1.
The title of hanya yanagihara’s second work of fiction contrasts almost comically with its length: at 720 pages, it is one of the largest novels to be published this year. To this literal circumference has been added, since the book appeared in March, the metaphorical weight of several prestigious award nominations, including the Kirkus Award, which Yanagihara won, the Booker Award, which he did not win, and the National Book Award, which will be awarded in mid-November. both the size of a little life and the impact it has had on readers and critics alike: a bestseller, the book has received rave reviews in the new yorker, the atlantic, the wall street journal and other serious places—reflect, in turn, the breadth of the novel’s themes. These, as one of its four main characters, a group of talented and artistic friends whom Yanagihara traces from college days to middle age in and around New York City, puts it, are “sex and food and sleep and friends.” and money and fame.”
The character who articulates these themes, a black artist on the cusp of success, has a great artistic ambition, which is to “report in images the trickle of all his lives”. this is also yanagihara’s ambition. “drip,” in fact, suggests why the author thinks her big book deserves its “little” title: eschewing the kind of frenetic plot that has recently become popular (as evidenced, for example, by the goldfinch by donna tartt, 2014 pulitzer winner), a little life is presented, at least at first, as a modest chronicle of the way life happens to a small group of people with a bit of history in common, like a catalog of the incremental accumulations that, almost without our realizing it, become the stuff of our lives: jobs and apartments, one-night stands and friendships and grudges , furniture and clothes, lovers and spouses and houses.
You are reading: New york review of books a little life
In this sense, the book bears a superficial resemblance to a certain kind of “women’s novel” from an earlier era: mary mccarthy’s 1963 bestseller the group, for example, which similarly traces the trajectories of a group of college friends over a period of time. but the objects of scrutiny for this woman novelist are men. United by friendships first formed at an unnamed Northeastern liberal arts college, Yanagihara’s cast is as carefully diversified as the crew of one of those 1940s bomber movies, no matter how 21st-century they may be. be your anxieties. there is the black artist, jb, a gay man of Haitian descent who has been raised by a single mother; Malcolm, a biracial architect who comically “turns out” as a straight man and guiltily worries about his parents’ wealth; willem, a handsome and kind midwestern actor shooting for stardom; and Jude, a brilliant and troubled litigant (he’s also a talented amateur vocalist and patissier) with no identifiable ethnicity and a dark secret that casts a shadow over his life and the lives of his friends.
As contrived as this setup may seem, it has the makings of an interesting novel about a subject rarely explored in contemporary lyrics: non-sexual friendship between grown men. in an interview he gave to kirkus reviews, yanagihara described his fascination with male friendship, mostly because, he told the interviewer, men are given “such a small emotional palette to work with “. Although she and her friends often talk about her emotions together, she told the interviewer that the men seemed to be different:
I think they have a hard time naming what it is to be scared, vulnerable or frightened, and it’s not just that they can’t talk about it, it’s that sometimes they can’t even identify what they are. feeling…. when I sometimes hear my male friends talk about these manifestations of what, to me, is clearly fear or clearly shame, they really can’t even express the word itself.1
Interestingly, yanagihara’s catalog of emotions doesn’t include positive emotions: I’ll come back to this later.
The novel, then, seems to be a masculine version of the group: a study of a closed society, its language and rituals and secret codes. It’s a topic Yanagihara has shown an interest in before. In his first book, People in the Trees (2013), a rather harsh parable of colonial exploitation unconvincingly intertwined with a lurid tale of child abuse, the main character, a doctor who is investigating a Micronesian tribe whose members achieve spectacular longevity, he is struck “by the smallness of society, by what it must be like to live a life in which everyone you know or have seen can be counted on the fingers.” the strongest parts of that book reflected the anthropological thrust behind the doctor’s nostalgic observation: the descriptions of the tribe’s habitat, rituals, and mythologies were imaginative and genuinely engaging, unlike the noisily symbolic pedophilic subplot. (Western doctors’ search for the source of the natives’ astonishingly long life expectancy inevitably invites exploitation and ruin; like the island children the doctor later adopts and abuses, the island and its culture tribe are “raped” by white men).
yanagihara’s new book would seem, at first glance, to have satisfied his desire for a “tribe” to which he could dedicate an entire novel. focuses on a small circumscribed group to the point of being hermetic: a small life never deviates from its four principles and, as other critics have pointed out, the novel offers very little historical, cultural information or detail politician that it is often difficult to tell precisely when the intense emotional dramas of the characters take place.
