A weird reading experience

I read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.

The original cover

I'd been aware of this book's existence for some time, and I knew that its reception had been ecstatic. After reading it people had felt like they'd experienced something extraordinary and unforgettable. The book made people go slightly "off the rails". Someone had slept with it after finishing it, held it in his arms through the night.

Wowza. Still, I didn't include this book on my "to read" list. I was kind of interested, but there were lots of books that I was more interested in, and you just have to choose. Then someone I know who's good at thinking wrote a review in which he basically said that this book is ridiculous garbage, and oddly enough that made me want to read it.

I read a couple of other very negative reviews, and I thought that they were brilliant: really smart and insightful and intellectually stimulating.

So, I wanted to see for myself. A Little Life (2015) follows the lives of four male friends living in New York: Jude, Willem, JD, and Malcolm. All of them are talented and creative, all of them become successful. The story begins when they're in their twenties. When it ends they're in their fifties.

Quite early on in the book, it starts to become clear that this is not a story about four friends after all. It's a story about Jude. The main role of the other characters is to wonder what's going on with Jude.

Jude is a brilliant lawyer. He is extremely good-looking and has all kinds of awe-inspiring talents – he's a fantastic singer, an amazing cook, a passionate mathematician... you know. However... Jude has a broken body: he walks with a limp, has scars and suffers from chronic pain that sometimes becomes torturous. His soul is equally broken: nobody knows what happened to him, and he's alone with these secrets, unwilling to talk about them with anyone. He's filled with irrational but intense self-hatred, and his only way of numbing the pain is to hurt himself: he cuts his arms, sometimes so badly that he almost kills himself.

Jude finds a doctor, Andy, who tries to help him live with the pain and to stop hurting himself. Andy becomes another close friend to Jude; like all of Jude's friends, Andy deeply and unconditionally cares about him. Jude also finds Harold, a law professor who becomes his mentor and later adopts him with his wife Julia. In his thirties, Jude, an orphan, finally gets loving parents.

Jude's liked and loved by so many people... but in the end, nothing can save him. For Jude, life is about pain and shame. He's broken beyond repair.

The story of Jude's suffering and his friends' worrying goes on for hundreds and hundreds of pages. (It's a long book – something between 700 and 1000 pages depending on the edition/translation.)

Gradually Jude's past unfolds: the sources of Jude's pain are revealed to the reader in horrific flashbacks from his childhood and teenage years.

It turns out that – spoiler alert – after being abandoned in a dumpster when he was just a baby, Jude was raised in a Catholic monastery, where he was bullied, abused and/or raped by (almost) all the brothers. Eventually one of the monks, the only likable and reliable one, Brother Luke, invited Jude to run away with him – so they ran away, but the true nature of Brother Luke wasn't what Jude had expected: Brother Luke only wanted to pimp Jude out as a child prostitute. (And, of course, also rape him every night.) Wherever they went, they found clients. There were always adult men eager to have sex with a young boy. (Obviously, these encounters gave Jude all kinds of unidentified diseases that can't be cured.) Eventually, Jude was rescued by the police and placed in a juvenile home... Unfortunately, everybody raped him there as well. So he ran away again and survived by letting truck drivers have sex with him. A man named "Dr Traylor" took him to his home, seemingly to help him, but locked Jude in his basement and kept him there for months, as his sex slave. Finally Dr Traylor let Jude "go" – but first he ran Jude over with his car, just for fun, disabling him forever.

Well. That's not a very great childhood at all. The negative reviews of this book ask two valuable questions: 1) Why was this written? 2) Why do so many people love this book so much?

I get the feeling that those asking these questions are genuinely concerned that there might be something seriously wrong with people's heads, and the culture at large.

What did I think of A Little Life? Firstly... I've got to say that reading this book was like watching TV. I'm used to expecting literature to challenge me in a way that makes reading feel like an "active" process, something that will give you a lot if you're ready to work for it a little bit, but the experience of reading this book was completely effortless in a way that's hard to explain: the world it described often seemed relatively uninteresting, but I just kept on reading, as if there were some invisible algorithm working behind the structure. The characters exist in an annoying bubble of culinary snobbery and stylish parties, and don't seem to pay much attention to anything going on outside that bubble – in itself, their world is a world that really bores me. But there's something really effective about embedding Jude's lifelong horror story into this land of triviality.

Yanagihara's writing has a good, natural flow. There were parts that felt awkwardly overwritten, but mostly her writing was readable, sometimes beautiful. This is not a book that's trying to explore "the possibilities of language" or anything, the language is here to tell a story. It does what it came to do, and does it well.

Some of Jude's gruesome childhood "adventures" were strangely exciting to read, there was a sense of adventure that made me feel like a kid reading Harry Potter.

There's also something fucking bold about how seriously this story takes itself... Unlike so many works of fiction, it's not trying to be ironic, "self-aware", or small. To some degree, seriousness is always a matter of courage.

But why was this written? What is the author trying to say?

Every time Jude finds someone who could help him heal, someone so good and trustworthy that Jude begins to open up a little, Yanagihara makes that person die in some horrible way – and then we get more descriptions of Jude's total and nightmarish psychological suffering, Jude throwing his broken body against walls, Jude crying himself to sleep in a pool of his own blood in the shower, etc. etc. Why?

What is the point? Is there one?

I sense a slight fetishy vibe in Jude's suffering. In some weird way, Yanagihara must have enjoyed torturing her creation in this way – why else would she spend so much time and energy doing it? I mean, nobody forced her to write something like this. (According to her, writing this book took only 18 months and happened in a state of a "fever dream".)

