the little life book review

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Book Reviews

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

'A Little Life': An Unforgettable Novel About The Grace Of Friendship

John Powers

A Little Life

Buy featured book.

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How?

• Independent Bookstores

America is hooked on stories of redemption and rebirth, be it Cheryl Strayed rediscovering herself by hiking the Pacific Trail or the late David Carr pulling himself out of the crack-house and into The New York Times . We just love tales about healing.

But how far should we trust them? That's one of the many questions raised by A Little Life , a new novel by Hanya Yanagihara, whose acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , came from seemingly nowhere 18 months ago. This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience . As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night.

The book follows three decades in the life of four friends from a posh college. There's the kindhearted actor, Willem, and the self-centered artist, JB, of Haitian stock. There's the timorous would-be architect, Malcolm, born of a wealthy, mixed-race family and the handsome, lame Jude, a brilliant attorney addicted to cutting himself. As the book begins, they've moved to New York to make their fortune, and over the next 700 pages — yes, 700 — we watch them rise, lose their bearings, fall in love, slide into squabbles and wrestle with life's inevitable tragedies.

Yanagihara has a keen eye for social detail, and reading her early riff on actors like Willem who work as waiters, you may think she's offering something familiar — a generational portrait like Mary McCarthy's The Group or the witty, emblematic realism of Jonathan Franzen. In fact, the book's apparent normalcy lures you into the woods of something darker, stranger and more harrowing. Turns out that everything largely orbits around one of the four, Jude, whose gothic past Yanagihara slowly reveals.

For those who want trigger warnings, consider yourself warned — Jude's tale has enough triggers for a Texas gun show. The poor guy may endure the harshest childhood in fiction, one that's equal parts Dickens, Sade and Grimm's Fairy Tales . Evidently named for the patron saint of the hopeless and despairing, Jude is treated so badly that I flashed back to my mom reading me the book Beautiful Joe , about a dog so cruelly abused that I melted into inconsolable weeping.

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago. Sam Levy/Courtesy of Doubleday hide caption

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago.

Yanagihara writes with even more trenchant precision about the scars on the adult Jude's soul — the self-hatred and self-destructiveness, the yearning for love laced with utter mistrust, the baroque defense mechanisms he erects to keep anyone from learning who he really is. He struggles again and again, in long frustrating detail, to recover from his past, along with support from his friends, his doctor, Andy, and his law-school mentor, Harold, who becomes a father figure.

Now, I should also warn you that these struggles become too much, as sometimes happens with a John Cassavetes movie. Readers will be ready to move on, even if Jude is not. Then again, the book's driven obsessiveness is inseparable from the emotional force that will leave countless readers weeping.

Besides, Jude's condition is Yanagihara's way of exploring larger issues. Even as the book pointedly challenges the neat, happy arc of popular redemption stories — "People don't change," Jude decides — it calls on our imaginative sympathy. Yanagihara is fascinated by how we understand minds very different from our own. Here, Jude's ghastly history puts him in a mental universe that his friends — and readers — must work to enter. Not that this is impossible, mind you. He's no alien. Jude's guardedness makes him the heightened embodiment of the secret private self we all have, with our own calming rituals, mental hideaways and escape hatches.

While A Little Life is shot through with pain, it's far from being all dark. Jude's suffering finds its equipoise in the decency and compassion of those who love him; the book is a wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff. In A Little Life , it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life”

At the beginning of Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, “A Little Life,” four young men, all graduates of the same prestigious New England university, set about establishing adult lives for themselves in New York City. They are a pleasingly diverse crew, tightly bound to each other: Willem Ragnarsson, the handsome son of a Wyoming ranch hand, who works as a waiter but aspires to be an actor; Malcolm Irvine, the biracial scion of a wealthy Upper East Side family, who has landed an associate position with a European starchitect; Jean-Baptiste (JB) Marion, the child of Haitian immigrants, who works as a receptionist at a downtown art magazine in whose pages he expects, one day soon, to be featured; and Jude St. Francis, a lawyer and mathematician, whose provenance and ethnic origins are largely unknown, even by his trio of friends. Jude, we later learn, was a foundling, deposited in a bag by a dumpster and raised by monks.

For the first fifty or so pages, as the characters attend parties, find apartments, go on dates, gossip, and squabble with each other, it is easy for the reader to think he knows what he’s getting into: the latest example of the postgraduate New York ensemble novel, a genre with many distinguished forbears, Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children” among them. At one point, after his acting career takes off, Willem thinks, “New York City … had simply been an extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn.” Yanagihara is a capable chronicler of the struggle for success among the young who flock to New York every autumn, sending up the pretensions of the art world and the restaurant where Willem works, which is predictably staffed by would-be thespians. “New York was populated by the ambitious,” JB observes. “It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common…. Ambition and atheism.”

Yet it becomes evident soon enough that the author has more on her mind than a conventional big-city bildungsroman. For one thing, there’s the huge hunk of paper in the reader’s right hand: more than seven hundred pages, suggesting grander ambitions than a tale of successful careers. There are also curious absences in the text. Yanagihara scrubs her prose of references to significant historical events. The September 11th attacks are never mentioned, nor are the names of the Mayor, the President, or any recognizable cultural figures who might peg the narrative to a particular year. The effect of this is to place the novel in an eternal present day, in which the characters’ emotional lives are foregrounded and the political and cultural Zeitgeist is rendered into vague scenery.

But the clearest sign that “A Little Life” will not be what we expect is the gradual focus of the text on Jude’s mysterious and traumatic past. As the pages turn, the ensemble recedes and Jude comes to the fore. And with Jude at its center, “A Little Life” becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery. And having upset our expectations once, Yanagihara does it again, by refusing us the consolations we have come to expect from stories that take such a dark turn.

The first real hint of what we’re in for comes on page 67, when Jude wakes Willem, his roommate, saying, “There’s been an accident, Willem; I’m sorry.” Jude is bleeding profusely from his arm, which is wrapped in a towel. He is evasive about the cause of the wound and insists that he doesn’t want to go to a hospital, asking instead that Willem take him to a mutual friend named Andy, who is a doctor. At the end of the visit, having sewn up Jude’s wound, Andy says to Willem, “You know he cuts himself, don’t you?”

The cutting becomes a leitmotif. Every fifty pages or so, we get a scene in which Jude mutilates his own flesh with a razor blade. It is described with a directness that might make some readers queasy: “He has long ago run out of blank skin on his forearms, and he now recuts over old cuts, using the edge of the razor to saw through the tough, webby scar tissue: when the new cuts heal, they do so in warty furrows, and he is disgusted and dismayed and fascinated all at once by how severely he has deformed himself.”

The cutting is both a symptom of and a control mechanism for the profound abuse Jude suffered during the years before he arrived at the university. The precise nature of that suffering is carefully doled out by Yanagihara in a series of flashbacks, each more gruesome than its predecessors. Jude was taught to cut himself by Brother Luke, the monk who abducted him from the monastery. Initially, Brother Luke appeared to be Jude’s savior, spiriting him away from an institution where he was regularly beaten and sexually assaulted. Brother Luke promises Jude that they will go and live together as father and son in a house in the woods, but the reality of their years on the road is much, much grimmer. Eventually, Jude is liberated from Brother Luke, but by then he appears to be marked for sexual violation. “You were born for this,” Brother Luke tells him. And, for a long time, Jude believes him.

The graphic depictions of abuse and physical suffering that one finds in “A Little Life” are rare in mainstream literary fiction. Novels that deal with these matters often fade out when the violence begins. The abuse in “Lolita,” for instance, is largely off camera, so to speak, or wrapped complexly in Nabokov’s lyrical prose. In Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” the child narrator is banished to the closet while his mother is raped by their captor. You are more likely to find sustained and explicit depictions of depravity in genre fiction, where authors seem freer to be less decorous. Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story,” Steig Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and the torture of Theon Greyjoy in “A Game of Thrones” all came to mind when I was reading “A Little Life” (though the torture of Theon is more explicit in the HBO series than in George R. R. Martin’s books). Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character.

One of the few recent novels that’s comparable to “A Little Life” in this respect is Merritt Tierce’s “Love Me Back,” a fierce book about a self-destructive Texas waitress who cuts and burns herself, abuses drugs, and submits herself to debasing sexual encounters. But that novel, at a mere two hundred pages, is a slim silver dagger, not the broadsword that Yanagihara wields. And unlike Tierce’s book, in which there is little reprieve for the reader, Yanagihara balances the chapters about Jude’s suffering with extended sections portraying his friendships and his successful career as a corporate litigator. One of the reasons the book is so long is that it draws on these lighter stretches to make the darker ones bearable. Martin Amis once asked, “Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?” And the surprising answer is that Hanya Yanagihara has: counterintuitively, the most moving parts of “A Little Life” are not its most brutal but its tenderest ones, moments when Jude receives kindness and support from his friends.