However, A Little Life, like its predecessor, is hopelessly sidetracked by a secondary narrative, one in which, surprisingly, homosexual pedophilia is once again the prominent element. Because Jude, we learn, he was serially abused as a child and young adult by the priests and counselors who raised him. this is the dark secret that explains his tormented present: self-destructive and masochistic relationships and, eventually, suicide. (The last plot point is not something the intelligent reader hasn’t guessed after fifty pages.) it turns out that yanagihara’s real theme is abjection. What begins as a novel that seems to be a bit retro, a cross between Mary McCarthy and a Stendhalian story of young talents who succeed in a big metropolis, soon reveals itself as a very 21st century story: abuse, victimization, self-loathing.
This sleight-of-hand trick is cunningly hinted at in the book’s striking cover image, a photograph by the late Peter Hujar of a man grimacing in what appears to be agony. The joke, which Yanagihara and his editors were aware of, is that the portrait is one of a series of images that Hujar, who was gay, made of men in full orgasm. In the case of yanagihara’s novel, however, the “real” feeling (not just what the book is about but, I suspect, what its fans crave) is pain rather than pleasure.
2.
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this is a shame, because yanagihara is good at providing the pleasures that come with a certain kind of fictional “anthropology”. Accounts of their characters’ early days in New York and their gradual rise to success and celebrity are piquant with a vivid opening: “There were times when the pressure to achieve happiness felt almost oppressive.” “New York was populated by the ambitious. it was often the one thing everyone here had in common.”
By far the most accomplished of the four characters is the actor Willem, whose rise from actor-waiter to Hollywood stardom, interrupted by memories of his rural childhood (a poignantly described relationship with a crippled brother suggests why he is so good at both the empathy and the modesty required for his job), is the most persuasive narrative trajectory in the book. a passage about two-thirds of the way through the novel in which he realizes he is “famous” demonstrates yanagihara’s considerable strengths in evoking a particular environment (intelligent, creative inner-city types who socialize with each other perhaps too much) and that particular stage of success in which one emerges. from the local to the greater world:
there was a day, about a month after he turned thirty-eight, when willem realized he was famous. At first, this fazed him less than he would have imagined, in part because he had always considered himself a bit of a celebrity, meaning him and jb. he would be in the center with someone, jude or someone else, and someone would come say hello to jude, and jude would introduce him: “aaron, do you know willem?” and aaron would say, “of course, willem ragnarsson. everyone knows willem”, but it wouldn’t be because of his job, it would be because aaron’s ex-roommate’s sister had dated him at yale, or he had done a reading two years ago for aaron’s friend’s brother’s friend , who was a playwright, or because aaron, who was an artist, had once been to a group show with jb and asian henry young, and had met willem at the after party. new york city, for much of his adulthood, had simply been an extension of the university…all of the infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been taken from boston and placed within a few blocks’ radius in lower manhattan and outskirts of brooklyn.
But now, Willem realizes that the release of a certain film “had created a certain moment that even he recognized would transform his career.” when he gets up from his table in a restaurant to go to the men’s room, he notices “something different in the quality of [the other diners’] attention, their intensity and silence…”. this is correct.
It’s telling that yanagihara’s greatest success is a supporting character: here again, it’s as if she doesn’t know her own strengths. because as a little life progresses, the author seems to lose interest in everyone but the tragic victim, jude. Malcolm, in particular, is never more than a figure, too obviously present to fill the biracial space; and after a brief episode in which jb’s struggle with drug addiction is very effectively recounted, that character also fades away, occasionally reappearing as the years go by, the big gay artist with a younger boyfriend from the arm. Overshadowing them all are the dark clues about Jude’s past that pile up ominously and self-consciously. “Traditionally, men (grown men, among whom he did not yet consider himself) had been interested in him for a reason, so he had learned to be afraid of them.”
the discomfort of “among whom he did not yet consider himself” is, I should say, pervasive. The writing in this book is often appalling, oscillating between the incoherently ungrammatical—“his mother…had earned her doctorate in education, teaching all the time at the public school near her home that she had deemed better than jb”—and painfully strained attempts at “lyrical” effects: “his silence, so black and total it was almost gaseous…” one wonders why the first one, at least, was not edited, and why the surprising weakness of the prose It has gone unnoticed by critics and award juries.
