A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

A guest review by Jayne White

I bought my ebook of A Little Life when it was declared the hot tip for this year’s Man Booker Prize. It was being extravagantly praised everywhere I looked so I was quite excited about it. It’s a big book so it stayed on the virtual TBR heap until I had a cosy long weekend and time to wallow in it. However, I find myself disappointed and wondering why I’m so at odds with so many critics over it.  What are these critics seeing that I am not? The following paragraphs contain extensive spoilers. I don’t normally do this in a review but if I’m going to be harsh then I need to be precise.

A Little Life is set in an unspecified time period over a 50 year span. Computers are referenced in an early scene which indicates that the later parts are set in the future. I get the impression the author didn’t specify the time because she needed the computer to make the plot work but didn’t want to imagine the future in any detail. It’s largely set in New York, but there’s very little description of New York other than the interiors of the flats and lofts that Jude lives in - especially the bathrooms where he self-harms. There are 195 instances of the word ‘cut’ and approximately 175 of them refer directly to self harm.

Jude is the central character. He is a high-flying successful lawyer who is an emotional wreck because he’s most abused person ever. Abandoned on a trash heap as a newborn he is raised in a monastery where he is systematically emotionally, physically and sexually abused by every inhabitant. He runs away with a seemingly gentle monk who pimps him out to an ever-increasing number of pedophiles as they travel from place to place. Eventually he ends up being maimed for life by a client who imprisons him and then repeatedly hits him with a car. Fortunately all this doesn’t put him behind with his education and he gets a scholarship to an elite college which sets him on the path to his glittering career. Although virtually everyone he meets in adult life adores him he is shaken and wracked with anxiety by the least incident and when he meets someone abusive he has no skills to escape them or to defend himself from them.

Now I’m not saying that childhood abuse is easy to repair. Most people who’ve had damaging experiences as children are slow to heal and will in almost all cases have scars. I do think though, creating a character who has suffered such extreme and continuous abuse is almost minimising the reality of abuse that many people we know have suffered. In some respects we read to understand ourselves and others but Jude is such an artificial confection of horrendous experiences, scars and dysfunction that it’s almost like ticking off a checklist rather than getting to know someone.

After being beaten up by an abusive boyfriend at around the 60% mark Jude makes a serious attempt at suicide. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have preferred this suicide attempt to have been successful because the novel would benefit from being shorter and less of a saga and it would have been a fairly credible and natural ending. However, instead we discover that Willem (an internationally famous actor and Jude’s best friend for more than a decade) is bisexual: “... he’d had sex with men before, everyone he knew had,...” and also now in love with Jude.

This revelation means we get to see how Jude adapts to an intimate relationship with a decent man. To me this felt like a big switch in direction. In my view, it has a very puppet-master feel about it as the existing relationship turns into something else overnight. Eventually Willem is killed in a car crash so we can see Jude experience even more grief and self harm in more ways while not faltering on the career ladder.

So does this novel have any redeeming features? Well yes. In some places the quality of the writing is quite remarkable. When Willem is feeling left behind on his career path:

“But these were days of self-fulfillment, where settling for something that was not quite your first choice of a life seemed weak-willed and ignoble. Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice. There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive, as if happiness were something that everyone should and could attain, and that any sort of compromise in its pursuit was somehow your fault.”

When Jude reassures the socially awkward boy he is tutoring:

“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.”

There’s no denying that the author is talented. It’s a fascinating theme for a novel and in places the prose is wonderful. However, I think she has attempted to do too much and readers are faced with an end result which is rather uneven and self-indulgent as a result. There is brilliance here, but it’s not what I will recall most. I think most of us who read literary fiction are like addicts who are looking for a buzz from whichever elements most appeal to them. For some, the quality of prose will be enough of a hit, but I need a degree of truth and character realism that I have not found here.

Jayne is a freelance copywriter and editor. Follow her on twitter @ElethaWhite