A Little Life
“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”
A Little Life is a title with 3 meanings. First, it refers to its protagonist, Jude, a man who cannot ever accept that his life is worthwhile. Second, it refers to the act of reading it, spending time in this book is really like living a version of life.
There is a third meaning, one that you don't discover until around halfway through the book when the title's words are used in a context that is like a punch to the gut. When you read them you may find yourself having a physical reaction, your stomach may flip, your skin may go cold, you may gasp for breath. And that is a lot of what the experience of reading this book is like. You can call these parts of the book words like "awful," but to be real you'd need to pull out your thesaurus and just line them up one after the other. This is not a book that is easy for your emotions. You care about the people in it, so the pain can really hurt you.
You will hear that this is a book about 4 friends. It's not. They're a nice framing device, but this is a book about one person and the people who are connected to him. His life is made up of extremes. I found myself weeping over and over again because of the love and compassion and kindness that characters in the book displayed. But this book has some of the most harrowing and horrifying scenes I've read anywhere. It is not really spoiling anything to say this involves terrible things happening to a child. Everyone knows from the very beginning that something bad happened to Jude when he was young. It's just so much worse than you could imagine. (If you have trouble reading about child abuse, it's probably best you not read this book. While it's essential to the story, it is not glossed over or referenced vaguely and what is described is truly terrible to contemplate.)
Jude is not a new character. The damaged soul whose self-worth never really recovers is present in a lot of modern fiction. Yanagihara's trick, I think, is just how willing she is to plunge the depths of his darkness and its effects on those around him. She follows him for decades, observes him in all situations, and is unflinching in her depictions. Her writing is the kind of good that you can miss if you're not paying attention. You are so caught up in her story that it's easy to miss just how agile and careful the book is. It eases back and forth from character to character, backwards and forwards in time, and it never feels strained.