What makes the book’s treatment of abuse and suffering subversive is that it does not offer any possibility of redemption and deliverance beyond these tender moments. It gives us a moral universe in which spiritual salvation of this sort does not exist. None of Jude’s tormentors are ever termed “evil” by him or anyone else. During his years of suffering, only once are we told that Jude prays “to a god he didn’t believe in” (note the lowercase “g_”_). Though he is named after the patron saint of lost causes—the name given to him by the monks who raised him—what’s most obviously lost here is the promise of spiritual absolution or even psychological healing. In this godless world, friendship is the only solace available to any of us.

Of course, atheism is not uncommon in contemporary literary novels; with notable exceptions, such as the works of Marilynne Robinson, few such books these days have any religious cast. But perhaps that is why they rarely depict extreme suffering—because it is a nearly impossible subject to engage with directly if you are not going to offer some kind of spiritual solution. “God whispers to us in our pleasures … but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” C. S. Lewis wrote, in “The Problem of Pain.” In “A Little Life,” pain is not a message from God, or a path to enlightenment, and yet Yanigihara listens to it anyway.

In addition to his law degree, Jude pursues a master’s in pure mathematics. At one point, he explains to his friends that he is drawn to math because it offers the possibility of “a wholly provable, unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable absolutes.” For Jude, then, mathematics takes the place of religion, in a sense. Later, during one of his worst episodes of suffering, Jude turns to a concept known as the axiom of equality, which states that x always equals x .

It assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality … but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life. Like the axiom of equality, “A Little Life” feels elemental, irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it.

Advertisement

Supported by

Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’

By Carol Anshaw

• March 30, 2015
• Share full article

The lock on the toolshed is smashed, the motel door is kicked in and a child ­emerges — blinky, freed from years of sexual service, the violence finally at an end. The newspapers celebrate another triumph of the human spirit, and move on. But does the victim do the same? How does someone go from years of suffering and shame to live out the rest of a life? This is the question Hanya Yanagihara, author of “People in the Trees,” takes on in her second novel.

This 700-plus-page narrative follows the lives of four college friends who come to New York seeking fame and higher tax brackets. Malcolm is an architect, Willem an actor, JB a painter. The fourth, Jude, is a litigator with a secret, painful past, and the book is primarily his story. He’s a beautiful orphan, now surrounded by loving friends, even formally adopted by Harold, his former law professor. Inside, though, he is sick with self-loathing — a veteran returned from the black site that was his childhood.

Starting off as a baby found in an alley, he’s taken into a monastery rife with brutal pedophile monks. And that’s just the beginning of his troubles.

As an adult, Jude “became obsessed in spells with trying to identify the exact moment in which things had started going so wrong, . . . but really, he would know: It was when he walked into the greenhouse that afternoon. It was when he allowed himself to be escorted in, when he gave up everything to follow Brother Luke. That had been the moment. And after that, it had never been right again.”

For many pages, Yanagihara leaves it at that. She obtains narrative traction by withholding information. Where did Jude come by his limp, his chronic pain issues? What exactly is “the injury” referred to time and again? This mechanism sparks the reader’s voyeuristic interest but comes with a sullying sensation. After a while, I understood I was being enticed to watch someone’s terrible suffering from a comfortable distance.

By the time Jude is a teenager, buggery and beatings are his main points of human contact. “Sometimes he was hit hard enough so that he lost consciousness, which is what he began to crave: that blackness, where time passed and he wasn’t in it, where things were done to him but he didn’t know it.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

UK Edition Change

• UK Politics
• News Videos
• Paris 2024 Olympics
• Rugby Union
• Sport Videos
• John Rentoul
• Mary Dejevsky
• Andrew Grice
• Sean O’Grady
• Photography
• Theatre & Dance
• Culture Videos
• Fitness & Wellbeing
• Food & Drink
• Health & Families
• Royal Family
• Electric Vehicles
• Car Insurance Deals
• Lifestyle Videos
• Hotel Reviews
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Australia & New Zealand
• South America
• C. America & Caribbean
• Middle East
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Today’s Edition
• Home & Garden
• Broadband deals
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Climate 100
• Sustainable Living
• Climate Videos
• Solar Panels
• Behind The Headlines
• On The Ground
• Decomplicated
• You Ask The Questions
• Binge Watch
• Travel Smart
• Watch on your TV
• Crosswords & Puzzles
• Most Commented
• Newsletters
• Ask Me Anything
• Virtual Events
• Wine Offers
• Betting Sites

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in Please refresh your browser to be logged in

A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara - Book review: Over the top, beyond the pale, and quite simply unforgettable

Picador - £16.99, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails

Sign up to our free breaking news emails, thanks for signing up to the breaking news email.

Hanya Yanagihara’s debut, The People in the Trees, was a brilliant, devastating if chilly novel, that confronted the worst excesses of male hubris through restraint and excision. Yanagihara’s follow-up, which has justly been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, approaches similar subject matter – masculinity, violence, secrets – but from the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. Just about every one of A Little Life’s 700 pages is saturated with trauma: child abuse, rape, domestic violence, dysfunctional families, addiction, self-harm, suicide, grief. If Emo musicians needed a literary masterpiece, then A Little Life is it.

The effect is all the more heightened after the novel’s opening, which describes a touching, even nostalgia-tinged love square between handsome actor Willem, volatile artist-in-waiting J B, Malcolm who is privileged, steady but anxious, and Jude, the enigma within this novel’s riddle.

About a quarter of the way in, J B and Malcolm retreat from the limelight, which burns ever more brightly on Willem and blindingly on Jude. What you make of the novel very much depends on how you feel about Yanagihara’s hero, an orphan who has survived a devastating childhood but whose heart-breaking past is withheld from reader and friends alike.

Jude’s duplicity is helped by the conspicuous nature of his material success. A poster boy for the American Dream, he earns a fairy tale education, fairy tale friends, fairy tale Manhattan job, fairy tale apartment, and finally a fairy tale boyfriend: Willem, by now an Oscar-winning millionaire movie star.

The clarity of Yanagihara’s prose is perfect for dissecting blind ambition, the consolations of work and money, and how these paper over the cracks of fragile, fractured individuals. So it is with Jude, a self-harmer whose wrecked body can hardly withstand the incisions he makes.

One could read the persistence of these self-soothing rituals as a fable of the hollowness of America’s pursuit of happiness. Interior decoration can spruce up a downtown loft, but does nothing to touch Jude’s inner self-loathing. But what makes A Little Life so powerful, unsettling and occasionally infuriating is Jude’s imperviousness to the love of his friends. Jude demands that we ask whether life is always worth living, whether some wounds are so deep as to be unrepairable.

If Yanagihara writes sharply on external rewards of accomplishment, her chiaroscuro style is even more unflinching when detailing Jude’s secret world of violence. “Before he had been taught to cut himself, there was a period in which he would toss himself against the wall outside … again and again until he sagged, exhausted, to the ground, and his left side was permanently stained blue and purple and brown with bruises.”

The percussive over-abundance of that sentence (“and ... and ... and ...”) might describe A Little Life as a whole. The reader too will sag exhausted to the ground, overwhelmed by how much pain one human can endure. I shared the frustrations of Jude’s adoring friends, but like them I could not look away, so completely did Yanagihara’s world convince.

Proof that sometimes in art more really is more, A Little Life is unlike anything else out there. Over the top, beyond the pale and quite simply unforgettable. Whether it makes the Man Booker shortlist – and it really should – this parable of modern life will last long after the winner is crowned.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.

New to The Independent?

Or if you would prefer:

Hi {{indy.fullName}}

• My Independent Premium
• Account details
• Help centre

Book Review: ‘A Little Life’ by Hanya Yanagihara

An Oldie But A Goodie – Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’ Has Had A Modern-Day Makeover

Hermès Made A Pair Of Clogs

The August 2022 Wish List

I’m Convinced We Are All Pawns In Balenciaga’s Giant Social Experiment

Swimsuits That Are Almost Too Hot To Handle

I had to put this book down so many times before I could finish it. Dubbed the best-written book of our generation, it is also described as one of the most heart-wrenching, devastating, disturbing, most depressing book ever read. Powerful and honest prose, A Little Life was almost torture to finish. I couldn’t put it down, but at the same time, I pushed and pulled with my conscience to take a break for my mental health. Incredibly difficult to read, I have only ever read one book with tougher content ( My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent, if you really must know – read with caution). I made myself read only one chapter a week, when normally, with prose written as addictively as this, it would take me perhaps 4 or 5 days to finish it entirely. Whether it made it worse – that I had to sit and properly take in what had happened that chapter – I don’t know.

