A Little Life

I remember the book cover was the other one and was kinda disappointed at first that it's the cover with the face but it's so floppy that I actually don't mind it now

Not sure why I am bothering to offer my take on this book, when the way Amazon now organise reviews conspires to hide low stars, but here goes. Little Life is an overwrought tale, heavy on sexual sadism, concerning the gilded lives of priveleged, beautiful people. The narrative rocks between the good heartedness of its characters in the present and revelations of torture against its main protagonist in the past. Skip every chapter concerning Jude, and a much better, and slimmer, novel emerges.

Every year I look at the Booker Prize shortlist and buy a couple of books from it, and frequently I read the winning book as well. A Little Life was on the shortlist in 2015 and has been sitting on my shelf for two years, until my break in August when I decided to actually read it, and it was well worth the wait. This is one of those books that will surely go down as a modern classic, it is so brilliant. The plot follows four friends who meet at college through life's up and downs and personal tragedies; JB an artists, Malcolm an architect, Willem an actor and Jude a lawyer.  Jude is the glue to this group, and is the main focus of the narrative. There are a few chapters narrated in the first person by Willem and Harold, who is Jude's law professor, mentor and the nearest thing to a father her has.The writing of this book is sublime in its language and Hanya Yanagihara is able to write plot lines, that in some parts are harrowing, in a beautiful and lyrical  way.  I actually found her prose hypnotic, I was drawn into this book and couldn't tear my eyes away from the page.  There are lots of difficult issues discussed in this book, rape, abuse, suicide, drug abuse, and many more but still I was entranced by this book.  Hanaya Yanagihara shows a great understanding, intelligence and empathy towards these subjects.  Her characterisation is again wonderful, with all her characters so true to life that at times I felt like I was reading a biography/autobiography rather than a piece of fiction. In a way A Little Life is a dark Fairytale with good, evil and romance at its centre.Jude is the main character in A Little Life, and all the other character's stories are all linked to his.  In all my years of reading I don't think I have ever come across a character as damaged psychologically and physically as Jude.  When we first meet him in the book we know he has physical problems and throughout the book his past is gradually revealed to the reader.  Jude has experienced the best and worst of humanity through his life, and seen love in many guises from destructive love to the love of friendship that is all encompassing.  Even though his story is hard to read in places, I found him a compelling character who I was really down to and wanted him to find happiness.  Willem is the person whom he is closest to, a friendship that is unconditional and intense in places; it is Willem that is there for Jude at some of his lowest moments.  Malcolm is different in that he comes from a wealthy family, very different from Jude who has no family and Willem whose parents are dead.  His relationship with JB can be tense around the subject of race; Malcolm has a white mother and black father where as JB's parents are both black.  JB is the typical troubled artist, very talented but also open to addiction.  Through his story there is the time old discussion of what is art, figurative painting versus the modern art of the instillation, photography and performance art.  I was really drawn into this as it something I studied with my degree and always find it a fascinating subject.To say A Little Life is a masterpiece, a Magnus opus, feels like an understatement.  I have read the winner of the Booker Prize from 2015, A Brief History of Seven Killings, and have to say I think A Little Life is so much better.  There are very few novels, except from the classics, that I keep to read again but this book will be added to that shelf to join other books that I found through the Booker Prize; Possession by A.S Byatt, Amsterdam by Ian MacEwan and The Goldfinch and The Secret History by Donna Tartt being on that shelf. This is a mesmerising, intelligent, all encompassing read and one that will stay with me forever.  This is a monumental novel in my opinion and one I will always recommend as well as those mentioned above.  A Little Life is fiction at its absolute best; the perfect novel.

