Review by foxo_cube - A Little Life

A review by foxo_cube
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

My uncle's really into films; he especially likes horror. When I was a teenager, he was going through a phase of watching all the "video nasties" and, somewhere around the same time, he got into giallo films - artsy Italian slasher stuff. I don't recall exactly, but it was probably one of these sorts of films where, walking through the living room, I watched a scene in which a woman was running from something, terrified. Don't know what order the things happened in, but I'm pretty sure she ran towards a caravan and was hitting at the door while some rats were trying to chase her or something, and then the guy in the caravan opened the door with an axe in hand, and she screamed and ran away from him, only to be attacked by dogs, something like that. I stood and watched and said, "Huh. She's having a bit of a bad day."

This book was a lot like that scene of that anonymous film I saw a few minutes of, but for 800 pages. Well, slight exaggeration. Only most of the book was like that.

The story follows Jude, primarily, and I really like Jude. I found him pretty relatable, which isn't great, really, but he is likeable. He has friends of varying importance: the blurb implies that the friends are of equal importance, but poor Malcolm gets the short end of the stick (which is a shame, because his relationship with his race and privilege had a lot of promise to be interesting until he got sidelined). JB kind of wanders in and out, being a bit obnoxious despite a good heart, and mostly serves to piss Jude (and Willem, by extension) off terribly or to make a beautiful art series that makes Jude have a bit of an existential crisis. Willem is his best friend and mostly a sweetie. I say "mostly" for reasons I will expand upon shortly.

Jude is very depressed and very traumatised. This is made clear very early on, where we meet the primary characters and get to know their personalities, dynamic, and idiosyncracies. This part of the book had a lot of promise for me. I liked the darkness in it, but the friendship dynamics are wonderfully written and each character had something about them I wanted to know a bit more about, which is a good start. The writing itself is beautiful, too.

It did contain a trope about self-harm I always wonder about.

Here's the thing: I've been self-harming by cutting for over ten years, on and off. I'm currently in a period where I haven't cut for over a year (everyone say "good job!!") but it's one of those things where I'd never say I recovered. I have to put a lot of effort into not doing it because I've never found anything to vent feelings that's healthier and as effective. Not great, I know. In media, so often, characters who self-harm always wear long sleeves to cover their cuts. This first comes up when Jude's friends speculate why he never shows his arms, and someone offers up that his sister's friend was the same because she cut herself. In my experience, if you're cutting your arms, you either don't care or you kind of want them to be seen. When I was a teenager, my self-harm was to prove a point to the people who bullied me as much as it was anything else; as an adult, I only cut my arms during lockdown when nobody was really going to notice them. If I wanted my cuts to be hidden in daily life, I would simply do them somewhere else.

This could be me being weird. A lot of the aspects of Jude's self-harm felt very realistic to me. His horrid fantasies about causing absurd bodily harm to himself and taking the cuts a step further is something I'd never seen in a piece of media before. I thought that was just me. The attitude he has towards it, that it isn't that serious and people make too much of a fuss, is something I've navigated before, too. But the long sleeves thing and the fact he seems to have no very minor self-harm habits - as in, stuff he does when he can't go and cut (I used to pull at my nails and claw at my neck when I was a teenager, for example) are off to me in what is otherwise such a detailed portrayal.

This leads in pretty nicely to something I found pretty unpleasant about the book. Now, I love horrible, graphic, gratuitous shit. Always have. I'm a morbid kind of person, what can I say. However, for a good part of the mid-section of the book, I was bored of how horrible it was. It was a chore to read.

Most of it was Jude's backstory, which is hinted at from the start and revealed more fully over the course of the story.

Apparently, every adult man ever was desperate to fuck a juvenile Jude, no matter what. If something could be made even more traumatic, it was. I mean, seriously! When Brother Luke, the monk that groomed Jude and took him away from the monastery (where he was, of course, being raped by the other monks) is about to be arrested for sex trafficking him, he runs to the bathroom and hangs himself, and as Jude is being led away from the motel room, he sees the body hanging. And I rolled my eyes, and I thought, "Of course he saw the body." That's not the response I should have had, is it!

But after god knows how long of the bullshit I'd read through, I was fed up. It wasn't sad any more. And I know some people really do have lives that feel like cruel jokes - I've met people with lives like that! - but seriously, it was just ridiculous.

I think what made it all so insulting is that it felt like the characters we'd been getting to know and which had been so carefully described were put on the back burner, and instead, Yanagihara was trying to make us like Jude out of pity. "Look! This bad thing happened to him! Do you feel bad for him? Do you care about him? What if I do this? Do you care about him now? What if he's forced into this?" It felt cheap and lazy and exploitative.

