Dave's Book Blog: "A Little Life" by Hanya Yanagihara

Two caveats. Firstly, I saw a filmed production of the National Theatre stage show of A Little Life before I read the book so I knew what was going to happen. This clearly coloured my experience of reading it. Secondly, it is a long book, 720 pages in my paperback edition, and as E M Forster says in Appendix A of his Aspects of the Novel: “Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.”

The plot concerns four American men who made friends at college. Willem is an actor, Malcolm is an architect, JB is a painter, and Jude is a lawyer. The inciting incident, which comes at about the 10% mark, is that we discover that Jude, who is the most secretive of the four friends, self-harms. Slowly the book focuses more and more on Jude. His past, the reason for the self-harming, is very slowly laid bare. At the same time, the consequences of his past for his present are described in meticulous detail. There are some horrors here. If it is any consolation, the medical details are more graphic than the sexual.

The fundamental set up of the book seems beyond belief. We have four friends who met in college because they all happened to be assigned to the same dorm. When we first meet them, three of them are more or less penniless New Yorkers (one has rich parents) but as the book progresses they will all have significant success in their fields. Ordinary guys? Not really. Jude is so clever that when he is employed as a private tutor it is to teach "Latin, math, German, and piano" (2.1); he is very handsome, cooks like a cordon bleu chef, is a brilliant gardener, and has a great singing voice. He becomes a hugely successful lawyer. He works incredibly long hours, often six days a week, sometimes staying at the office until sunrise. Nevertheless, he never seems to collapse for lack of sleep. He also fits in an active social life, attending plays, films, art gallery openings, and dinner parties galore. The sort of guy who lives down my street? Not really. Towards the end of the book the main characters, including many of the minor ones, are more than happy to travel to London or Paris to attend a birthday party. These surely aren't your average Americans. Perhaps I'm jealous that I can't fit 36 hours of endeavour into 24 hours of daytime. How do they do it? They don't seem to read books or watch television ... but they can sneer at someone who pronounces 'Proust' wrong which implies that they have read him. I suppose the thesis of the book is that even the elite can have serious psychological problems but in my opinion, it is more difficult for a reader to have empathy with characters who are so clearly superior superheroes.

In addition, there seem to be more gay or lesbian couples than heterosexual ones; hardly anyone has children and if they do, the children die. Does this reflect contemporary metropolitan America? I doubt it.

As well as the characters being decidedly too good to be true (which seems a trend in modern fiction) there is some wonderfully unrealistic dialogue: "Mathematical logic, or pure logic, is essentially a conversation between truths and falsehoods. So, for example, I might say to you 'All positive numbers are real. Two is a positive number. Therefore two must be real.' But this isn't actually true, right?" (2.1) This is not a snippet of conversation often heard in the circles I move in.

It is told in the third person, past tense from the multiple perspective of four of the principal characters (the four friends); and in the first person in Harold's section which gives the impression that Harold is the ultimate narrator, especially since he has the final say. This form of narration enables us to consider the protagonist, Jude, from more than one viewpoint. But it also means that we are distanced from the characters, an effect enhanced because the book is very didactic in the sense that the reader is told how the characters feel rather than being allowed to infer those feelings. Stream of consciousness this is not; interior monologue it is only if you are in the habit of thinking of yourself in the third person. Therefore we never really get inside the head of any of the characters, even though we are told all their thoughts and feelings.

Nevertheless, by the end of the book, I felt I knew the characters. Furthermore, the book does have an emotional impact; more than once my eyes were leaking and there was a lump in my throat. I suppose that this effect has been achieved by the overwhelming effect of so much book. We enter into every detail of the lives of these characters, described in micro-detail, over years, and this is what packs the punch.

I read it at the same time as I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (in which the narrator also uses the third person) and it seemed to me that the style was very much the same: its effect is achieved by the use of exhaustive and meticulous detail. But One Day is a much shorter book!

So is ALL a good book or a great book? It was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize, the 2015 Women's Prize for fiction, and for the 2015 Waterstones Book of the Year. The vast majority of early reviews were extremely positive. Certainly, although it demanded a lot of effort and concentration, and although the story is gruelling and harrowing, filled with unhappiness, I looked forward to picking it up every day. On the other hand, given the superhero status of the lead characters and the consequent air of fantasy about their stories, I'm not sure this book would have had anything without the emotional punch of the misery-porn story. My feeling in the end was that it was an achievement but that my breath wasn't taken away by how good it was (as with, for example, Demon Copperhead).

Selected quotes:

"their identical expressions of exhaustion, that blend of determination and resignation that only the immigrant possesses." (1.2) Nevertheless, in this book, only native-born Americans achieve success.
"When did pursuing your ambitions cross the line from brave into foolhardy?" (1.2)
"Could you have a real friendship if some part of you was always expecting betrayal?" (2.1)
"You have never known fear until you have a child." (2.2)
"He couldn't stop feeling that the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone." (3.3)
"There is a sort of symmetry to his pairing with Caleb that makes sense: they are the damaged and the damager, the sliding heap of garbage and the jackal sniffing through it." (4.1)
"He was warm from the scotch, and from his own blood, which lapped at him as it pooled around his legs - his insides meeting his outsides, the inner bathing the outer." (4.3)
"Relationships never provide you with everything. The provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person - sexual chemistry, say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of those things. Three - that's it. Maybe four, if you're very lucky. The rest you have to look for elsewhere." (5.3)
"I assumed he was going to be one of those typical surgeons - you know, 'not always right, but always certain'." (5.3)
"It is one of those summer days when the air is so hot, so dry, so still, the sun overhead so white, that one doesn't so much see one's surroundings as hear and smell and taste them: the lawnmower buzz of the bees and locusts, the faint peppery scent of the sunflowers, the oddly mineral flavor the heat leaves on the tongue, as if he's just sucked on stones." (5.3)
"For the first time in his life he understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn't just his heart that he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety." (5.3)
"Joyfulness, abandon: they had had to relearn those, they had had to re-earn them. But they would never have to relearn fear." (5.3)
"He has the feeling, unhappy as it is, that he was at his most valuable in those motel rooms, when he was at least something singular and meaningful to someone, although what he had to offer was being taken from him, not given willingly." (6.3)
"All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well." (6.3)