A LITTLE LIFE — My Problem with Hanya Yanagihara
in which i explain my beef with an author who doesn't know i exist
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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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.
I went into A Little Life knowing what to expect – or at least I thought I did.
Expectation: We will follow a group of friends as they go through the highs and lows of New Yorkian life that will be checked against a long list of trigger warnings the length of my TBR.
Reality: It is NOT about a group of friends as they go through the highs and lows of New Yorkian life checked against a long shopping list of trigger warnings.
Its central character is actually Jude, a fairly likable, albeit stubborn lawyer of failing health. After briefly glossing over the dynamics of the group in the first hundred-or-so pages, the story shifts to revolve almost entirely around him, stretching on for forty years of his life and generously peppered with flashbacks of his traumatic past.
As someone who enjoys books that explore the intricacies of the mundane, nuanced mechanics of realistic conversation, and people navigating the difficult relationships that make us so wholly human, I expected this book to be right up my alley.
But by page 200 these expectations had begun to wilt; by page 400 it had completely shrivelled up and died, and by the last page, Yanagihara had not only buried it six feet underground, but also trampled on and desecrated its grave.
Friendly reminder: this story is 700 pages long, give or take.
Yanagihara's writing is technically beautiful (although littered with many, many parentheses like these throughout, which is cumbersome to read and often took me out of the story). Not one precious page is wasted describing every single setting and action (/s), as she hops seamlessly from scene to scene, timeline to timeline. You can, however, expect minutiae of the character's daily life, which gets excruciatingly tiresome around the halfway mark, but the syntax is so deliciously near-perfect that I'm willing to overlook it.
The book is well-researched. Yanagihara has an uncanny ability to inject complex scientific and philosophical concepts into the prose with a dexterity that could only have come from actually speaking with professionals from those fields. She has the characters explain these to us in a very digestible way that makes sense with the narration, which works as an efficient way to deliver these ideas to the masses.
There is also discourse about how this book is the 'great gay novel of the century’. I am not in a position to comment on that, so I won't. All I can say is that there are indeed multiple gay relationships portrayed, but if this representation serves a greater cause or feeds into a pre-determined aesthetic Yanagihara desired for this book is up for debate in my opinion. I will get into this later.
Story-wise, you will get the heartbreak and agony you were promised – maybe even more than that. You will be devastated. Jude's story is nothing short of horrifying. There were a couple of times I had to set the book down and take a few deep breaths because I could not believe the things that were happening.
But I cannot, in good faith, recommend this book to anyone who doesn't have the hours to spare to get through this painful, arduous story. Here's why.
**MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD**
1. This book is pure misery porn
Jude's life is pitiful, and I don't say that lightly. He suffers from depression, which is implied to stem from events in his childhood, which I will elaborate on later, and is made worse by his declining health.
Compounding this are his debilitating health issues, which prevent him from walking without assistance or a wheelchair, to get up and down those notoriously narrow New York building staircases.
These are unfortunately very real circumstances of very real people in the world. It is not an easy life, and its emotional and mental repercussions are undeniable. But Yanagihara's portrayal and depiction of this life, in Jude's circumstances, border on caricaturing.
Many of the 'villains' in Jude's past are cartoonishly one-dimensional and exist only to inflate his 'tragic backstory', which she rams against our heads with unrelenting perseverance. These characters do not exist for anything other than the sole purpose of furthering Jude's apparently incurable misery; they have no motivation other than to cause him suffering.
This drivel is worsened by Jude's apathy towards everything. Yes, he is severely depressed, but when you have such an imbalance of conflict versus resolution in a story, the conflicts start to lose meaning, which then prompted me to begin wondering, three quarters into the book: What is the point?
Don't get me wrong, a book by no means has to follow the typical Hero's Journey arc of storytelling. Characters can have no motivation throughout the entirety of the story. In fact, that can sometimes work in the book's favour and make stories unique and interesting. But in order for this to be executed successfully, I feel you'd have to be quick, concise, and to the point.
For example, in Diary of an Oxygen Thief, the central character had no motivation other than to hurt girls, because he 'enjoyed watching them suffer'. It is a toxic story about a toxic man bereaved with self-loathing and insecurities, and the story ends with the suggestion that he never actually finds any real meaning in life. The difference is that it isn't 700 pages long.
I don't mind long books at all, but only if the length has a justification. This brings me to my next point.