Maybe, too, it was the fact that a lot of Jude's struggle is that he wants to be loved as him. He doesn't want to be a burden and he doesn't want to be pitied. He feels repulsive and irredeemable but he wants to be accepted as a whole human being even if he can't believe he deserves that. Having our eyes pulled open to watch Jude's traumas in excruciating detail felt dehumanising and disrespectful. Is that the point? Is the voyeurism meant to make us feel like an abuser by association?

A little later in the book, this evolved into something almost worse: it felt kind of like a weird fetish thing. Low-hanging fruit, I know, but I legit can't think of any other good reason for the shit-tier storyline

of Jude being raped by basically every adult he ever encounters. He's discovered by the monks as a baby, who rape him. He's groomed and pimped out to clients by a man who rapes him. He goes to a children's home where the counsellors rape him. He escapes the children's home (after being raped, would you believe it) where he tries to hitchhike to Boston, offering truck drivers sex in exchange for a lift, and not a single truck driver turned down the advances of this child. Not one was like "What the fuck? What happened to this poor kid?". He passes out from an STI-induced fever and is locked in the basement of, you won't believe this, a guy who nurses him back to health (ish - he deliberately keeps Jude weak) and then keeps him prisoner so that he can rape him.

A little earlier in the book I had that same uncomfortable feeling - Jude's relationship with Caleb. The course of the relationship, though short, is intended to have that frog-in-heated-water thing of a guy who seems cool and then some red flags come up and then he ends up being an abusive arsehole. But it really felt like, after we meet Caleb, all the stuff in between is sped through so that we can get to see Caleb

beat and rape Jude

in, as ever, excruciating detail. When you're reading that sort of scene, the last thing you want is the nagging feeling in the back of your head that the writer is salivating to get to the "good" bit.

The relationship in Jude's middle age with Willem is nearly lovely. I say nearly because, as we all know, nothing wholly good could ever happen to our boy Jude. Willem conveniently ignores the fact that Jude absolutely despises sex and is dissociating to get through it. As in, he's not just dense - he realises it and is just like "But I really like sex. And when I asked Jude, he was quiet for ages and then eventually said yes which is totally an enthusiastic affirmation so it's probably fine :) I like sex so this is very convenient!" It takes Jude telling him about how he got raped by a zillion people for Willem to be like "Whoa... he really doesn't like sex... that's so sad..."

And, again, I feel like this is insulting because Willem, throughout the entire book, is always the most attuned to Jude. He is Jude's strongest defender and, while he isn't infallible, he knows him like nobody else. It's true that a lot of people don't notice when you go on autopilot during sex to get through it, but anyone who gives half a shit can pick up on it, no matter how practised you are (ask me how I know). You're telling me that it's in character for Willem to even try to kid himself if he risks furthering Jude's trauma and self-hatred? I'm sorry, but again, it feels cheap!

Other things that made me go "???" include a scene in which some autistic characters are introduced, patronised by the author for about two pages, and then are never mentioned ever again. They were maths students taught by Jude's old professor, as well as said professor's son, and it says something about how he was trying to teach them how to act normally and it was written so weirdly and with such failed delicacy and made me feel kind of itchy. It's great fun being autistic and seeing people try to write autistic people when they have no fucking clue. Jude was nice to them, at least. He read to me as autistic-coded, funnily enough - but that could well be me projecting because he is, after all, just like me fr. The other notable wild bit was when Jude was cutting more to deal with having sex with Willem, and he tries so hard to stop at Willem's request, but after however much time he can't deal with it and none of his other coping mechanisms are working and he cuts, and Willem finds him and takes the razor from him and cuts his chest like "Yeah! How do you feel now! It's not nice, is it!!!" and once they resolve that argument it's like it never happened. And it's still not enough for Willem to acknowledge the Obvious Connection between sex and Jude's cutting somehow. I don't really know if it's realistic or not, but it certainly made me dislike Willem a bit, which is a shame.

Positive things that don't fit anywhere else are Harold, the dad of all time, and Andy, who is a type of person I am very fond of. In general, the side characters are mostly nuanced and interesting - it's just that the nasty ones are just ridiculously, obscenely nasty.

The end of the book, though,

after Willem's death,

is lovely. It's devastating to see Jude try so fucking hard to keep living, all the while craving nothing more than to be released from his obligation to stay alive, but it's beautiful. There's a gorgeous, heart-wrenching story in this book - there really is. And Yanagihara has the talent to pull it off. But she spends so much time poking and prodding at her victim that it gets lost in the depravity and ends up feeling hollow.

A friend recommended me this book (she loved it), and she said that, in a way, it may have worked better if we'd never known the full extent of Jude's story. I feel inclined to agree. Knowing the gist, the constituent elements, that have turned Jude into such a cowering, self-hating individual despite having so much to offer, would leave it up to our imagination without a cartoonish reveal that only detracts from the seriousness of it all.

Content Warnings

A review by foxo_cube A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A review by foxo_cube
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara