By the time you finish the 800-page story that is A Little Life, you’ll be left with the feeling of a hopeless desperation for a happy ending, even a single happy moment for the main character. The “New York Life” story follows four friends living in New York over five decades, centered around the one enigmatic Jude, his life a mystery even to his closest friends. It’s soon revealed that all is not what it seems, and Jude is living a lie. Rather quickly, you’ll find that the author, Hanya Yanagihara, has seemingly created what one critiquer has even called: “The Great Gay Novel”. JB is a gay artist, Malcolm is a bisexual who has a hard time coming to terms with his sexuality, and Wilhelm and Jude fall in love, though neither of them can accept their queerness for what it is. While representation is a must for books coming onto the market, Yanagihara writes of experiences never had, and not just once. In her debut novel, The People in the Trees, she writes of similar themes of gay men and sexual abuse. Although powerful themes, seeing them reoccur again and again makes you question what kind of person Yanagihara really is, and her motives for writing these types of stories.
They say a piece of every author lies in their characters, embedded into their very souls. Whether this stems from our own human self-obsession or our inability to think past what we know, this rule reigns true for Yanagihara, and especially for her character Jude. Throughout the novel, Jude avoids any medical help like the plague. It takes an intervention from everyone he has ever known to get him to therapy, although begrudgingly. In the midst of all the horrors he has experienced, Jude’s biggest torment is the idea of therapy. It haunts him like a ghost and is very much a reflection of Yanagihara’s own beliefs. She herself has testified many times to believing therapy is a sham, going so far as to claim that suicide may be the only option for some. In an interview with Adalena Kavanagh from Electric Lit, she says: “But I also think there’s a point in which it becomes too late to help some people: that there’s a time past which the damage has calcified so completely that there’s no undoing it.” She claims that for people like Jude, therapy simply fails. And along with her dislike of therapy, she is a foreigner to the idea of trigger warnings for books, a more recent addition to modern literature. When asked, she says: “All I can say is that I think it’s very dangerous to isolate oneself from information or art or history or news because the subject is painful.” Her position on the topic comes from a position of privilege in writing these stories. Because her stories are not “own voices stories”, she does not have to suffer from the idea that these things have happened to her. She does not have to suffer from graphic rememberings of these instances and is privileged for saying that trigger warnings are unnecessary. People do need them, they do not need to become friendly with a topic that could potentially trigger them. Yanagihara is a hypocrite in saying these things. And with her mentality, of an unwavering, never-ending trauma, Jude is formed.
Child abuse at his Montessori, sexual abuse, child prostitution, kidnapping, and torture are not the only pains inflicted on Jude. Yanagihara carefully crafts Jude’s life, weaving in her bits of abuse throughout the length of the novel, and therefore almost fooling the reader into believing things are finally getting better. The reader faces a back-and-forth with Jude – a pleading to get the bad to stop, and the feeling of inevitability when they continue to happen in both flashbacks and the present. If there’s an analogy to describe Jude, it’s a pillow that doubles as a punching bag. A coping mechanism used in the darkest of nights, doubling as the soft you cry into and hug. It is said that authors love their characters as their own children, but Yanagihara refuses to abide by this. She continually tortures Jude, relishing in a cruel satisfaction at his stagnant progress. He truly never gets better. Through the eyes of his father-like figure, Harold, we see the perspective of a loved one in Jude’s life. Suffering through the same cycle as the reader: a want – a need – to save Jude, and Jude’s need to be left to his own misery. At times, Yanagihara supplies the reader with happy moments for Jude, almost as an addictive drug. She comes down like his savior: letting someone save him before he bleeds out after slitting his wrists, allowing him the loving relationship that he deserves – until viciously ripping it from his grasp. In all the terrible fates he suffers in his adulthood as well – another abusive relationship, many problems with his back (from when he was run over by his kidnapper, remember?) ultimately resulting in the amputation of both his legs – we, the readers, selfishly hope for some sort of redemption. And what is there to feel but a slight sense of disappointment at Jude’s predictable ending of suicide?
