Every once and awhile (and it is more rare than you would think, since hundreds of books are released every year) a book comes out that is important.
Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, is one such book. It is full of misery, injustice, wrongs so wrong they cannot be undone or fixed or ignored. But it is also full of small moments of joy. Glimmers of hope, not that the past can be reckoned with, but rather moments when the clouds clear and the future holds a promise.
This book is about many things, without the self-consciousness of being about anything. It is first and foremost a story.
A Little Life follows four friends struggling to survive in New York City after college. They are all full of ambition, as we all are after finishing college and trying to “make it big” in the city. JB is an aspiring artist, Malcolm an architect working for a big firm that is paying the bills but killing his spirit, Willem is handsome and friendly and failing to land a role in any plays, and Jude is a lawyer working for the public defenders office.
Although they all have their secrets and their suffering and their insecurities, the lens of the novel slowly tightens on Jude. Jude and his mysterious past. His scars and limp and success; he is the surprising point around which the four friends revolve.
The story does not linger. It is not about how these four friends find their paths and become successful (although we watch them fall into the decisions that will determine their futures), rather it is about life. All of it. Yanagihara pushes us forward, from Thanksgiving dinner to Thanksgiving dinner, from dinner parties to fallings out. With each step forward in time, more of the past is remembered.
A Little Life could be about the unattainable nature of justice or the mysteriousness of love or about forgiveness. It could be about homosexuality. But A Little Life is more then even that. Yanagihara has successfully written a book in which sexuality is a non-issue and anyone arguing that this book is about homosexuality or sexual identity is missing the point. By identifying ourselves solely by our sexual preference we do ourselves an injustice. Before we are gay or straight or whatever we are, we are human. We are kind (or not) and generous (or not). We fall in and out of love. We try and succeed and fail.
But again, A Little Life is not about that. Or it’s not only about that. A Little Life is the story of Jude.
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