A Little Life follows the life of a young man named Jude, and his friends, Willem, JB, and Malcolm; their meeting at university; and their lives growing older in New York. Always intertwined in some respect, this book unravels the meaning of true friendship, which shines like a lighthouse beacon throughout the book. Every time the content is hard and cruel, the friendship and love cuts through. The star character is Jude St. Francis, who is a star to everyone but himself.

Jude has endured too many tough, life-changing moments in his life, any one of them being almost too much to bear, but the hardest part to read about Jude is his inability to love himself, and his longing to get better not for himself, but for the others around him. His awareness of knowing his personal boundaries, wanting to surpass them, but just not being able to. Jude is standing in the doorway of his life, never being able to step outside onto the porch. He can’t bring himself to voice the past he grapples with, and his non-existent self-esteem that comes with it. When you’re depressed and someone asks you how you are, the answer “Fine” seems almost like a call for help, when outwardly it says the opposite. Jude is crying out for help, for connection, for love, and true kindness, without ever having the ability to do so.

One of the most overwhelming reactions when I talk about this book is, “I’ve never experienced so much love.” Love is the strongest theme in the book, with agape (unconditional love) and philia (familial love) taking centre stage. It’s the love of Jude’s friends that care for him as a doctor, as adopted parents, as someone who understands Jude, as someone who builds a home for Jude, as someone who mentors Jude, and someone who captures Jude through art – because he can never see his own beauty or worth.

It is a slow burn, and at over 700 pages, it’s an intimidating read. The story is slow and winding, jumping between character’s point of view, and moments in time. The narrative is so aware of human behaviour, that it’s like seeing ultimate clarity almost of our own consciousness. If someone saw your life through your own mind, thoughts and all, and could explain moments that you couldn’t even understand. Hanya Yanagihara puts to words thoughts that you’ve had that are so fleeting and intangible, you didn’t even know you had had them until you read a sentence that triggers your memory of a thought that wasn’t quite a thought. Yanagihara delves so deeply into the minds and thoughts of the characters that you know them more deeply than you know your own friends. She creates the characters’ personalities not by telling you how they are, but by being who they are. The reason A Little Life is so heart-wrenching is not because you have been told a story, but because you have become the characters; you have lived a full life being the characters – bad days, deepest thoughts, hopeful weeks, and hopeless years.

There are times in this book when I had to close my eyes to stop myself from reading the next words. It’s like a car crash. Everything slows down, the car is flying through the air, time stops for a second and everything is stuck in place. But then, time starts again, you keep on reading, the car hits the tarmac, you are irrevocably changed. Most storytellers have a line that they do not cross, for example, there’s not many writers that would kill the dog. Hanya Yanagihara kills the metaphorical dog. She holds nothing back. She is not afraid to rip apart the story – all you’ve ever known in this little life! But that’s life, isn’t it? Sometimes the dog does die, even if it breaks your heart – regardless of whether it breaks your heart. Perhaps that’s why A Little Life is so heart-breaking to read. Because it’s real, and it’s life, and it doesn’t stop for anyone. Willem sums up this perfectly towards the end of the novel, “…a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn’t know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in those moments. It’s so sad, and yet we all do it.”

If this year has taught us anything, it’s the importance of our health. Jude struggles with his health throughout the book, and it leaves us with the feeling of a fist around our heart. It is that fear of the worst that can happen in sickness – when it is out of our hands, when you want to cure someone but cannot, when there is nothing you can do but watch it unfold.

I cannot express how much I loved this book. I agree with the critics and really do believe that it’s one of the best books of our generation. As an English Lit graduate, I can say that I’ve read a lot of classic, life-changing books in my time, and A Little Life takes its place up on the podium among the best of them. We are lucky to read a book like this in our lifetimes. It is rare to find not only an extraordinary not-commonly-told story, but with extraordinary writing and narrative to match. It was an ordeal reading this book, one that spilled many a tear, but nevertheless, I’m looking forward to reading it all over again (albeit with a couple of year’s grace), if only so I can experience Jude’s journey, to look at all that hardship, loss, and love, and watch in awe.

To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

Normal People: A Hot Take

A Selection Of Chonky Books That If You Can Hack It, You Should 100% Read

Your Summer Reading List For 2022

House of Sky & Breath by Sarah J. Maas

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

Discover more from the butterworth effect.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

Hanya’s Boys

The novelist tends to torture her gay male characters — but only so she can swoop in to save them..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

By the time you finish reading A Little Life, you will have spent a whole book waiting for a man to kill himself. The novel, the second from author Hanya Yanagihara, begins as a light chronicle of male friendship among four college graduates in New York City before narrowing its focus to Jude, a corporate litigator whose decades-long struggle to repress a childhood of unrelenting torments — he was raised by pedophiles in a monastery, kidnapped and prostituted in motels, molested by counselors at an orphanage, kidnapped again, tortured, raped, starved, and run over with a car — ends in his suicide.

An unlikely beach read with a gothic riptide, A Little Life became a massive best seller in 2015. Critics lavished praise on the book, with one declaring it the long-awaited “great gay novel” for its unsparing approach to Jude, who falls in love with his male best friend. (A rare pan in The New York Review of Books prompted an indignant letter from Yanagihara’s editor.) A Little Life would go on to win the Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize; it has since been adapted for the stage by the celebrated director Ivo van Hove, and last month, readers of the New York Times nominated it next to finalists like Beloved and 1984 for best book of the past 125 years.

But Yanagihara’s motivations remained mysterious. The author was born in Los Angeles to a third-generation Hawaiian Japanese father and a Seoul-born Korean mother; her father, a hematologist-oncologist, moved the family around the country for work. She has lived in Manhattan since her 20s, but her heart is in Tokyo and Hawaii. (She has called the last “the closest thing that Asian Americans have to Harlem.”) Her first novel, The People in the Trees, about a doctor who discovers immortality on an island paradise, was well but quietly received in 2013. That book featured homosexuality and pedophilia; not until A Little Life would these be revealed as consistent preoccupations. The People in the Trees took Yanagihara 18 years to write, off and on, during which time she worked as a publicist, book editor, and magazine writer. A Little Life, which she wrote while an editor at large at Condé Nast Traveler, took only 18 months.

How to explain this novel’s success? The critic Parul Sehgal recently suggested A Little Life as a prominent example of the “ trauma plot ” — fiction that uses a traumatic backstory as a shortcut to narrative. Indeed, it’s easy to see Jude as a “vivified DSM entry” perfectly crafted to appeal to “a world infatuated with victimhood.” But Jude hates words like abuse and disabled and refuses to see a therapist for most of the novel, while Yanagihara has skeptically compared talk therapy to “scooping out your brain and placing it into someone else’s cupped palms to prod at.” (Jude’s sickest torturer turns out to be a psychiatrist.) More compelling about A Little Life — and vexing and disturbing — is the author’s omnipresence in the novel, not just as the “perverse intelligence” behind Jude’s trauma, in the words of another critic, but as the possessive presence keeping him, against all odds, alive. A Little Life was rightly called a love story; what critics missed was that its author is one of the lovers.

This is Yanagihara’s principle: If true misery exists, then so might true love. That simple idea, childlike in its brutality, informs all her fiction. Indeed, the author appears unable, or unwilling, to conceive love outside of life support; without suffering, the inherent monstrosity of love — its greed, its destructiveness — cannot be justified. This notion is inchoate in The People in the Trees , which features several characters kept on the brink of death and ends with a rapist’s declaration of love. In A Little Life, it blossoms into the anguished figure of Jude and the saintlike circle of friends who adore him. In Yanagihara’s new novel, To Paradise, which tells three tales of people fleeing one broken utopia for another, the misery principle has become airborne, passing aerosol-like from person to person while retaining its essential purpose — to allow the author to insert herself as a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health.