Yanagihara says she sees her characters in her male friends: their lack of emotional vocabulary eventually leading to their repressed feelings. Throughout the first part of A Little Life, called The Postman, Jude and his friends have a suffocating relationship. They each have their own relationships with one another, from friendly competition to a more intimate portrait of the other. But as men do, as declared by Yanagihara’s own experiences, they refuse to say anything which may paint them as vulnerable. For this, A Little Life is not so far from the truth, and one of the reasons I originally adored it. The idea that men, with their own repressed pasts and lives, must learn to be vulnerable to the people they call their friends is riveting to many. Many men are afraid of being seen as anything less than, of being seen as ‘non-manly’. And through her invigorating storytelling, Yanagihara dismantles these pressures of masculinity versus emotions – and what they really mean to each other. As you read the novel, you’ll find that all the main characters are men, and other than Julia (or more memorable as Harold’s wife) there are no women with an actual standpoint in the plot. While a creative approach to the novel’s main themes, you have to stop and ask yourself why a woman has refused to write about complicated women up until Charlie in her newest release: To Paradise, a novel still focused on gay men for a large majority of its story. In an article written by Claire Armitstead for The Guardian, Yanagihara’s fixation, even infatuation with writing about gay men is discussed: “She is particularly impatient with the #ownvoice movement, which might question her right, as a woman, to tell the stories of gay men. ‘It’s very dangerous. I have the right to write about whatever I want. The only thing a reader can judge is whether I have done so well or not.’” In the article, she talks about the impact of her father on her life, and how much he influences who she writes about. But, it begs the question of why gay men? Why them in particular? In A Little Life, she features some sapphic (women-loving-women) couples, but of course, none of them are ever featured more than once. I find, as a lesbian, a fine line between genuine interest and fetishization. Now, of course, her male characters are complex, and not written to only exist as gay, but they exist on the opposite spectrum: sad, miserable, self-hating, and ultimately victims of the common ‘kill-your-gays trope’. This is the difference you will see in stories written by people like Yanagihara, and actual gay authors. She portrays her characters as existing in a state of permanent misery, whilst ‘sad books’ written by gay men are willing to depict happier moments. She says she has every right to write about whatever she wants, but what does it mean when she has no experience being a gay man? Many people come running to her defense. SJ Zhang for Pink News writes this: ‘In the past, queer writer Alexander Chee praised Yanagihara’s allyship on Twitter, citing her involvement in editing queer anthologies and giving mainstream coverage to queer writing as editor-in-chief at The New York Times’ T magazine. He concluded that she has demonstrated “again and again she is no tourist to our lives.’” I beg to differ. While I cannot speak on behalf of gay men, Yanagihara, and anyone else, will always be a tourist for things they have never lived. Are we, as the queer community, this desperate for queer stories?
Yanagihara is not a stranger to writing stories people believe she has no place writing about. One of the characters in A Little Life, Malcolm, is half black and half white. During his first features in the novel, he is clearly very conflicted about himself and his racial identity, especially when one of their friends, JB, a black man, jabs at his mixed identity. Many black readers have critiqued Yanagihara for writing about racial struggles that have never affected her, and never will. Feeling non-American in a very American world is a common experience for all people of color, but for Malcolm, his character arc is explicitly about his identity with his blackness. Many readers have disfavored her for choosing the way she approached Malcolm’s identity. While his experience is the most relatable of the four, it was never hers to write of. Not only does Yanagihara write of racial experiences she will never experience, she slowly lets Malcolm’s perspective fade out, until only Jude, Wilhelm, and JB seem to matter in the story. As soon as she writes him, she discards his character, until his death at the end, in which he still gets less appreciation.
Many critics have said that A Little Life has made them cry uncontrollably for hours on end, and even weeks after finishing the story, they still reminisce about Jude and Wilhelm. And I was a victim of this very mentality, this virus. Jude’s story, with all its horrors and violence, had been inscribed in my brain. It was something I had never thought imaginable – so much violence inflicted on one person. And yet, Yanagihara writes it. There is a new genre being created by literary fiction authors: a plot with no plot, a story where nothing ever happens. And in a way, this reigns true for A Little Life. Other than facing success in their careers, much of Jude and Wilhelm’s story hinges on Jude’s traumas. So much of the story you’ll spend crying, that you’ll glance over the unbelievable, almost impossible things. Jude is an expert baker, a talented singer and pianist, one of the best litigators, and someone who had gotten into a ‘good school’ at 16 (never really mentioned because what great schools have a great law, arts, theatre, and architecture department?) without any formal schooling. He is a multi-faceted man, but you must question where so much of his talent comes from if much of his adolescence was spent in child prostitution and an orphanage. It is as if Jude is a reflection of everything Yanagihara wants in a character, even if it includes a fantasy disease.
With riveting stories and infinitely intricate characters, Yanagihara uses her talents to paint important stories for the world, and ultimately herself. Her stories revolve around sad, gay men, who are surrounded by cruel people, and even crueler lives. For Jude, everyone in his life, save for a few people, have it out for him. And all of his abusers happen to be gay men. But Yanagihara is her character’s ultimate abuser. She makes him suffer the worst abuses, whether for her own interests or for a ‘sad plot’, she hurts him and saves him, again and again. Only to finally let him die. Labeled an icon by many for reaching limits no other author has achieved, we must ask ourselves: where do we draw the line?
This is too good!
Very informative and emotional