Whenever there is structure here, it is that of a striptease: Gradually, in a series of flashbacks, secrets about Jude’s past are unraveled until we finally get to witness the pivotal moment of the abuse, a scene where that one of his many sexual tormentors, a sadistic doctor, deliberately runs him over, crippling him both physically and emotionally. But the wounds inflicted on Jude by the pedophile priests at the orphanage where he grew up, by the truck drivers and homeless men the priest he runs off with, by the counselors and young inmates at the youth center where they cajole him. ending after the evil priest is stopped by the evil doctor whose torture chamber he ends up in after escaping from the unhappy youth facility, are nothing compared to those inflicted by yanagihara herself. As the back catalog suggests, Jude might have been better called “Job”, abandoned by his cruel creator. (wasn’t there a priest who noticed something, who wanted to help? Wasn’t there a counselor?)
the sufferings remembered in the flashbacks are repeated in the endless series of humiliations that the character is forced to endure in the current narrative: the stories of these form the backbone of the novel. jb makes fun of his limp, a particularly incredible plot point, with whom he subsequently breaks up; he compulsively cuts himself with razor blades, an addiction that lands him in the hospital more than once; he rejects the loving attentions of a kind law professor who adopts him; he becomes involved with a sadistic male lover who beats him repeatedly and throws him and his wheelchair down a flight of stairs; his injuries to his legs eventually reach the point where his limbs must be amputated. And when Yanagihara seems to give his protagonist some respite by finally giving him a love partner (at the end of the novel, Willem conveniently changes his sexuality and falls in love with his friend), it’s simply so she can crush him by killing Willem in a flash. car. accident, the tragedy that ultimately leads him to take his own life.
you suspect that yanagihara wanted jude to be one of those doomed golden children around whose disintegrations certain beloved novels revolve: sebastian flyte, for example, in revisited brideshead. but the problem with jude is that, from the beginning, he’s a pill: you never care enough about him to get emotionally involved in the first place, let alone affected by his death. sometimes i wondered if even yanagihara liked it. there is something punitive in the artificial and unredeemed quality of Judas’ endless sufferings; sometimes it feels like the author is working with a private emotion of her own.
yanagihara must have known that the sheer amount of downgrading in her story would likely turn off readers: “this is too hard for anyone to take,” her editor told her on doubleday, according to kirkus interview advice she was apparently proud not to take. it is interesting to speculate why she persisted. In The People in the Trees, the doctor studying the island’s culture recalls wishing as a child that he had had a more traumatic childhood, one in which, indeed, the presence of a crippled brother could bring the family together. “How I longed for such motivation!” he cries to himself as he remembers his early years. as yanagihara acknowledges in this passage, there is a deep and immature sentimentality that lurks behind that longing; and yet she herself is a victim of it. in the end, her novel is little more than a machine designed to produce negative emotions for the reader to wallow in; unsurprisingly, the same emotions that, in her kirkus reviews interview, she listed as the ones she was interested in, the ones she felt men were incapable of expressing: fear, shame, vulnerability. Both the tedium of a little life and, imagine, the guilty pleasures that it offers some readers are those of a teenage rap session, that quintessential adolescent social ritual, in which the same crises and injuries. constantly rehearsed.
We sadly know that victims of abuse often end up unhappily imprisoned in cycles of (self) abuse. but continuing to show this unhappy dynamic at work is not the same as creating a meaningful narrative about it. yanagihara’s book sometimes seems less like a novel than a seven-hundred-page booklet.
3.
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Interestingly, it is because of this failure, rather than in spite of it, that a little life has struck a chord with critics and readers alike. jon michaud in the new yorker praised its “subversive” treatment of abuse and suffering, which he says stems from the book’s refusal to offer “any chance of redemption and liberation.”2 michaud highlighted highlight a passage that describes jude’s love of pure mathematics, a discipline in which he earns a master’s degree at one point (another on the list of his unlikely achievements) and which, interestingly michaud observes, takes the place of religion in the irredeemable world of jude :
Not everyone liked the axiom of equality… but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be thwarted by attempts to prove it. it was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become a lifetime.
(the quote allows him to conclude his review by declaring that “yanagihara’s novel can also drive you crazy, consume you…”) michaud’s is a kind of meta-criticism: the novel should be admired not for what it does, but for what it doesn’t do, for the way it grimly defies conventional and, by implication, sentimental, closure expectations. but all “closure” is not necessarily cloying: it is what gives the stories an aesthetic and ethical meaning. the passage that seemed significant to me, on the other hand, was the one in which the nice law professor exposes one day in class the difference between “what is just and what is just, and, what is equally important, between what is just and what is necessary” . .” for a realistic tradition novel to be effective, it must obey some kind of aesthetic need, especially that of a slight verisimilitude. the abuse that yanagihara heaps on his protagonist is neither fair from a human point of view nor necessary from an artistic point of view.
