A Little Life
I abandoned and then returned to this book three different times before I finally finished it—something I have never before done with a novel. Each time I gave up, I found myself reflecting on the characters and wondering what ever happened to them, and I would reluctantly return to find out.
This novel follows four friends through their entire lives together: Willem Ragnarsson, who leaves his family ranch in Wyoming to pursue his dreams of acting in New York; Jean-Baptiste Marion (a.k.a. ‘JB’), the son of Hatian immigrants and aspiring artist; Malcolm Irvine, an affluent New Yorker and up-and-coming architect; and Jude St. Francis, a lawyer and mathematician with a vague past and a strange set of physical disabilities.
While the opening chapters provide a relatively unremarkable chronicle of the college escapades of these four young men, the narrative gradually coalesces around the character of Jude and his gruesome past. Most of what follows is a kind of dialectic between the heartbreakingly redemptive friendships formed by Jude as an adult and flashbacks of the appalling abuse he underwent as a child. Self-harm, sexual assault, and emotional abuse are the central themes of this novel—how evil can distort and consume a human life to a degree that qualitatively outstrips the efficacy of its source and conduit. At the same time, friendship, forbearance, and family (not biological family, but the families we build for ourselves) form its emotional core—how grace, love, and empathy can transform a person in unimaginable ways.
This novel is noteworthy for how unflinchingly it chronicles this abuse and suffering—something that is relatively rare today, when such extremes of suffering are typically either made into a spectacle or papered over. However, the details occasionally defy belief, undermining some of the thematic credibility of the narrative as a whole.
This story illustrated for me how trauma experienced in youth can grow and intensify as time goes on. As Jude matures and begins to grasp the evil of those things to which he was subjected, and as he builds a life with more and more to lose, looking back serves to intensify the pain of the original trauma. While perspective can bring healing, it can also magnify grief.
Jude is persistently unable to internalize the truth spoken over him by friends and incapable of allowing it to replace the lies forced on him by his abusers. This illustrated for me something of the psychological toll of a life devoid of Truth. Relativism traps us within those judgments spoken most forcefully over us. If we cannot point to something that transcends these voices as a source of meaning, then we are doomed to drift hopelessly on tides of opinion. That is not to say that we are well-served by a smug assurance of the accuracy of our own beliefs. But it is to note the positive consequences of recognizing that our beliefs have reference to something objective outside of our minds such that their veracity depends not on the strength which attends their delivery but the degree to which they conform to their object.
There are probably not a lot of people to whom I would recommend this novel—it is unnecessarily long and much of it is less than enjoyable. Nevertheless, Yanagihara has accomplished something significant, and I’m glad I decided to finish it. It was well worth the effort in the end.