Review - 'A Little Life' Hanya Yanagihara - UPDATE

This review comes about a year too late, but here we go anyway. Warning – contains mega spoilers.

Back in March and faced with almost 2 days of non-stop travel, I thought, ‘I need a big book, one of those massive, 700+ page jobs, that will see me through all those tedious hours of waiting for check-ins, waiting to board and the actual flight,’

I chose Hanya Yanagihara’s Man-Booker prize short-listed novel A Little Life, mostly because I had heard so much about it, and how amazing it was.

US edition - the cover photo sums up this review

UK edition cover

The novel follows four twenty-something New York friends, Jude, JB, Malcom and Willem over a period of some 30 odd, curiously timeless years. (there’s mobile phones and computers, but no social media, 9/11 or world politics.)

 At first, I struggled to separate which character was which, and this isn’t helped by Yanagihara (who I will refer to from now on as ‘HY’) playing the pronoun game and starting each chapter with ‘he’ instead of the narrating character’s name.

As for the first 50 or so pages, the four boys were so indistinguishable to me, I found myself flipping back over what I had just read, making notes so I could keep track.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Jude is the character HY has decided to focus on. Poor Jude; not even an Eastender’s character is put through the mill as much as he is. Abandoned by his mother as a baby, he’s taken into a monastery where the monks sexually and physically abuse him for years.

All except for kindly Brother Luke, who love-bombs Jude with encouragement and affection, providing him with a safe place to escape and just be a little boy. Because HY is from the ‘tell’ not ‘show’ school of writing, Brother Luke’s grooming is clear to the reader from the start of their ‘friendship’, and when Brother Luke suggests to a blindly willing Jude that they run away together to build a house in the woods, my heart sank.

Following his time with Brother Luke, which is so unrelentingly grimy I had to stop reading to gather myself and make a comforting cup of tea, Jude’s story gets progressively darker and more twisted, from the home he’s in during his early adolescence, to the truckers he meets on the road, to the sinister doctor he encounters in a service station bathroom, to the bullying, violent, lover he thinks he deserves, Jude's life is a non-stop parade of misery. 

Even after he’s adopted as an adult by Harold and his wife Julia, and meets doctor, Andy, there’s no happiness for Jude.  He is damaged, as you would be if you’d been through what he has been through. He cuts himself, he can’t stand sex or to be touched. Yet he’s also brilliant at absolutely everything he does; cooking, singing, playing the piano, gardening, in his stellar career as a lawyer.

And this is one of the issues among the many that I have with this novel. All of the four friends are wildly successful in their chosen fields; Willem becomes a Hollywood actor, winning Oscars and working with acclaimed directors; JB becomes a famous artist despite only painting portraits of his friends, and Malcolm becomes a famous architect. None of them end up quitting their dreams to get a job in Carpet Right or working in a call centre selling home insurance; none of them simply settle down and have a couple of kids and wash the car on a Sunday (I guess because that would be boring.)

JB and Malcolm’s stories eventually fade so much into the background, you wonder why HY included them in the first place, and then you realise; it’s so they can stand around saying, ‘I’m sorry’ (this book clocks up more ‘I’m sorries’ than 50 Shades does ‘Holy Craps!’) and telling Jude how amazing he is and how much they love him.

The amount of shit the three friends, Andy and Harold tolerate from Jude exasperated me. They seemed to give him so much time, such unquestioning, unconditional understanding and loyalty, and he never once gives it back. He lies to them, he tells them nothing about himself, he gives nothing away, he’s stubborn, and he treats them like shit.

In part, you can tell yourself that this is because this is who Jude is, a person who does not believe that they are worthy of being loved, but I found it amazing that his friends, who he treats so poorly for so long, would stick by him, for a massive 30 plus years.  They don’t know anything about the abuse he went though as a child, so they don’t even have the information to decide, ‘this is why Jude is why he is.’ The only knowledge they have of Jude's past is that he had a life-altering accident that disabled him, but even the details of this are hidden from them, and the reader, until towards the end of the book. 

Andy is perpetually, literally, putting Jude back together again, over and over again, stitching wounds and setting bones, asking the slimmest of questions and accepting the scantiest of answers. It drove me mad that Andy’s character was a doctor, and it felt like he was only there to provide Jude with 24/7 healthcare without asking any awkward questions. In short, being the total opposite of what every decent doctor would do, staying quiet when he should be talking, doing nothing when he has a duty to his patient to take action.

There’s actually little evidence of Jude’s amazingness, beyond his ability to survive the most awful of abuses, bake excellent cakes and be brilliant at everything he turns his hand to.

Jude is destined to spend the entire novel hating himself, feeling dirty, cutting himself so badly he almost dies, and surviving two suicide attempts.

I really, really, wanted to Jude to finally decide he was worthy of getting help and realise that he was loved and nothing that happened to him was his fault. I really wanted him to be more than his abuse, but HY was never going to let that happen.

Not much of Jude’s story really rang true for me. He didn’t need to have so much abuse thrown at him to be damaged, and his damage did not need to make up the totality of his character.