Two years after A Little Life was published, Yanagihara joined T magazine, the New York Times ’s monthly style insert, as editor. She has called the publication “a culture magazine masquerading as a fashion magazine” — though you’ll have to sift through many pages of luxury advertisements to confirm that. During her time at Condé Nast Traveler , the publication sent her on a staggering 12-country, 24-city, 45-day, $60,000 journey from Sri Lanka to Japan for a 2013 issue called, incredibly, “The Grand Tour of Asia.” “A trip to India isn’t complete without a stop at the legendary Gem Palace,” she wrote in a photo spread titled “The Plunder,” “and a few souvenir diamonds” — four diamond bangles, to be exact, priced up to $900 each. “When we wear a piece of custom jewelry ,” she once told readers of T , “we are adding ourselves to a legacy as old as the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians — older.”

This may be surprising. But it is easy to forget that A Little Life is an unapologetic lifestyle novel. Jude’s harrowing trials are finger-sandwiched between Lower East Side gallery openings, summers on Cape Cod, holiday in Hanoi. Critics remarked on its mouthwatering (or eye-rolling) spread of culinary delights, from duck à l’orange to escarole salad with pears and jamón, followed by pine-nut tart, tarte Tatin, and a homemade ten-nut cake Yanagihara later described as a cross between Danish rugbrød and a Japanese milk bread she once ordered at a Tokyo bakery. The book inspired celebrity chef Antoni Porowski to publish a recipe called “Gougères for Jude,” based on the canapés Jude makes for a New Year’s party before cutting his arms so badly he requires emergency medical attention; it can be found on the website for Boursin, the French herbed-cheese brand .

Indeed, Yanagihara’s onslaught of horrors could allow readers to block out, like a childhood trauma, the fact that they were reading luxury copy. Her first book was quite literally a travelogue written by a pedophile; in To Paradise, Yanagihara has not lost the familiar voice of a professional chronicler of wealth. Here are rose-hued Oriental carpets, dark-green douppioni-silk drapes, wood floors polished with macadamia oil; here are wok-fried snow peas, ginger-wine syllabub, a pine-nut tart (another one!). As in A Little Life, Yanagihara cannot help giving cheerful directions as she maneuvers her characters, tour guide–like, through New York. “We’ll cut across Christopher, and then go past Little Eight and east on Ninth Street before turning south on Fifth Avenue,” a minor character proposes during a crisis.

Perhaps I am being ungenerous. Surely novelists should describe things! Better, they should evoke them, like the dead, or the Orient. Yanagihara has a tourist’s eye for detail; this can make her a very engaging narrator. Here’s that holiday in Hanoi from A Little Life :

“[He] turned down an alley that was crowded with stall after stall of small, improvised restaurants, just a woman standing behind a kettle roiling with soup or oil, and four or five plastic stools … [He] let a man cycle past him, the basket strapped to the back of his seat loaded with spears of baguettes … and then headed down another alley, this one busy with vendors crouched over more bundles of herbs, and black hills of mangosteens, and metal trays of silvery-pink fish, so fresh he could hear them gulping.”

Now here’s days 23 and 24 of that “Grand Tour of Asia” from Condé Nast Traveler :

“You’ll see all the little tableaux … that make Hanoi the place it is: dozens of pho stands, with their big cauldrons of simmering broth … bicyclists pedaling by with basketfuls of fresh-baked bread; and, especially, those little street restaurants with their low tables and domino-shaped stools … [The next day] you’ll pass hundreds of stalls selling everything for the Vietnamese table, from mung bean noodles to homemade fish paste to Kaffir limes, as well as vendors crouched over hubcap-size baskets of mangoes, silkworms, and fish so fresh they’re still gulping for air.”

Now it is no crime to put your paid vacation into your novel. My point is simply that Yanagihara remains at heart a travel writer, if not an unreconstructed one. She seems to sense that wealth can be tilted, like a stone, to reveal the wriggling muck beneath. In a few cases, she is even making a political point, as with her abiding interest in the colonization of Hawaii. But more often in these books, wealth’s rotten underbelly is purely psychological: There are no wrongful beach houses in A Little Life, no ill-gotten hors d’oeuvre. Luxury is simply the backdrop for Jude’s extraordinary suffering, neither cause nor effect; if anything, the latter lends poignancy to the former. This was Yanagihara’s first discovery, the one that cracked open the cobbled streets of Soho and let something terrible slither out — the idea that misery bestows a kind of dignity that wealth and leisure, no matter how sharply rendered on the page, simply cannot.

To Paradise is not a novel at all. It is three books bound into a single volume: a novella, a brace of short stories, and a full-length novel. The conceit is that its three tales are set in 1893, 1993, and 2093 in alternate versions of a Washington Square townhouse. The first is a Henry James–esque period romance: David, a wealthy scion with a secret history of nervous breakdowns, rejects a proposal from the boring Charles to flee west with roguish pauper Edward. The second, a weird postcolonial fable, finds gay paralegal David hosting a dinner party with his older HIV-positive boyfriend, Charles, in honor of a terminally ill friend, while David’s father, the rightful king of Hawaii, lies dying in a psychiatric facility. The third book, the novel-length one, is a fitful attempt at speculative fiction complete with surveillance drones (“Flies”), boring names (“Zone Eight”), and a biodome over Central Park. In this New York ravaged by a century of pandemics, brain-damaged lab tech Charlie discovers her husband Edward’s infidelity, while her grandfather, a brilliant virologist, reveals his role in creating the current totalitarian government. (In a desultory bid to sew the three parts together, Yanagihara has given multiple characters the same name, without their being biologically or, indeed, meaningfully related.)

The third part of To Paradise may sound topical, but Yanagihara has a lifelong fascination with disease. She was a self-described “sickly child” whose father used to take her to a morgue where a pathologist would show her the cadavers, folding back the skin flaps like flower petals so the young girl could sketch their insides. Years later, The People in the Trees would center on a zoonotic disease that extends the sufferer’s life span while rapidly degrading cognitive function. In A Little Life, Jude’s history of abuse is equally a nutrient-rich soil for infection: his venereal diseases, acquired from clients; his cutting, which results in septicemia; his maimed legs, which, after decades of vascular ulcers and osteomyelitis, must finally be amputated. That’s to say nothing of the many minor characters in the novel who are summarily dispatched by strokes, heart attacks, multiple sclerosis, all kinds of cancer, and something called Nishihara syndrome, a neurodegenerative disease so rare the author had to make it up.

Like its predecessor, To Paradise is a book in which horrible things happen to people for no reason. The agents of misery this time have become literally inhuman: cancer, HIV, epilepsy, functional neurologic disorder, a toxic antiviral drug, the unidentified viral hemorrhagic fever that will fuel the next pandemic. A virus makes perfect sense as Yanagihara’s final avatar after three novels. The anguish it visits on humanity — illness, death, social collapse — is just an indifferent side effect of its pointless reproductive cycle. Biologists do not even agree on whether viruses are living organisms. A virus wants nothing, feels nothing, knows nothing; at most, a virus is a little life.

This is ideal for Yanagihara: pure suffering, undiluted by politics or psychology, by history or language or even sex. Free of meaning, it may more perfectly serve the author’s higher purpose. Reading A Little Life, one can get the impression that Yanagihara is somewhere high above with a magnifying glass, burning her beautiful boys like ants. In truth, Jude is a terribly unlovable character, always lying and breaking promises, with the inner monologue of an incorrigible child. The first time he cuts himself, you are horrified; the 600th time, you wish he would aim. Yet Yanagihara loves him excessively, cloyingly. The book’s omniscient narrator seems to be protecting Jude, cradling him in her cocktail-party asides and winding digressions, keeping him alive for a stunning 800 pages. This is not sadism; it is closer to Munchausen by proxy.

Yanagihara provides a perfect image for this kind of love. Jude’s lover, Willem, trying to prevent him from cutting himself, hugs Jude so tightly he can barely breathe. “Pretend we’re falling and we’re clinging together from fear,” Willem tells him; for a brief moment, the fiction of imminent death cuts through Jude’s self-loathing and allows him to crumple helplessly into his lover’s suffocating embrace. As he loses consciousness, Jude imagines them falling all the way to the earth’s core, where the fires melt them into a single being whom even death cannot part.

If disease is Yanagihara’s angel of death, gay men are her perfect patients. The majority of her protagonists to date are gay men, or at least men-loving men, and she approaches them with a distinct preciousness. When Jude finally reveals the details of his horrific childhood to Willem, the two are lying on the floor of a literal closet. In A Little Life, this tendency could be fobbed off as a literary technique in line with Yanagihara’s stated desire to make the novel “operatic,” but in To Paradise, her sentimentality has begun weeping like a sore. “We could never be together in the West, Edward. Be sensible! It is dangerous to be like us out there,” pleads one David. “If we couldn’t live as who we are, then how could we be free?” Indeed, the entire first book of To Paradise is set in an alternate version of 19th-century New York preposterously founded on the freedom of love; you’ll forgive me for being unmoved, at this moment in history, by the heartbreak of marriage equality.