2. Character development? We don't know her.
I understand healing is not linear, but Jude's character and personality do not develop enough for him to make a 'good character'. That is not to say he isn't realistic. He is, and many people go through similar struggles every day. I don’t know about you, but if I am to be put through 700 pages of trials and tribulations, I expect the central character(s) to develop somewhat, for better or for worse.
Willem, his loyal-to-a-fault friend (and later on lover) is a total simp for Jude and incredibly one-dimensional as well. All I can mine from his character is that he is a handsome, soft-hearted actor who loves Jude perfectly and unconditionally, despite not receiving his end of what is supposed to be a romantic relationship.
We are then taken through this agonising push-and-pull dynamic where Willem keeps getting hurt by Jude's suffering, often unintentionally, and Jude, in turn, hides things from Willem, which only hurts Willem more when he finds out. Yet, Willem is still willing to fly out to meet Jude in the middle of shoots and basically move heaven and earth to give Jude anything and everything he wants. He becomes a complete doormat for Jude and it was maddening to read.
On top of that, Jude treats him horribly. It was somewhat understandable due to Jude's mental health, but it quickly became toxic when Willem isn't being treated as an equal in the relationship, and this all takes a toll on his mental health as well.
I think this could be a fairly realistic portrayal of what it is like to be in a relationship with a depressed person, but it doesn't mean it should be glorified, which is what I feel Yanagihara does by portraying Will's passiveness as chivalrous, even admirable.
At this point, you may be asking: What about the other two friends, Malcolm and JB? Well, after we skim over their short, incredibly cursory backstories, they simply evaporate into thin air, only to be revived once every 50 pages or so — when Yanagihara remembers they exist. She does come back around to them at the end, but by this time we have seen so little of them that I stopped caring completely.
Harold and Julia, Jude's adoptive parents, who were positioned to be one of the most important people in Jude's life, disappear once Willem and Jude get together. Again, Yanagihara only brings them up occasionally, as if to remind herself they exist.
The second issue is that almost every character falls into a very specific trope/stereotype. They're either 100% good or 100% bad. That is not objectively bad or wrong, just makes for boring characters who are either completely forgotten or phase in and out of the story at such minimal frequencies that we may as well just forget them completely. JB and Malcolm just fall away at the halfway point, which is very early on, in my opinion, for a book supposedly about friendship.
In an interview, Yanagihara even said:
"One of the reasons Jude's interior life doesn't appear in the book until the second section was because I wanted the first section, which concentrates on the other three characters, to be, in a sense, a study of their normalcy, a foil to the strangeness of Jude's own life."
This makes sense, but also proves that Willem, JB, and Malcolm exist solely as a plot device for her to write what she wanted to write, which is a character so miserable, rotten, and pitiful that we aren't allowed anything beyond that.
To sum it up, the entire book is one long character study of Jude, and that's perfectly okay — if that had been made clear in the blurb at the back.
I was promised me a story of four friends who experience the ups and downs of college-adult life together, but we don't get to see how their friendship morphs and changes as they go through the different stages in life, such as getting jobs. In fact, Yanagihara completely skips over that particular transitory phase of their lives. All of them are somehow magically planted into their own glitzy worlds of Hollywood, law, architecture, and art, attending high-brow functions and rubbing elbows with important people.
How did they climb the ladders at their respective jobs so quickly? What kind of people are they as middle-aged adults? How did this impact their relationship with Jude exactly? I don't know, and I don't care because Yanagihara apparently doesn't either.
3. Yanagihara hates her characters. All of them.
a. Jude
He is the embodiment of everything bad and sad Yanagihara can think of or conjure. She absolutely hates him and wishes to rain down nothing but agony and torment upon his poor, afflicted soul. He has zero good things happening in his life, and every good thing that does happen is temporary — why? To make him suffer even more, of course. To make him happy then take it away and crush him into the dirt, in hopes to wring out even more sympathy from the reader.
I'm all for handsome, tortured, noodly men of gentle, pliable nature and large sorrowful eyes. In fact, that's one of my favorite character templates, but too much of anything is a bad thing.
In my opinion, the point of inflicting pain upon a character or giving them a sad backstory is so the reader can sympathise with them as we read about how they deal with said troubles physically, emotionally, and mentally. But with Jude, it seems very much as if she couldn't pick a struggle for him so she thought, "Hell, let's make him struggle with EVERYTHING."