I would question how a child who grew up in ‘care’ and without the nurture and solid foundations of a healthy mother/child relationship could slide so easily into a successful career and into close friendships. The truth is, Jude doesn’t. His friendships are as shallow and one-sided as you’d expect from a child who never really learned how to interact with other children, yet this isn’t an area the author chooses to explore at all.  

Jude also displays zero curiosity about who his parents might have been / are, and in fact I am not sure it’s ever even mentioned with the exception of it not being clear what his racial heritage is (we know it’s mixed, and that’s the extent of it.)

Jude’s relationship with an abusive older partner, in particular, was handled badly, and I felt that little to no research had been done by the author about the creeping, insidious nature of domestic violence and of domestic abusers.

None of the characters rang true for me; there’s not one that feels like a fully formed person you would know,  and have encountered in your own life. They just seem to be there purely to propel Jude’s narrative. The most honest moment in the book comes courtesy of JB. Lost and drug-addicted, he does a cruel impression of Jude and boy, he is never let off the hook for that one, because you’re not allowed to mock someone as fragile and broken as Jude.

I am actually infuriated thinking about just how shallow each character is. They are all so good, with the exception of JB’s brief time as a drug addict. They have no faults, no pettiness, no moments of dickheadishness that make up the human experience. They are constantly there for Jude, at any time, at any hour, despite having lives (and in Andy’s case, kids,) of their own.

I just wanted one of them, ONE, who when summoned to the hospital for the fiftieth time after Jude had done something disgusting to himself yet again to go, ‘Actually, it’s 3am and I have finally got to sleep, after being woken up 5 times already, so I am not going to come to the hospital to see Jude, I’ve got baby sick on my shoulder and I’ve not slept for six months, I HAVE A LIFE TOO, YOU KNOW!!!’

It takes 97% of the way through the book (I read the Kindle edition, so don’t know what page number this was) before HY finally gives Jude a break and lets him die.

Soon after that, all his close friends also die, all youngish in their late 50s and early 60s because NO-ONE IS ALLOWED TO BE HAPPY AND NORMAL AND WASH THEIR CAR ON A SUNDAY AND TAKE THEIR GRANDCHILDREN TO THE SEASIDE OR WATCH A FILM WITH A CUP OF TEA AND BISCUIT FOR DUNKING OR ANYTHING NICE LIKE THAT.

Spindly plot and poor characterisation aside, the writing isn’t that great. I felt that HY was trying to emulate the style of Donna Tartt (The Secret History, The Goldfinch) Most novice writers do this - it’s a means of flexing your writing muscles and finding your own style - but this is HY second novel. Each over-descriptive, meandering paragraph reads like HY was wondering to herself how Tartt would have written the same book (better, is probably the answer, child abandonment and neglect being covered in The Goldfinch.)

There was far too much needless detail about dinners and the lives of the bit-player characters, and this was detail that could have been given to fully exploring Jude’s psychology further, beyond ‘sexual abuse fucks you up’. What about how being abandoned as a baby would fuck you up? About how not knowing who you are, where you come from, not having any normal relationships until you are in your 20s?

HY isn’t interested in this, she’s interested in the unrelenting, grim torture that abusers meter out to Jude and the cruelty he later inflicts on himself as a result.

Are there good things about the book? Yes. We are not given graphic, detailed descriptions of Jude’s abuse, and what is revealed is dealt with sparingly and very matter of factly.  The portions of the book about Jude’s early childhood are very good, his typical childish trust in adults and their motivations, his misunderstanding of the mysterious adult world is heart-breaking, and despite the awfulness of what happens to him at the monastery, I found those sections of the book the most interesting and vividly drawn.

I liked the fact that there’s no clear time setting (other than it’s obviously ‘modern’ times) to the novel - I imagined that the four friends met at college in the late 1980s / early 90s – but another reader could place them as first meeting in the 1970s. There’s little mention of technology or politics to provide a timescale. It’s not really clear why the author chooses to do this – I believe possibly so the book won’t ‘age’ and the story can speak for itself, instead of being a comment on  late 20^th / early 21^st century life.

I started this book on 14^th March and finished it today (2 May) It never normally takes me so long to read a book, even one as long as this. It felt like what it is; a slow, tedious, trudge through the thick sludge of an awful life, while someone hits you over the head with MEANINGS made of breeze blocks. 

I stayed with it because I had already invested time and money in it, but there are probably authors out there who have tackled this subject more competently and meaningfully. 

1/5.....'sorry'. (not sorry). 

Now for the updated bit...

I love reading bad reviews of books. Love it. In my search for reviews on this book, I discovered that the cover photo is called 'Orgasmic Man'. I have to say that a thought had occurred to me when I kept seeing the cover...is he in pain...or is he...? He looks like he might be....? Or at the very least it's a cry wank, maybe? 

So yeah, that cover photo more sums up what I think of the book (load of wank) than my review of the book. 

I probably shouldn't rush to review things when I'm pissed off with the author for mucking me around and wasting my time, because later I think, oh it wasn't  THAT bad.  

It actually wasn't that bad, I take back that the writing wasn't that good. I would have just liked to have read what this book could have been with some more ruthless editing and with less focus on Jude.

I might read Hanya Yanagihara's first book, so watch this space....