But I don't have a problem with that. Art can, and sometimes must, be fetishy. When you're writing from that place in your soul, you're writing with primitive intuition. What comes out may be stupid and terrible, but it may also have a heart that beats in a way that the heart of something healthy and sensible wouldn't.

Also, I wonder if Jude's experiences are as impossible as they sound.

Some months ago I saw a documentary called Dreamcatcher, about a woman named Brenda Myers-Powell. As a child growing up in one of the poorest ghettos in Chicago, she was repeatedly molested by family members and her grandmother's drinking partners. At the age of 14, she became a prostitute. Then she was a prostitute for 25 years. She was shot five times, stabbed 13 times, strangled, locked in a closet, manipulated, tortured and abused in almost every imaginable way, physically and mentally, and brainwashed into thinking that there was no way out, that this was all that life could ever be for her. Finally, when she was 39, she was thrown out of a moving car by a customer and dragged six blocks along the ground. The incident tore all the skin off her face, but it also led to her getting out of prostitution.

What's incredible and interesting is that today she is an articulate, wise, luminous woman who's devoted her life to saving other women and young girls from prostitution. She's the first person to give a crap about a lot of people that nobody has ever given a crap about; she's reliable and attentive, and mentally, she seems to "have her shit together" in a way that a lot of people with normal childhoods don't have. The documentary shows her doing her job.

In some way, you could claim that Jude's story is more "realistic" than Brenda's. Most people don't become superheroes after stuff like this, right?

But this is interesting... I just read an article where Myers-Powell tells her story.

The article ends with words that just happen to be the exact opposite of the title of the book we're talking about here:

"So I am here to tell you – there is life after so much damage, there is life after so much trauma. There is life after people have told you that you are nothing, that you are worthless and that you will never amount to anything. There is life – and I'm not just talking about a little bit of life. There is a lot of life."

Well... Clearly, Myers-Powell's message is much, much better than Yanagihara's.

But: is fiction supposed to have a message? If it is, does the message have to be good or clear? Probably there are people like Jude – why not tell a story like his, just for the sake of telling it?

Besides... I think that the hopelessness of A Little Life could be much more radical than it is. For example, if I compare it to another story of people living in New York, the HBO series Girls, I see a contrast that reveals all the light in the book.

The horrors in Girls are less extreme. They don't have torture chambers in their world – but there isn't friendship either. The people in Girls don't care about each other very much, not because they are evil but because they are simply really bad at caring, caring is something that they don't know how to do. If a character in Girls seems to be behaving in a compassionate or socially responsible way, the show always makes it clear that in the end, even that is motivated by an immature, desperate ego project of some sort.

Out of all the fictional worlds I've ever spent any time with, Girls is among those with the darkest, least hopeful views of humanity. It's a clever and well-written series, but also totally scary; in my mind, a lot scarier than A Little Life.

Yes, for some reason 99% of the adults that Jude encounters in his childhood are unapologetically active pedophiles, but at least his adulthood is populated by people who are capable of real love and caring.

I don't think that the real reason for this book's popularity is that people enjoy reading about somebody's never-ending suffering because it "confirms their preexisting view of the world as a site of victimization and little else" (as one of the brilliant negative reviews of this book claims). On the contrary, I think that people enjoy reading a story where people sincerely care about each other. A story where truly and deeply caring about your friends is the most normal and natural thing in the world.

That is the message people enjoy receiving. People in your life can't always be saved, but even then they can be loved.

It's a bit like those fantasies that some people have when they are kids (because they feel systematically ignored by their parents and/or peers, I presume): they picture life after their own death, how everybody finally sees them and their pain and takes their suffering seriously. Jude's adult years are a lot like those imaginary funerals. Jude always has a villageful of people around him, unconditionally loving him, taking his pain seriously, worrying about him and missing him when he's gone. For a lot of people, there must be something healing about reading hundreds and hundreds of pages of this. It may be sort of "intantile", but then again, a lot of human suffering is sort of infantile. Exploring, and sometimes alleviating, that suffering is what art does.

In the end, this book ended up moving me much more deeply than I thought it would. The other day I was sitting on a bus and started thinking about this book and the people in it, and I noticed a warm, mildly aching feeling in my heart or whatever.

Somewhere in the last few dozen pages of this book, there's a scene where Jude, who's now in his fifties and trying to commit suicide by not eating, but forced to eat by the people who care about him, behaves badly. He's never had the courage to behave badly because he's thought that people would abandon him if he did. Now that he doesn't care anymore, he lets himself be terrible to his adoptive parents. He throws his plate at the wall and says cruel things. To his total surprise, Harold and Julia hug him tightly. "My sweetheart," Harold says quietly. "My baby." ... Man, there is real human truth in that scene. What a beautiful depiction of what love can be.

I also noticed that this book often made me think about my own life, experiences I've had and decisions I've made, and the lives of people I know, their behaviour and my relationships to them. If a book does that, it means that it must be succeeding in saying something about humans. A Little Life is not exactly realistic, but if you expect it to be, you're reading it wrong. It's not realistic, but in some ways, it's obviously real.

Interestingly, so far all the reviews that I've read of this book, the positive ones and the negative ones, the ones written by professional writers and the ones written on Goodreads, have seemed passionate. All of them are full of strong feeling and interesting thinking. That means something. I may be able to tell you what it means...

This book is kind of ridiculous, and kind of awkward, and I don't know why this was written. But this is great literature.