In a similar vein, garth greenwell in the atlantic praised a little life as “the great gay novel” not because of any traditionally gay themes—greenwell acknowledges that almost none of the book’s characters or love affairs are recognizably gay; It should be noted that when Willem discusses her affair with Jude, she states that “I am not in a relationship with a man… I am in a relationship with Jude,” a statement that in an earlier time would have been labeled “denial.” “. ”—but by their technical or stylistic gestures. Yanagihara’s book is, in fact, curiously reticent about the accoutrements of erotic life with which many if not most gay men are familiar, for better or worse: the pleasures of sex, the anxieties of hiv. (barely mentioned), the pervasiveness of grindr and porn, of carefree erotic energy expressed in any number of ways and available on any number of platforms. (When Jude tries to liven up his and Willem’s sex lives and orders three “manuals,” some readers may wonder not what he was he on but what planet he’s supposed to live on.) but for greenwell, a little life is distinguished by the way in which
engages in aesthetic modes long codified as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera… by violating the canons of current literary taste, by embracing melodrama, exaggeration and sentiment, he can tap into emotional truths denied to more modest means of expression. 3
greenwell cites as examples the “elaborate metaphor” to which yanagihara is given, as, for example, in the phrase “junk from jude’s past writhing with snakes and centipedes”.
but not everything that is excessive or exaggerated is, ipso facto, “operatic”. the crazy hyperbole you find in grand opera gives great pleasure, especially since exaggerated emotions come in beautiful packages; excess is exalting, not depressing. it’s hard to see where the compensatory beauties of a little life lie. yanagihara’s language, as I’ve mentioned, is tense and gangly rather than artfully baroque: as for the melodrama, there isn’t even drama here, let alone anything more heightened: her story structure isn’t the satisfying arc we associate with the drama. , one in whose form no meaning is implied, but a monotonous series of assaults. it’s hard to see what’s “gay” or “queer” in this monotony.
There is a strange sentimentality lurking behind praise like Greenwell’s. you wonder if a novel written by a straight white man, one in which urban gay culture is depicted sketchily at best, in which male homosexuality is for the second time in that author’s work deeply intertwined with pedophile abuse, in which the only traditional male-male relationship is relegated to a tertiary and semi-comic stratum of the narrative, would be celebrated as “the great gay novel” and nominated for the lambda literary prize. If anything, it could be argued that this writer’s view of male bonding revives a pre-stone wall type of plot in which gay characters are castrated, miserable, and ultimately punished for finding happiness, a story that it looks less like the expression of “queer” aesthetics. than as the projection of a regressive and repressive cultural fantasy from the middle of the last century.
It may be that the literary columns of the best general interest magazines are not the right place to look for explanations as to why this maudlin work has struck a chord with readers and critics. recently, a colleague of mine at bard college, one of the models, according to newsweek, for the unnamed school attended by the four main characters of a little life4, drew my attention to a psychology today article on a phenomenon that has been puzzling us and other teachers we know: what the article’s author refers to as “decreased student resilience.” “. A symptom of this phenomenon, which has also been the subject of essays in the chronicle of higher education and elsewhere, is the striking increase in recent years in requests for advice from students regarding with the “problems of everyday life”. life.” The author cites, among other cases, those of a student “who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a ‘bitch,’ and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. ”5
As humorous as these particular cases may be, they remind you that many readers today have reached adulthood in educational institutions where a pervasive sense of powerlessness and acute anxiety have become the norm; places where, in fact, young people are increasingly encouraged to see themselves not as agents in life but as potential victims: of their dates, their roommates, their teachers, institutions and society. story in general. In a culture where victimhood has become a claim to status, how could Yanagihara’s book, with its endless parade of aesthetically gratuitous scenes of punitive and humiliating violence, not provide a kind of solace? for such readers, the ugliness of this author’s subject matter must bring a sort of delight, confirming their pre-existing view of the world as a site of victimization and little else.
this is a very “small” view of life. Like Jude and his abusive mistress, this book and its champions seem “bound by their mutual disgust and discomfort”; Much like its cover image, Yanagihara’s novel has misled many into confusing anguish and ecstasy, pleasure and pain.
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