For my Professional Practices class, I was given the choice to read “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara or “The Sellout” by Paul Beatty. I had already bought “A Little Life” and wasn’t about to spend money on another book that wasn’t on my already huge To-Read list.
Before reading, I went to Goodreads to read a summary. The Goodreads synopsis read:
“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cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity.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 don’t think anything could’ve prepared me for this novel. “A Little Life” by Hanya Yanagihara is devastating and traumatic to say the least. She covers multiple themes throughout the novel: relationships among men; trauma, recovery and support; chronic pain, disability and self-harm.
I’m not going to say much about what happens in the novel because I think readers need to experience it without a preconceived idea.
However, I will include some reviews I found interesting after I finished reading it.
The Guardian (A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara review – relentless suffering)
The Guardian (A Little Life: why everyone should read this modern-day classic)
The New Yorker (The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life”)
The Atlantic (A Little Life: The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here)
The Conversation (Review: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara)
Salon (This is 2015’s most infuriating, overpraised novel: “What real person trapped in this novel wouldn’t become a drug addict?”)
“A Little Life” caused some controversy in the book world. Many readers love it and think it’s brilliant. Other readers think it has “dull prose, lazy plotting and stereotypical characters,” according to the Salon article linked above. On Goodreads, it has a rating of 4.26 stars from over 74,000 ratings.
My personal rating: 1 star. Maybe I read it at the wrong time in my life and I’ll come back to it another time, or I might just pass the book along to someone else because I don’t know if I could force myself to read the 720-page book a second time.
Don’t let me persuade you either way. If you do decide to pick it up and give it a read, be prepared to set it down a couple times.
“How much suffering and abuse can one character believably endure?” – The Guardian
Also, take a look at an Instagram dedicated to “A Little Life.”
*All photos in post are from A Little Life: A Novel.
Nicole Hilder 