mean?

But real life actually does include both evil rape monasteries and Lispenard Street. They coexist! They will stubbornly continue to coexist whether you can reconcile them or not!

Some critics say that Jude’s suffering is excessive, that the point could be made even if his past were less gothic and overwrought. But, in real life, abuse isn’t polite enough to stop once you are adequately traumatized for the plot to work. Real life abuse is excessive. I have heard a lot of people talk about their abusive childhoods and absolutely none of them have stopped at a tasteful point. It’s more like “your parents did what with your cat? Wait, is this before or after they forcibly drugged you with antipsychotics?”

It’s an interesting aspect of discourse—who gets to be realistic and, by extension, real.

Jude winds up fabulously wealthy, partner at a powerful corporate law firm, and in a committed long-term relationship with a handsome Oscar-winning actor. His other two college roommates become an award-winning architect and a painter who gets a four-floor retrospective at MOMA. This is actually… way more implausible than the other stuff? But I have seen relatively few complaints about Jude’s good luck, compared to the sea of complaints about his bad luck.

Book characters aren’t drawn from a random sampling of human beings. They tend to be unusually powerful, wealthy, and successful. No one complains that literary novels are stuffed full of world-renowned pianists and tenured professors of English literature and feckless heirs to great wealth. All those people get to be real. Traumatized multiracial foster care kids, not so much.

Themes

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of A Little Life is its ending—and there will be spoilers from here on out.

Jude never recovers from his mental illness. Over time, he gradually builds a life worth living, centered around the unceasing love he gets from his boyfriend. His life is not perfect, but it’s okay. But then his boyfriend gets hit by a car. Jude tries and fails to cope with the grief, as well as his increasing level of physical disability; eventually, he kills himself.

Jude’s suicide is one of the most widely criticized plot points in A Little Life. “Isn’t Yanagihara saying that some people are so fucked up that they can’t possibly be happy and the only thing they can do is commit suicide?”

No. You are either deeply philosophically confused or bad at reading.

It is true Jude St. Francis had no happy ending. But he had a happy middle.

More than a hundred pages of it, in fact. He had Thanksgivings with his adoptive parents and lunches with his friends, interesting work he excelled at, a beautiful vacation home. He had the love of his life: quiet nights at home together cooking elaborate dinners, snarky eye-contact conversations across the room at parties, cuddles every night and morning with no expectations. He shared the secrets he thought were unforgivable, and he was forgiven.

And what are all those years worth, if he just ended up committing suicide in the end?

A Little Life answers: they are worth exactly the same.

If you are severely mentally ill or traumatized, the joy and pleasure and love you feel matters exactly as much a sane person’s. It matters as much even if you never get better. It matters as much even if you recover temporarily, and then get worse. And it matters as much even if you commit suicide. Either way, a Thanksgiving is worth one Thanksgiving; a homecooked dinner, one dinner; a cuddle, one cuddle; forgiveness, one forgiveness.

Your life doesn’t lose its value because of how it ends.

I think it is wise for sane people to adopt the gospel of the happy middle. Very few people have happy endings: very few people die in a pleasant mood, in full possession of their faculties, with no regrets or unfinished business, surrounded by people who love them but who won’t particularly miss or grieve them. You are likely to die alone or confused or in pain. You will leave work undone. If you are lucky, you will leave behind people for whom your death is like a knife in the heart; if you are unlucky, no one will care at all.

Books have happy endings because authors are strategic about where they stop. No one is taking such precautions about your life. If a bad ending means that it’s all for naught, you’re as fucked as Jude.