And then there is the matter of AIDS. It’s true that To Paradise is not an AIDS novel; the actual crisis, which unfolds here just as it did in reality, is little more than a faint backdrop for a hundred pages. But this is only because Yanagihara appears to see all diseases as allegories for the human immunodeficiency virus. Charles’s ex-boyfriend Peter may only be dying of “boring old cancer, I’m afraid,” but the virus hovers over his farewell party and lingers through the novel’s succession of pandemics. The next Charles, persona non grata in a fascist state of his own design, will join other mildly oppressed gay men of New York in seeking love and support in a riverside rowhouse on Jane Street in the West Village — three blocks from the real-life AIDS memorial in Hudson River Park. This detail is mawkish in the extreme, a shameless attempt to trade on the enviable pathos of a disease transmitted through an act of love.

When A Little Life was first published, the novelist Garth Greenwell declared it “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years,” praising Yanagihara for writing a novel about “queer suffering” that was about AIDS only in spirit. This was a curious claim for several reasons. First, many of the novel’s characters, including Willem and Jude, fail to identify as gay in the conventional sense. Second, Yanagihara herself is not gay, though she says she perfunctorily slept with women at Smith College. Indeed, if A Little Life was opera, it was not La Bohème ; it was Rent. Now perhaps the great gay novel should move beyond the strictures of identity politics; Yanagihara has stubbornly defended her “right to write about whatever I want.” God forbid that only gay men should write gay men — let a hundred flowers bloom. But if a white author were to write a novel with Asian American protagonists who, while resistant to identifying as Asian American, nonetheless inhabited an unmistakably Asian American milieu, it might occur to us to ask why.

Why, then? “I don’t know,” Yanagihara told one journalist. To another, she insisted, “I don’t think there’s anything inherent to the gay-male identity that interests me.” These are baffling, even offensive responses given that she has had almost a decade to come up with better ones. But I do not think Yanagihara, an author who believes in fiction as a conscious act of avoidance, is being dishonest. “A fiction writer can hide anything she wants in her fiction, a power that’s as liberating as it is imprisoning,” she has written, explaining her refusal to go to therapy despite the urging of her best friend, the man to whom A Little Life is dedicated and whose social circle inspired the book’s friendships. “As she grows more adept at it, however,” Yanagihara continues, “she may find she’s losing practice in the art of telling the truth about herself.”

That well may be. Regardless of Yanagihara’s private life, her work betrays a touristic kind of love for gay men. By exaggerating their vulnerability to humiliation and physical attack, she justifies a maternal posture of excessive protectiveness. This is not an act of dehumanization but the opposite. There is a horrible piety to Jude, named for the patron saint of lost causes; he has been force-fed sentimentality. When the author is not doling out this smothering sort of love through her male characters (Willem, for instance), she is enacting it at the level of her own narration. Indeed, the conspicuous absence of women in her fiction may well express Yanagihara’s tendency, as a writer, to hoard female subjectivity for herself.

This brings us to Charlie, a narrator in To Paradise and Yanagihara’s only female protagonist to date. Charlie is a technician who takes care of mouse embryos at an influenza lab in Zone Fifteen. The antiviral drug that saved her life as a child has left her affectless and naïve, pitifully incapable of comprehending the extent of her own loneliness. After Charlie is raped by two boys her age — the only rape in this whole book, if you can believe it — her grandfather Charles desperately tries to ensure her safety by marrying her off to a homosexual like himself. But it is with Charlie, who longs for her husband to touch her even as she knows he never will, that the sublimation of romantic love will finally slouch into despair. When Charlie follows him to a gay haven in the West Village, having discovered notes from his lover, she is heartbroken. “I knew I would never be loved,” Charlie thinks. “I knew I would never love, either.”

But this isn’t entirely true. After Charlie’s husband dies of an unknown illness, the only woman Yanagihara has ever asked readers to care about will lie next to his corpse and kiss him for the first time — the space between them closed, at last, by death.

There is no paradise for Charlie. The odd and tuneless phrase to paradise provides a destination but withholds any promise of arrival. Perhaps this is why Yanagihara has tacked it half-heartedly onto the last sentence of each of the novel’s three books. Doom shadows every character who decides to abandon one apocryphal heaven on earth for another: the plutocratic Northeast for the homophobic West, the colonized state of Hawaii for a delusional kingdom on the beach, totalitarian America for the unknown New Britain. Every paradise is a gossamer curtain; behind it lies a pit of squalor, disease, torture, madness, and tyranny. Freedom is a lie, safety is a lie, struggle is a lie; even the luxuries Yanagihara has spent her career recording are nothing in the end. For paradise, insofar as it means heaven, also means death.

Not even love will save Yanagihara’s characters. Her fantasies of suffering and illness are designed only to produce a very specific kind of love, and this love is not curative but palliative — it results, sooner or later, in the death of the thing. If this is fatalism, it is not the sanguine fatalism of Prospero, another rightful king on another island paradise, reminding his audience that “we are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” No, it is the exsanguinating fatalism of Jude, who, out of love for his boyfriend, will try to show “a little life” — a phrase he learned from his pimp — while Willem makes love to his reluctant body. The same phrase appears in The People in the Trees, where it describes the bleak vegetative state that befalls the islanders whose disease has stretched out their life spans. In To Paradise, Charles reflects on a set of immune-compromised twins, explaining that he never became a clinician because he “was never convinced that life — its saving, its extension, its return — was definitively the best outcome.” The twins die, possibly by suicide, and Charles goes on to design death camps. “There’s a point,” Yanagihara once said of Jude, at which “it becomes too late to help some people.”

These are difficult words to read for those of us who have passed through suicidal ideation and emerged, if not happy to be alive, then relieved not to be dead. It is indeed a tourist’s imagination that would glance out from its hotel window onto the squalor below and conclude that death is the opposite of paradise, as if the locals did not live their little lives on the expansive middle ground between the two. But even Yanagihara’s novels are not death camps; they are hospice centers. A Little Life, like life itself, goes on and on. Hundreds of pages into the novel, Jude openly wonders why he is still alive, the beloved of a lonely god. For that is the meaning of suffering: to make love possible. Charles loves David; David loves Edward; David loves Charles; Charlie loves Edward; Jude loves Willem; Hanya loves Jude; misery loves company.

• vulture homepage lede
• book review
• close reads
• one great story
• new york magazine
• hanya yanagihara
• the best of vulture

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 176: September 18, 2024
• Can Ben Affleck Handle Another Jennifer in His Life?
• The 50 Best NPR Tiny Desks
• Pommel-Horse Guy Now Ballroom Boy
• A Guide to the Many Lawsuits Against Diddy
• Slow Horses Recap: That’s a Big Dog

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2015

Kirkus Prize winner

National Book Award Finalist

A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

GENERAL FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Hanya Yanagihara

BOOK REVIEW

by Hanya Yanagihara

More About This Book

PERSPECTIVES

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

More by J.D. Salinger

by J.D. Salinger

SEEN & HEARD

APPRECIATIONS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah ( The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

The Literature Empire

Book review: hanya yanagihara – a little life.

One of the saddest books on the market. That’s what you might have heard of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara – or at least that’s what I figured from all the reviews I’ve seen online. But is it actually worth reading?

I started to read the book with great expectations, even though I was very hesitant at first. And with all the trigger warnings, who wouldn’t be?

Well, it turned out to be a rollercoaster of emotions – but let’s not spoil it too much in advance.

So, let’s figure out whether you do or don’t want to add the book to your to-read list.

• The trigger warnings you might have heard regarding the book are there for a reason. There are themes and plot developments that are truly upsetting.
• The main characters have amazing chemistry – I wish there were more moments where we’d see them interact.
• While I loved the first half of the book, it then seemed like the author kept throwing the characters (especially Jude) into traumatic situations just for the sake of it. How much suffering is too much to make the book still enjoyable?

What Is A Little Life Really About?

In A Little Life , we meet a group of 4 friends who went to the college together:

• Willem – a kind and handsome aspiring actor
• Jude – a brilliant lawyer dealing with a troubled past
• Malcolm – an architect who isn’t happy about his job
• JB – a talented artist trying to break through and make his mark in the industry

The story follows them over decades. And as it always is with people, all of them change. Over time, their relationships take a darker turn but become deeper at the same time. 