As the book progresses it becomes so obvious that she's doing it for the sake of creating a character whose pain is so utterly irreversible and prolonged that she will eventually no longer require a good reason for adding more and more. Jude is so predisposed to pain that it becomes normal and something he (and we, as readers) must come to expect. This not only takes away the shock and empathy I should have felt for him, but also makes the story lazy and purposeless.
If you take it in the context of real life, our sympathy/sorrow for people is often first triggered by shock. How could such a bad thing have happened to you? It shouldn't have, and that's why I feel bad that you have to experience this.
But with Jude, it has become something we expect, and something he expects as well, because she has set him up to be this way. This is unrealistic and at odds with what I presume she intended this novel to be — an honest, uncensored, no-holds-barred presentation of real-life suffering.
I became so desensitised to all the violence that as I got to the third quarter I was just wondering, with total indifference, what shit thing is going to happen next that will sink him further into his hole of desolation. And when shit thing happens, I just go "Oh, ok", and wait for the next shit thing. And I'm not sure why an author would want to provoke that kind of sentiment in their reader.
b. The side characters
They are all enabling Jude.
I get the main 'conflict' here is that they don't quite know what to do with Jude and his depression. To commit or not commit? To confront or keep mum and let it slide?
But for ALL of them to decide to not only be willfully ignorant of Jude's self-destructive tendencies, but ready to halt their lives at a moment's notice to tend to him is frustrating, unrealistic, and unhealthy.
Yes, this is a real dilemma for families and friends of depressed people, but A Little Life doesn't portray this as such. Instead, it's glorified and encouraged (i.e. "Wow, Jude is so lucky to have all these good friends and family who are willing to drop everything and fly to help him. They're so nice.") This may not be the message Yanagihara intended us to take away, but it is dangerous for readers who do and become upset when that is not their reality.
What message is she trying to send exactly, then? Is it that depression should be enabled? Or that the best form of care one can possibly provide for their depressed loved one is to not take action? Or perhaps that halting your life to answer their every beck and call is what would make you a 'good friend'? All these other possibilities don't sit well with me.
Just for comparison's sake, another novel with a similar character to Jude is Will from Jojo Moyes’s novel Me Before You. Will is also handicapped, suffers from depression ( though for different reasons), and is intent on killing himself. We are taken through this story via his new caretaker Louisa Clark as she and his loved ones try to help him see the brighter side of life in an attempt to change his mind.
Moyes invokes a sense of helplessness in us as a third party looking in from the outside. Will has had something traumatic happen to him that triggered his depression and desire for euthanasia. He acknowledges the feelings of his loved ones and does try to work through it, but ultimately sees his situation as permanent and therefore sticks with his decision.
Jojo didn't heap upon him trauma after senseless trauma to justify this or overcomplicate things with bumbling side characters. Louisa and his friends and family all faced similar internal moral battles to those in A Little Life, but what they empathised, did their best, and ultimately accepted it as his decision — they neither enabled nor fought against him.
As such, Jojo creates a much more comprehensible dichotomy between the situations of both Will and the other characters. In crafting a storyline that isn't fuelled by baseless tragedies that occur for no other reason than to torture the main character, Jojo managed to successfully eke out the sympathy and emotional investment she intended from me, the reader.
I understand A Little Life is fictional and we as readers should exercise a certain degree of suspension of disbelief, but that doesn't automatically mean it makes sense. I'm presuming the idea Yanagihara wants to convey is that not every depressed person wants to be helped, and that the informed action plan of their family and friends are not as clear-cut as one might think. But you don't need aimless violence ('aimless' being the operative word here) to be inflicted upon a character for their cause and situation to be empathised with, or for them to have a reason to kill themselves.
On the flip side, there might be some philosophical discourse that can be further explored here: Does suffering have to be purposeful? But that is a bit of a digression.
4. A case of misplaced intentions?
As I mentioned, I like her prose style and the fact that she doesn't dictate every single action her characters make. However, this isn't consistent with her writing of the characters themselves. She wastes exorbitant amounts of time going on and on about their day-to-day lives that serve minimal purpose in driving the story forward.
For example, she describes in detail Willem's life as an actor, travelling from country to country, and about the films he makes, but she only starts doing this way too late in the story, after she has spent 500+ pages talking about Jude and his one-dimensional relationships with all the other one-dimensional characters. All of a sudden we are dealt with 100+ pages about Willem's glamourous jet-setting life that we previously knew close to nothing about.
Why should we care if he's filming a movie about monsters or aliens, if he enters a restaurant with or without a jacket, or if his face is on a billboard? What do these things mean to Willem as a character, how do they shape him as a person, and how does this then propel the story forward? (It doesn't, IMO.)