The fundamental problem with A Little Life is that it doesn't deliver what it claims to be. It is marketed as a novel about four friends, but it isn't that at all. It is a novel about ONE person (Jude), and the other three (I include Willem here) are so wooden and poorly sketched, they aren't believable in the slightest. The bizarre thing is that in a novel of this length (700+ pages), the author doesn't manage to develop Willem, Malcolm and JB whatsoever, apart from a turgid section inserted at the beginning of the book which exists purely to sketch out the main characters. If this were a 200-300 page novel I would still consider these poorly developed characters, but in a book of this length how can this be possible?So what DOES the author spend all these pages doing? You might assume 'a Little Life must be plot driven then', but again, no. There is very little plot. The author constantly teases details of Jude's early life - he was horrifically abused and injured as a child (at the hands of a catholic monk, natch), but really the book isn't about this, it's about how Jude tries (and mostly fails) to deal with this trauma in his adult life (mostly through copious amounts of self harm), and the impact it has on those around him. The main bit of suspense a Little Life swings on is that Jude conveniently never explains to people what actually happened to him - you think he's about to but no, he doesn't, and the book reverts to another hundred pages of tedious dinners and thanksgivings and memories that go precisely nowhere.I'd say you could slim this book down, but I think by bringing together all the actual stuff that happens, you would see just how unlikely and unoriginal plot is - the over-ornate misfortunates experienced by Jude, the improbability of the four main characters' ability to be the centre of attention wherever they go and the top of all their respective fields, and actually how mundane the plot is when you distil it down: traumatic childhood > gilded success but ennui in adulthood > eventually finding love > happiness destroyed in a convenient accident > sadness, acceptance and death.The trick at the heart of this book is that its length creates the illusion that the plot has any depth or nuance, it tricks you into thinking that the characters are well developed just because you spent a load of time reading about them. It tricks you into thinking it's clever just because everyone in it is an acclaimed artist, or an A-list movie star, or an era-defining architect, or a Harvard professor, or (in Jude's case) a brilliant mathematician and lawyer and philanthropist and art collector all in one. But it's not, it's just indulgent YA literature.Once you notice the way that additional, superfluous length is being added in, this is a really frustrating read: events will be described, someone present will be reminded of an event that happened several months prior and pointless paragraphs of totally irrelevant information stretch on and on describing this until suddenly the story reverts back to what is actually happening and the narrative continues, except it feels totally disjointed. Yes, this can be used in writing to great effect, but a Little Life doesn't do that. It just feels like pure padding.One reason I think this book has been so acclaimed, is that the author uses a Little Life to talk about the hot topic of 'identity' (potentially a good intention), but does so in such a shallow, tokenistic and unrealistic way that it borders on offensive. The author labours so much over emphasising that the grey cast of tediously metropolitan background characters are all on different ends of the LGBT spectrum, all incredibly racially diverse, but in such a way that they are all inherently unbelievable. Just their names (Citizen van Straaten, Rhodes Arrowsmith, Phaedra de los Santos, Andy Contractor) is enough to make you cringe at how unlikely it all is. There are no characters in this who feel fundamentally real - it's like they've all been conjured from a faux New York Magazine reading alternate globalist universe (where everyone is rich, by the way, but only through cool and interesting creative careers of course, nothing boring and conventional).Finally, what made me truly dislike this book is the fact that while almost all its main characters are male, the author seems completely unable to create convincing male characters, write male dialogue and describe male relationships. If you just count the number of lines of dialogue that begin with indulgent 'Oh's and sighs and gasps you'll know what I mean. The author wanted to create a novel about glamorous, diverse people, but it feels like 'The people a teenager from Ohio imagined they would befriend if they went to art school in New York'.I was recommended this by someone I really respect so I saw it through just to see if it got better. I would recommend others not to bother.

I really can see so little point to this novel, - in fact I believe it may do more harm than good - it makes me more and more angry the more I think about it. There is no equivocation that horrifying abuse happens, often, everywhere and I believe in both exposing that and developing a collective understanding of its causes and impacts. But this novel doesn’t achieve anything so basic or sophisticated. The drawing of the main character, to whom all this happens, as well as his friends’ lives and responses to him, is so ridiculously simplistic and idealistic - without being in the least bit inspirational - that it reduces the graphic descriptions of trauma, uncomfortably acceptable if appropriately managed, to nothing more than parasitic voyeurism.

Hanya Yanagihara takes the reader deep into the lives of four main characters, and then deeper still into the lives of two of them. The book centres around Jude, whose history is as first mysterious and then something you come to dread learning more about. Yanagihara is brilliant at telling you enough, at the right times, and then moving somewhere else. Her deft movement between the different moods of the book, and phases of the characters' lives, gives this book incredible pace for its length. I found it difficult to put down, from the first chapter to the last.It is a sad story - parts of it will make you cry. Some of it you see coming but that doesn't make it any less powerful. Other parts come as blows out of the blue and leave you breathless. Read this book concurrently with a friend if you can - you'll want to talk about it!But it's also a story about the importance of relationship. There are so many rich, rewarding relationships in this book, beautifully captured and intertwined. The way she has written about how relationships survive is eloquent and empathic, never simplistic.I didn't want this book to end and it's rare to say a book with 720 pages could have been longer.One thing: why is this tagged as "#1 in erotic bisexual fiction"? This book really doesn't belong under that heading. There are graphic descriptions of child sex abuse and rape, which is something you might like to know before you decide to read it.