Rating: 5/5, excellent
This book is amazing.
Basically, A Little Life is the story of four men – Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm – who we follow over the course of thirty years of friendship.
The main character, Jude, has been severely abused as a child and as a teen and only started to have a normal life when he went to college at the age of fifteen. Jude’s trauma is so extensive that it haunts him all the way until he’s fifty.
This book contains a lot of frank discussion of sexual assault, child abuse, cutting, and suicidal ideation. This makes me hesitant to recommend it to everyone, although I really liked it.
I picked this up because it was on sale and I’d heard a lot of hype about it. I was expecting it to be really literary and difficult to read, but the prose actually isn’t that complex. It’s pretty, but I didn’t find myself having to reread sentences and paragraphs like I do with a lot of other literary books. I think this is good because the main strength of it is that it’s so immersive, so the prose doesn’t get in the way.
The reason that I love this story is that it just feels so real. There were so many times while I was reading it that I would be talking to someone and want to say, “My friend, Jude…” and then had to stop because I remembered that Jude is fictional. I haven’t had that happen in a really long time. I think part of it might be because it’s not fantasy or scifi, so all the characters have real (if unusually successful) careers and everything feels very contemporary.
I related to and grew to love Jude over the course of the book. This book is 720 pages long, so you spend a lot of time with the characters. I got really invested in wanting Jude to find comfort and be happy, and even though there is so much struggle and pain in his life, in a way it made the little moments of happiness shine brighter.
Ultimately, the thing you think is going to happen does eventually happen, but it didn’t really leave me sad. Somehow I came away feeling uplifted and lighter? (could have just been because it was over & resolved, though, lol)
Compared to a lot of other “depression literature” books I’ve read, this was tense but I didn’t find it as triggering and it didn’t get me down as much as some. I think the difference between this and something like Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion or No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai is that it’s life-affirming instead of life-negating. Even though the people around Jude fail to save him from his dark fate, just the fact that they tried so hard to make him feel wanted and loved warmed my heart. As much as there are bad people who do horrible things to Jude in this book, there are good people who really try their best to help him.
Jude also has a different attitude than most depression lit protagonists: instead of being born into privilege and wanting to be something exceptional he’s born into a traumatic life and aspires to be ordinary. That feels like a more achievable goal, whereas characters like Esther in The Bell Jar and Craig in It’s Kind of a Funny Story don’t really know what they’re trying to achieve, so their struggles have more existential angst. There’s something sweet and comforting in reading about a protagonist that just wants to get to the baseline that everyone else has. I find myself sympathizing with him more than with existentially stuck protagonists because he has a clear goal and I can envision him achieving it, which creates a lot of suspense – will he or won’t he – whereas with existential protagonists we know they won’t find what they want because they don’t know what that is.
There’s something more outward-looking in this book than there is in most depression literature. The narrative positions the reader as an observer, helper, and carer for Jude instead of only relating the self to Jude which I think is really cool because it made me feel inspired to help someone out if they’re in a situation like Jude was in as a child. To be honest, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about kids being mistreated in foster care before reading this book, but now I’m aware and invested on an emotional level in a way that I wasn’t before. I think that’s a major accomplishment for a writer: to be able to make the reader care about an important issue that they knew intellectually was a problem, but then to go beyond simple awareness to creating an emotional connection.
I thought Jude’s inner monologue was really realistic: his inability to accept anything good about himself, his workaholism to compensate for that sense of worthlessness, and the way Yanigahara described the self-harm was really relatable as someone with trichotillomania (which isn’t intended as self-harm but the stress preceding it and the relief following it are very familiar).
There were a lot of points where I was wondering where she drew all this from. The characters seem almost too fleshed out to be fictional, though if they are, holy shit. Each of their personalities and backgrounds and flaws are so grounded and nuanced, the verisimilitude is off the charts. There’s a moment between two of the characters about in the middle of the book that’s so horrible and yet so spot-on for the kind of thing you’d say in the heat of the moment and regret immediately that it was just devastating, but I feel like we’ve all been there.
(note: the author stated in an interview that the characters are all fictional)
One thing did frustrate me a little bit, and that was that nobody took control, nobody was willing to cross that line of dignity and force Jude to get help. There were so many times when I expected his friends or his doctor to institutionalize Jude and they didn’t. I understand not wanting to offend or cross boundaries, but sometimes you need to intervene. Some people have a lot of stigma against or fear of psychiatric treatment but might find it helpful if given a little push.
However, this is a really good depiction of that struggle between wanting to help a person and wanting to respect their autonomy which is such a difficult balance to achieve as a caregiver.
Speaking of sickness, there’s something kind of off about Jude being a chronically ill protagonist who’s ridiculously good at so many things (law, math, philosophy, singing). It begs the questions: Would the people in his life care about him if he wasn’t good at things? Would the reader? What if Jude wasn’t thin and physically attractive? If there’s any flaw in this story, it’s that it doesn’t address the aspect of ableist society that expects disabled people to be beautiful or talented in order to be worthy of care.
This was a long and emotionally difficult read but it really flew by due to the sensational content, emotional depth, and breadth of detail. I thought it rang true to experience, but I know this is a book about bi/gay men written by a woman so I’m taking it with a grain of salt…
If you’ve read it, let me know what you think!
If you haven’t read it, do you want to?
Post a Comment