Throughout the years, their friendships get tainted by addiction, pride, and drive to succeed.

But no matter what, all of them seem to gravitate to Jude.

While there is a great dynamic among the main characters, it all spirals back to Jude – his traumatic upbringing and demons of the past that keep haunting him till the end.

So, essentially, it’s a deep dive into the soul of a man who suffered too much and went through events that nobody deserves to experience.

In the Beginning, There Were Four

Willem, Jude, Malcolm, and JB have great dynamics. In fact, my most favourite scenes in the book were those where I could see them all interact with each other. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many situations like that.

And while all of them are framed as the main characters, only Willem and Jude seem to stay in the centre of the story. JB and Malcolm still have their storylines, but as the years go by, Yanagihara doesn’t focus on them in her story as much anymore. And that’s a pity, in my opinion.

True, there are also many other relationships – whether they’re romantic, friendly, or parental – that form around the individual characters. While some add genuine value to the storyline and emotions of the story, it feels like others are there only for sensation.

Even though I love Jude and Willem and their dynamic, I wish there was a bit more focus on the entire group.

Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged. Hanya Yanagihara – A Little Life

How Much Suffering Is Too Much?

The amount of trauma and suffering is one of the main reasons why the book is so controversial.

Jude is so broken. And after what he’s been through, it’s no wonder. You can’t help but feel bad for him. Really, no one should go through what happened to him since his early childhood.

However, how much suffering is too much? When should be the right time to stop before it scales too much in the book?

Honestly, I knew that I was in for a ride when I started the book, just based on what I’ve heard from others. But it doesn’t take much to figure out what’s happened to Jude pretty early on in the book. I really didn’t want to believe it when I started to put together the puzzle.

I think that Yanagihara took it too far. There were villains that made my heart break, but then there were evil characters that just didn’t fit in, and it felt like the author kept adding in the moments of suffering just for the sake of it.

I just kept thinking: “That’s a bit overboard, right?” But at the same time, there are 7 billion people in the world. And if there’s someone going through even a fraction of what happened to Jude and others, then I’m so sorry, and I keep them in my prayers.

So… Is it realistic?

I can’t say. But it’s fiction, so the borders could be stretched way beyond reality.

The Final Verdict

If there’s any book I have a love/hate relationship with, it would be this one.

Everyone was telling me how they found the first 200 pages or so really boring and slow. But to be honest, I LOVED the first half of the book. But I really don’t bask in seeing people going through traumatic experiences, and this was too much for me.

In the second half of the book, it felt to me like the writer just flew through the rest of the story. The years went past quickly, there were unnecessary villains, and some romantic relationships made no sense whatsoever.

But I might be a strange audience for the book. Everyone I know has cried while reading the book. I didn’t. Don’t take me wrong – it is a heartbreaking story. But I completely skipped the sadness and went directly into the stage of anger. Really, I don’t think my book has ever flown across a living room before.

So… Will I read the book again?

Am I glad that I’ve read it?

Should you read it?

It depends. I don’t want you to get triggered by some of the things going on in the story. But if you’re interested in psychology and love to see how the human mind can sometimes work, then it could be worth it.

Readers Also Ask

Is a little life a hard read.

Yes, it is – both in terms of the length and complexity of the story. After all, the book has over 700 pages, and the plot spins over decades. So, there’s a lot to follow and remember as you go.

Should a 14-year-old read A Little Life ?

Definitely not. It’s a challenging read, even for adults. There’s a lot of trauma, heartbreak, and upsetting themes that could bring harm to teens in that vulnerable time of their lives.

What is the controversy with the book A Little Life ?

The main controversy with the book stems from its depiction of trauma. Many people also bring up that the amount of trauma isn’t realistic, and LGBT characters are depicted and treated poorly by the writer.

Pick Your Next Read

Are you looking to read something happier? Here are some of my articles that could improve your mood:

• PHOTO DIARY: Chatsworth House – Do you love Pride and Prejudice? Read more about my trip to Pemberley as you might know it from the 2005 movie adaptation.
• BOOK REVIEW: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary A. Shaffer and Annie Barrows – A story of a writer who travels to Guernsey and falls in love. Is it the right read for you? Find out in this review!
• Book review: Good Omens – Who doesn’t love a good fantasy book? Let’s dive into the magic of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

Share this:

Leave a comment cancel reply.

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

A Little Life : The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here

Hanya Yanagihara’s novel is an astonishing and ambitious chronicle of queer life in America.

In a 2013 essay for Salon , the culture writer Daniel D’Addario lamented the absence of a big, ambitious novel about gay life in America today. While the number of LGBT characters in mainstream novels has increased, he argued, they’re too often relegated to subplots or “window dressing,” their lives left “sketchy and oblique.” D’Addario surveyed a number of prominent gay writers about his thesis, and the next day Tyler Coates summarized their views for Flavorwire in a piece titled “ The Great Gay Novel is Never Going to Happen .”

Recommended Reading

The Puzzling Virus That Infects Almost Everyone

The Secret of Scooby-Doo ’s Enduring Appeal

Dear Therapist: My Roommate Is Cheating on Her Boyfriend With Me

But I think it’s possible that novel has happened, even if no one has quite realized it yet. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was released in March, is one of the most buzzed-about books of the season, hailed as a “tour de force,” “extraordinary,” “elemental and irreducible,” “astonishing,” and the work of “ a major American novelist .” But no coverage of the book I’ve seen has discussed it as a novel fundamentally about gay lives—as the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.

The book follows a group of four men—Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm—over three decades of friendship, from their years as college roommates to the heights of professional success. Three of them form their primary physical and emotional bonds with other men, though sometimes in ways that challenge the usual nomenclatures. Of the novel’s main characters, only JB unambiguously embodies an immediately recognizable and unambivalent gay identity. Willem spends much of his adulthood pursuing sexual relationships with women, before he recognizes his desire for Jude and acknowledges their friendship as a life partnership. In college, JB calls Jude “the Postman” because he seems to entirely escape the usual categories: “We never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him … [He’s] post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.”

The complexity of the characters’ relationships to sexual identity is one way Yanagihara elevates them from mere “window dressing,” and I suspect it’s one reason A Little Life hasn’t been recognized as a book fundamentally about gay male experience. Another is that readers have come to expect such books to be written by gay men and to be at least plausibly confessional. From Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1982) to Justin Torres’ We the Animals (2011), novels about gay men and their lives have often been more or less easily mappable onto the author’s biography. In essays and interviews , Yanagihara has spoken of her desire instead to write across difference, exploring what she sees as specifically male friendships and emotional communication.

Just as Yanagihara’s characters challenge conventional categories of gay identity, so A Little Life avoids the familiar narratives of gay fiction. Yanagihara approaches the collective traumas that have so deeply shaped modern gay identity—sickness and discrimination—obliquely, avoiding the conventions of the coming-out narrative or the AIDS novel. Her characters suffer relatively little anxiety about the public reception of their sexual identities—only Malcolm will be tormented by coming out, before realizing that in fact he’s straight—and HIV is conspicuously absent from the book’s weirdly ahistorical New York City.

But queer suffering is at the heart of A Little Life . The novel centers on Jude, who’s 16 when he arrives at an affluent New England college with only a backpack of baggy clothes. Parentless and horribly scarred, with his legs disfigured in an incident whose details he guards as closely as everything else about his past, he’s profoundly aware of his “extreme otherness.” The book slowly discloses luridly gothic episodes from his life before college, among them abandonment, childhood in a monastery, horrifying physical and sexual abuse, prostitution, and abduction. “You were made for this, Jude,” he’s told by the only adult he loves, a monk who betrays his trust, and Jude comes to believe that his suffering is a consequence of what he is: “He had been born, and left, and found, and used as he had been intended to be used.”

Jude’s childhood is an extreme iteration of the abandonment, exploitation, and abuse that remain endemic in the experience of queer young people. Recent discussion of that experience has been dominated by an affirmative narrative—“It Gets Better”—that may be true for most. But it isn’t true for Jude. Even as he acquires wealth and power, Jude’s sense of the logic of his life never changes. His self-loathing is shocking from the start, and only grows more abject: he is “a nothing,” “rotten,” “useless,” “ugly,” “a piece of junk,” “inhuman … deficient … disgusting.” “Every year, his right to humanness diminished,” he reflects late in the novel; “every year, he became less and less of a person.” After the abuse he has suffered, he will never be able to able to enjoy sex, even as he craves the physical and emotional intimacy he finds in his partnership with Willem.

