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A review by justinlife
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
0.25
Ok let’s do do this! If I gave it zero stars, I don't think Goodreads would count add that to the total rating and I want this added.
There are so many negative things I want to say about this book but know this: I will never, ever recommend this book to anyone. It is insidious and cruel. It disguises itself as a “sad book about friends” when it’s really just trauma porn.
There is something sadistic about creating a fictional character (one could argue characters, but I’ll get into that later), giving them the most awful life, meticulously detailing their past trauma, and forcing the audience to relive it. It’s even more abhorrent and unforgivable that this creation is of a minority group that the author is not a part of. It felt exploitative and at times fetishistic for her to include the amount of trauma, to detail it so excruciatingly, and to pile it all on one character. This is the thought that stayed with me from about page 250 until the end. There are other reasons that this isn’t the masterpiece the internet thinks it is.
Characters
While the main plot of the book and even the book jacket describes it as a book about friendship, Yanagihara doesn’t keep to that. Yes, there are four friends (JB, Malcolm, Willem, and Jude) who we follow through their lives but around page 250 it becomes less about how those friendships are maintained and more about the extreme abuse of one of them. She takes focus from two of them and zeroes in solely on Jude and Willem’s perspectives. It’s rage inducing because Malcolm and JB’s stories could have been more interesting and fleshed out if explored. Making JB an addict was a choice but one that didn’t get explored beyond the beginning. Malcolm finding success and struggling with familial approval and sexuality also could have been an interesting sub plot, but nope, let’s blow past 20 years of friendship and have these characters show up here and there.
Trauma Porn
There was truly no need for the level of descriptions given to the various abuses. Any of the following would have made for enough but to have all of them… girl! If you read this novel, know going in there are heavy descriptions of self harm, suicide, child abuse, child sexual abuse, child prostitution, kidnapping, domestic abuse, rape, eating disorders. Typing all that out only made me angrier. There was no need for all of that. If you’re wanting to give the reader a reason that a character might be self loathing and hate themselves, YOU DON’T NEED MUCH. Romance novels do that better.
No cultural context
It is a choice to write a book about characters living in NYC and Boston and not mention any cultural milestones that might have affected those communities. Like COME ON! The audience gets to read these characters' lives for up to 40 years and you refuse to give them any cultural contexts? You don’t include anything about the NYC gay scene? None of the bombings? Nothing that shaped the cities and could have shaped the characters? Girl bye.
Queer representation
I don’t know if Yanagihara knows what the words bisexual and pansexual are or if she knows the history of bi-erasure. It’s ok for a character to sleep with both men and women; so why does no one in the book acknowledge that, potentially, some of them are bisexual? It’s so annoying. The characters who engage in primarily gay relationships and sexual experiences are either predators, abusers, and pedophiles. At one point, one of the characters doesn’t even know if he’s gay, it’s just that he’s been used by men so much that he thinks being attracted to women is something he can’t pursuer. WHAT THE HELL? WHY?? I can’t say that the main characters’ relationships are healthy either, which is fine. Bad relationships happen.
Mental Health
From my understanding from reading this book, Yanagihara is not ok with therapy as a tool for mental health, but is ok with suicide. There is a paragraph toward the end where one of the characters mentions how therapy is basically a joke. This is infuriating because the community she’s writing about, queer men and the LGBTQ experience need the option of therapy to help process the experience, particularly in today’s time. It’s adds to the cruelness that one writes about the community and then mocks the tools the community can access in order to process their existence. The amount of expletives I said at this point… girl.
Here’s the kindest thing I can say about this book- she writes well. I will never ever read another of her books. I think had she removed the trauma porn and shaved off about 250 pages of it, this book would be the book people say it is. Instead we have cruelty and sadism designed as literature. I do not wish this person well.
There are so many negative things I want to say about this book but know this: I will never, ever recommend this book to anyone. It is insidious and cruel. It disguises itself as a “sad book about friends” when it’s really just trauma porn.
There is something sadistic about creating a fictional character (one could argue characters, but I’ll get into that later), giving them the most awful life, meticulously detailing their past trauma, and forcing the audience to relive it. It’s even more abhorrent and unforgivable that this creation is of a minority group that the author is not a part of. It felt exploitative and at times fetishistic for her to include the amount of trauma, to detail it so excruciatingly, and to pile it all on one character. This is the thought that stayed with me from about page 250 until the end. There are other reasons that this isn’t the masterpiece the internet thinks it is.
Characters
While the main plot of the book and even the book jacket describes it as a book about friendship, Yanagihara doesn’t keep to that. Yes, there are four friends (JB, Malcolm, Willem, and Jude) who we follow through their lives but around page 250 it becomes less about how those friendships are maintained and more about the extreme abuse of one of them. She takes focus from two of them and zeroes in solely on Jude and Willem’s perspectives. It’s rage inducing because Malcolm and JB’s stories could have been more interesting and fleshed out if explored. Making JB an addict was a choice but one that didn’t get explored beyond the beginning. Malcolm finding success and struggling with familial approval and sexuality also could have been an interesting sub plot, but nope, let’s blow past 20 years of friendship and have these characters show up here and there.
Trauma Porn
There was truly no need for the level of descriptions given to the various abuses. Any of the following would have made for enough but to have all of them… girl! If you read this novel, know going in there are heavy descriptions of self harm, suicide, child abuse, child sexual abuse, child prostitution, kidnapping, domestic abuse, rape, eating disorders. Typing all that out only made me angrier. There was no need for all of that. If you’re wanting to give the reader a reason that a character might be self loathing and hate themselves, YOU DON’T NEED MUCH. Romance novels do that better.
No cultural context
It is a choice to write a book about characters living in NYC and Boston and not mention any cultural milestones that might have affected those communities. Like COME ON! The audience gets to read these characters' lives for up to 40 years and you refuse to give them any cultural contexts? You don’t include anything about the NYC gay scene? None of the bombings? Nothing that shaped the cities and could have shaped the characters? Girl bye.
Queer representation
I don’t know if Yanagihara knows what the words bisexual and pansexual are or if she knows the history of bi-erasure. It’s ok for a character to sleep with both men and women; so why does no one in the book acknowledge that, potentially, some of them are bisexual? It’s so annoying. The characters who engage in primarily gay relationships and sexual experiences are either predators, abusers, and pedophiles. At one point, one of the characters doesn’t even know if he’s gay, it’s just that he’s been used by men so much that he thinks being attracted to women is something he can’t pursuer. WHAT THE HELL? WHY?? I can’t say that the main characters’ relationships are healthy either, which is fine. Bad relationships happen.
Mental Health
From my understanding from reading this book, Yanagihara is not ok with therapy as a tool for mental health, but is ok with suicide. There is a paragraph toward the end where one of the characters mentions how therapy is basically a joke. This is infuriating because the community she’s writing about, queer men and the LGBTQ experience need the option of therapy to help process the experience, particularly in today’s time. It’s adds to the cruelness that one writes about the community and then mocks the tools the community can access in order to process their existence. The amount of expletives I said at this point… girl.
Here’s the kindest thing I can say about this book- she writes well. I will never ever read another of her books. I think had she removed the trauma porn and shaved off about 250 pages of it, this book would be the book people say it is. Instead we have cruelty and sadism designed as literature. I do not wish this person well.