This might have worked much better if it had been set up much earlier, alongside JB and Malcolm's introductions, perhaps after that unreasonably long chapter about JB's art or Malcolm's family, who are never mentioned again after that.
Speaking of, why doesn't Malcolm, the architect, get his own chapter in which he gets to extol his passion for his vocation? In terms of Malcolm's story, Yanagihara gives us crumbs. His only role is to fix Jude's apartment to be handicap-friendly, which further proves my point that JB and Malcolm only exist to not even drive, but merely frame Jude's joyless storyline.
Of course, writing is an art in which one is free to do whatever they want to achieve a desired result, but every word still should have a place and purpose. One can churn out 50 novels or a 700-page character study, but if they don't care about their characters or story, neither will their readers. At least that's the reason I stopped caring about Yanagihara's characters: because I realised she herself does not care about them.
In fact, in a Vulture interview, she explicitly says that she wants to "create a character that never gets better", and likens the book to an ombre cloth, "something that began on one end as a bright, light bluish-white, and ended as something so dark it was nearly black."
I believe her intentions for this novel are misplaced right from the very start. Firstly, this book starts getting pretty dark and heavy about a hundred pages in. So more like a totally black cloth, then.
Secondly, characters who don't heal are okay. Stories that do not have a hero's arc are okay. But I personally feel that she did it to fulfill her own desire of creating a novel so unsettling and bleak, the likes of which have never been written before; one that will settle into your chest and make you feel disgusted, sorry, and hopeless (maybe even to the point of nihilism), for no apparent rhyme or reason.
Under this light, her injection of all these seemingly brilliant philosophical concepts now comes off as plastic – tasteless and meaningless. NOT because she wanted to create characters we will care for and empathise with. NOT because she wanted to tell a good story. NOT because she wanted to shed light on important societal issues like gender identity, STDs, and mental illness — these were merely a means to her end. I would even go so far as to say she exploited these social conversations to serve her wild determination to create the most unsalvageable, helpless character in the history of fictional novels.
A Little Life reminds me of A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway, in which it is very clear the author only cares about one character. In the case of AFTA, it is Frederic Henry, who embodies every value Hemingway deems important. He is a chauvinistic soldier who marries a girl who keens to his every word and worships at his feet — a character who encompassed his creator’s thoughts, beliefs, and way of life (which were purportedly not very savoury).
Hemingway didn't care about any of the side characters, and the story devolves into a blind, meandering journey that brings us round and round in circles, deluding us into thinking we're reading something intelligent and meaningful but is really not.
Alright, then. What DID I like?
I genuinely like Jude as a person in the story. He is intelligent and charming, and despite all my gripes, I found myself rooting for him right to the bitter end.
Yanagihara also explores the endless spectrum of human emotion and successfully captures them in her writing in a moving way. The protagonists are very clearly separated into two teams: Jude vs. The People Around Jude, and over the course of the novel there were moments where I found myself relating to both sides in more ways than one.
It was difficult not to tear up at some parts. Her writing does evoke plenty of emotions, and even the coldest, deadest of hearts will feel an iota of something, because the story is simply that depressing.
The conversations between characters are meaningful, the dialogue is snappy, and the intricate details of the city are so absorbing it felt like I was actually there.
I'm torn. On one hand, I did love the digestible expounding of scientific theories and philosophies, but on the other, the copywriter in me was thinking, "Is 700 pages of this really necessary? Can we shave off 200 pages and still have it not lose its meaning?"
Overall, a misalignment in expectations.
I do not blame the characters for behaving the way they do – I blame the author. Not because she writes badly at all but because I don't feel this novel tells a realistic, meaningful story. I'm not saying every book has to be 'meaningful', but I wish she wouldn't pretend it is something else than what it truly is. This intentional subversion of expectations just comes off as dishonest and discredits the racial and mental health representation in its story.
Do I regret reading it? No. Would I read it again? Also no. Would I recommend it to anyone? Maybe, if you have the time, emotional and mental stamina, and patience of a saint; or if you're a sob-junkie looking for their next book to cry over.
To me, A Little Life is a book that was written more out of selfish necessity than well-intended passion. It is the literary equivalent of that pigeon Mr. Bean inflated with an air pump and tried to pass off as a turkey — a dramatic romance novel basted with pseudo-intellectual concepts to pad its runtime, veiled behind the much more interesting and robust idea of four friends journeying through life together.