Both the intensity of pain Jude endures and other aspects of his and his friends’ lives—each is brilliant, each becomes not just successful but famous—strain credulity, and while Yanagihara has insisted that the novel’s plot is “not, technically, implausible,” it’s clear that the book is after something other than strict realism. This has annoyed some critics. In The New York Times Book Review , Carol Anshaw accused the novel both of being “allegorical” in its disregard for social and historical reality, and of placing the reader in a voyeuristic attitude toward suffering that’s so baroque as to seem like “a contrivance.”

To understand the novel’s exaggeration and its intense, claustrophobic focus on its characters’ inner lives requires recognizing how it engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera . The book is scaled to the intensity of Jude’s inner life, and for long passages it forces the reader to experience a world that’s brutally warped by suffering. Again and again A Little Life conveys Jude’s sense of himself through elaborate metaphor: he is “a scrap of bloodied, muddied cloth,” “a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled,” “a scooped out husk.” His memories are “hyenas,” his fear “a flock of flapping bats,” his self-hatred a “beast.” This language infects those closest to him, so that for Willem, learning about his childhood is “plunging an arm into the snake- and centipede-squirming muck of Jude’s past.” In its sometimes grueling descriptions of Jude’s self-harm and his perceptions of his own body, the book reminds readers of the long filiation between gay art and the freakish, the abnormal, the extreme—those aspects of queer culture we’ve been encouraged to forget in an era that’s increasingly embracing gay marriage and homonormativity.

This is not a register of feeling or expression readers are accustomed to in American literary fiction. Yanagihara has described the experience of writing the novel as “a fever dream,” and reading it induces a similar effect. Part of this is due to the novel’s structural conceit: In nearly every section, a present-moment scene is interrupted for dozens of pages by elaborate flashbacks, mimicking the way Jude’s past irrupts into his present. Combined with the novel’s emotional extremity and the tightness of its focus on Jude’s consciousness, this nonlinear structure produces a feeling of immersion that’s almost unprecedented in my experience as a reader.

The novel’s darkness is leavened by its portrayal of Jude’s friends, whose attempts to care for him inevitably recall the communities of care formed by LGBT people in response to the AIDS crisis. Each of Jude’s friends cares for him differently, uniquely: Malcolm by designing spaces that will accommodate his disability; JB by painting portraits “kinder than the eye alone would see”; Willem by being the one person to whom he can tell his entire history. They make innumerable accommodations to Jude’s daily needs; in periods of crisis, they monitor him, making sure he eats and doesn’t harm himself.

The book vigorously defends friendship as a primary relationship, as central as marriage to the making of lives and communities. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?” Willem thinks early in the novel. “Why wasn’t it even better?” For Jude, his friends “had imagined his life for him … they had allowed him to believe in possibilities that he would never have conceived.” Their relationships with one another challenge categorization. “They were inventing their own type of relationship,” Willem thinks of Jude, “one that wasn't officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.”

These passages recall similar defenses of friendship from queer writers before the age of marriage equality, especially Edmund White. “And friendship will be elevated into the supreme consolation for this continuing tragedy, human existence,” White wrote in 1983, as he was beginning to understand both the scope of the AIDS crisis and the need for novel social arrangements to sustain queer communities through it.

“It might have been mawkish,” one character thinks about his feeling for Jude, “but it was also true.” This is the claim that animates A Little Life : that by violating the canons of current literary taste, by embracing melodrama and exaggeration and sentiment, it can access emotional truths denied more modest means of expression. In this astonishing novel, Yanagihara achieves what great gay art from Proust to Almodóvar has so often sought: a grandeur of feeling adequate to “the terrifying largeness, the impossibility of the world.”

About the Author

More Stories

The Timely Anxiety of Linda Gregerson’s Prodigal

Review: ‘A Little Life’ a darkly beautiful tale of love and friendship

• Copy Link URL Copied!

I’ve read a lot of emotionally taxing books in my time, but “A Little Life,” Hanya Yanagihara’s follow-up to 2013’s brilliant, harrowing “The People in the Trees,” is the only one I’ve read as an adult that’s left me sobbing. I became so invested in the characters and their lives that I almost felt unqualified to review this book objectively.

For example, less than 200 pages in, something wonderful happens to the main character, Jude St. Francis, who has already been subjected to an incredible amount of suffering. I became nauseous with the knowledge that this precarious joy would have to collapse in the following 500 pages. I wanted so badly for Jude to remain frozen in a moment of happiness that part of me wished the book were ending with that note of hope, the light reached at the end of the tunnel — I wished, in other words, for a gentler, inferior book. Instead, Yanagihara records the ups and downs of Jude’s life with painterly, painstaking patience, denying easy resolutions at every turn.

When the novel begins, Jude has already survived his formative traumas. He and college friends JB, Malcolm and Willem have moved to New York to realize their ambitions; he has a stable existence and people who love him. We meet him at a moment when a less exacting writer might have left him to a vague, sunny destiny.

But life for Jude is a daily struggle. He is overwhelmed by “the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days.” His memories hound him, and he is in chronic physical pain because of a crippling injury of mysterious origin.

He doesn’t talk about his childhood, and he is constantly exhausted by “the thousands of little deflections and smudgings of truth, of fact, that necessitated his every interaction with the world and its inhabitants.” With endless vigilance, he hides his many secrets from his closest friends. At one point, JB dubs him the Postman: “[W]e never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-past.” Even Willem, his most beloved, kind-hearted friend, finds that their relationship seems to require “not letting himself ask the questions he knew he ought to, because he was afraid of the answers.”

Yanagihara is a patient writer — she took nearly two decades to finish “The People in the Trees” while working as first a book publicist and later a magazine editor (she is an editor-at-large for Condé Nast Traveler). And while the narrative pace of “A Little Life” never feels sluggish, we learn about Jude in careful increments. (“Friendship,” thinks Willem, “was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries.”)

Part of the suspense of “A Little Life” lies in our discovery of Jude’s horrific past, which Yanagihara reveals piece by excruciating piece. His childhood is an agonizing parade of tragedy and evil, starting with his abandonment at a monastery (“Inside a trash bag, stuffed with eggshells and old lettuce and spoiled spaghetti — and you”), where he suffers abuses at the hands of the brothers before moving on to worse and worse fates. But there is nothing lurid or gratuitous about the telling, and each piece helps us make sense of the Jude we have gotten to know.

We follow Jude and the people in his life for decades. (One of the many things Yanagihara handles well is the narrative passage of time.) He finds professional success as a fearsome litigator, and he maintains strong relationships that help him survive. He is beloved and cared for — by his friends; by his doctor Andy, who acts as a surrogate older brother; by his old law school professor Harold, who acts as a surrogate father — but his well-being is always in question.

Despite evidence to the contrary, he lives with the persistent belief “that he is a nothing, a scooped-out husk in which the fruit has long since mummified and shrunk, and now rattles uselessly.” He keeps his secrets close to his chest, convinced that he is “a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated” and that his friends will reject and despise him if they find out what happened to him, which he can’t help but equate with who he is.

Here lies the central conflict of this novel — can Jude overcome his shame and self-loathing and open up to his friends? And if he can, will they be able to help him? It says a lot about Yanagihara’s talents that this deeply contemplative, psychological, tortured material is as compelling as the plot-heavy story of Jude’s past. It is also at least as upsetting, a brutal examination of the lifelong effects of trauma, of the impossibility of healing all damage.

“A Little Life” is not misery porn; if that’s what you’re looking for, you will be disappointed, denied catharsis. There are truths here that are almost too much to bear — that hope is a qualified thing, that even love, no matter how pure and freely given, is not always enough. This book made me realize how merciful most fiction really is, even at its darkest, and it’s a testament to Yanagihara’s ability that she can take such ugly material and make it beautiful.

Cha is the author, most recently, of “Beware Beware.”

A Little Life A Novel

Hanya Yanagihara Doubleday: 720 pp, $30

More to Read

Feeling climate anxiety? These books offer glimmers of hope — and much-needed wisdom

Sept. 11, 2024

The violence of rural life blends with the gravity of Chinese myth in the horror novel ‘Sacrificial Animals’

Aug. 19, 2024

Review: In ‘Great Absence,’ a son puzzles out the dad he misunderstood, now fading into dementia

July 26, 2024

Sign up for our Book Club newsletter

Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Connie Chung reveals doctor who sexually abused her also delivered her: ‘Reprehensible’

Sept. 18, 2024

The week’s bestselling books, Sept. 22

5 mysteries to read this fall

The 5 biggest ‘Gilmore Girls’ revelations from Kelly Bishop’s memoir

Sept. 17, 2024

Most Read in Books

Eric Roberts has no use for fame anymore. He just wants to work

Please enable JavaScript in your web browser to get the best experience.

• Go to our Facebook page.
• Go to our Twitter page.
• Go to our Instagram page.
• Go to our YouTube page.
• Go to our TikTok page.

Dua Lipa on A Little Life: ‘It challenged everything I thought I knew about love'

In this guest post, the award-winning singer-songwriter explains why Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel does exactly what great literature is supposed to do - it makes us think deeply and helps us understand life

Written by Dua Lipa

I will happily admit, as a devoted and lifelong reader, that there are more than a few books that have made me cry. But Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is different: it was one of the first books where I openly sobbed after reading. By the end of it I felt profoundly changed. I’m not exaggerating when I say this novel challenged everything I thought I knew about love and friendship. It’s one of those books that stays with you forever.   

Of course, A Little Life is not an easy read. So after saying it’s one of my ‘favourite’ books, I always feel the need to add a caveat to that statement, because while exquisitely written it is also relentlessly sad, with 700 pages detailing harrowing abuse and trauma. Without giving too much away, the main character Jude experiences horrific repeated sexual abuse and violence as a child, and the core of the story hangs on how this trauma affects the rest of his life and the lives of those closest to him. There’s JB the artist, Malcolm the architect, Willem the actor and Jude the lawyer, each reaching the pinnacle of outward success in their chosen career.     

Jude is an incredibly strong character, and many readers, myself included, say that he stays in their mind for years after reading the book. He wears a tough exterior to hide from the abuse he has suffered, but inside he’s deeply sensitive and troubled and traumatised. Yet somehow he still picks himself back up and tries until the very end to continue his life, albeit without ever letting anyone get too close.   

As the story unfolds through a variety of horrific flashbacks, we are increasingly privy to what’s happening in Jude’s brain and why he is the way he is. The more we learn about what happened to him at school, the more we understand where his insecurities stem from and his behaviour starts to make sense. I wanted to jump into the pages and take Willem, JB and Malcolm to one side and help them to help Jude to open up.  

Of course, in real life, we are often in the position of the other characters in the book, never really knowing what drives a person’s self-destructive behaviour. How many of us have wanted to save someone who doesn’t want to be saved? Or felt like we alone may be able to persuade someone to keep living? Between Willem and Jude there’s a kind of love that knows no bounds; that sad but unconditional love of wanting to help someone but not necessarily being able to really get to the core of the problem. As the reader, you hope desperately that Jude and his friends will be able to heal and transcend this awful past. But as Jude scars his own body through self-harm, and the scars in his mind do equal damage to his career and relationships, you fear that he won’t - and that the trauma of the past will eventually consume them all.   

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

It was one of the first books where I openly sobbed after reading. By the end of it I felt profoundly changed — Dua Lipa

It is deeply unsettling and painful, as much for the inevitability of how the story plays out as for the specific tragedies the characters suffer, Jude above all. And that is exactly the point. Great literature helps us understand life, real life, and not every story is supposed to make us feel good. But if it makes you feel a connection, if it makes you think deeply, then I think that’s exactly what literature is supposed to do, and that’s why A Little Life so deserved its place on the Booker Prize shortlist.  

Several years after first reading the story, I think about those four friends living together in their apartment on New York’s Lispenard Street often. Like many others who have read this book, my friends and I have formed a kind of self-help group to help endure the agony within it, and we check in with each other every time one of us walks past Lispenard Street in real life. It’s a place that symbolises the characters’ friendships and that makes me think of my own friendships which are also enduring, profound and absolutely fundamental to my life.  

For many fans of the book, Lispenard Street has become a place of pilgrimage, perhaps because it represents a space for friends fresh out of college where they share their lives, develop their careers and find their freedoms. It’s something we can all relate to in some way, and many of us have our own personal Lispenard Street. Mine is in West London, where I moved when I was just 15 years old, a time that was really formative for me. I had left my family home in Kosovo to pursue a career in music and moved into a small flat. I was living alone and my friends became my family. Just like the four men in the story, I was figuring out my dreams and my goals and how I was going to get to where I wanted to be. That was the place that shaped me and set me off, even though I was still at school. I would meet my friends in nightclubs and we’d end the night with the most colourful cast of characters, who would come back to my flat. These weird and wonderful personalities, who tended to be older than me and had interesting jobs, really inspired me to just get out and do the work.   

What I think makes the book so emotionally powerful - and intelligent - is Hanya Yanagihara’s decision to pay homage to the purity of friendship above all else in A Little Life . So many other novels explore the more common literary construct of Big Love - romance, sex, marriage. But at the centre of this book is an understanding that it is the love inherent in friendship that saves us again and again. Ultimately, it’s desperately sad - yearning to help someone doesn’t always result in reaching the core of their distress. There are some things which are always going to be out of reach. But there is hope in this selfless love, the beauty of loving someone with all their flaws, come what may.     

Canal street and Broadway, New York

At the centre of this book is an understanding that it is the love inherent in friendship that saves us again and again — Dua Lipa

I had the privilege of speaking to Hanya Yanagihara about writing A Little Life on my podcast , and I asked her why she decided to tell a story primarily about male friendship. I still think about her response often: ‘It wasn’t that men didn’t feel vulnerability, shame or sorrow, it was that we live in a culture that doesn’t allow them to express those things,’ she told me. ‘What happens to half of our population when they are not allowed to express the fundamental human qualities that make us vulnerable? Where does that shame and anger and sorrow go? And, of course, it either explodes outwards or it turns inwards.’ Both these things happen in A Little Life , with tragic consequences.    

If you haven’t already read this novel, you will have gathered by now that A Little Life can be hard to get through - and no wonder, given the themes it tackles. But for anyone who has hesitated to pick up this book, or struggled to finish it first time around, I’d suggest to maybe look at it from a more empathetic angle. Try to imagine, if you can bear it, that something like this was happening to someone you know - that friend who can be difficult to reach or the one who holds you at a distance. By taking us to the extremes, Hanya Yanagihara opens our eyes to how people find themselves in this cycle and challenges us to love them more, not less. The easiest thing we can do is run away from things that make us uncomfortable, but sometimes the best thing to do is dive in and think about your own personal relationships and whether there’s someone out there who needs your help.   

Yes, A Little Life is shot through with pain. But there is also beauty in the purity of friendship, love and compassion within its pages. You might love it. You might hate it. But, for sure, you will be profoundly changed.

Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life

Read more on a little life, book of the month: a little life by hanya yanagihara.

Hanya Yanagihara’s deft depiction of heartbreak becomes a dark examination of the tyranny of memory, the limits of human endurance and the power of friendship

Read an extract from A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Win a copy of a little life by hanya yanagihara - and a booker prize tote bag, reading guide: a little life by hanya yanagihara, buy the book.

Reading list

Nine Booker Prize-nominated novels that explore toxic relationships

10 of the most heartbreaking books from the booker library, 70 classic booker prize-nominated novels, recommended by our readers, the best love stories in booker-nominated books.

Book recommendations

Ten Booker-nominated books to inspire a fresh start

First person

A Little Life: 'I forged a deep connection with vulnerable, determined Jude'

Ecstasy or agony: the story behind the 'visceral' photo on the cover of a little life.

Competition

Book extract

Reading guides

A Little Life: 'Reading about someone else’s pain makes you feel less alone’

Dua lipa's booker prize speech: 'i wonder if authors realise how many gifts they give us', share this page.

• Share this page on Facebook
• Share this page on Twitter
• Share this page on LinkedIn
• Share this page on Mail

– Entertainment Analysis and Reviews

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara: Exploring Complex Themes

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a novel that has captured the attention of readers and critics alike since its publication in 2015. The book tells the story of four college friends — Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB — as they navigate their way through adulthood in New York City. At the center of the story is Jude, a deeply traumatized individual whose past is slowly revealed over the course of the novel.

The book is a work of contemporary literature that has been praised for its vivid characterization, emotional depth, and intricate plotting. It has been compared to classic works of literature such as The Great Gatsby and Wuthering Heights for its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in life.

Despite its acclaim, the book has also been criticized for its graphic depictions of violence and abuse, which some readers have found difficult to stomach. Nevertheless, A Little Life continues to be a book that generates discussion and debate, and its impact on readers is undeniable. In this article, we will explore the various aspects of this book that make it such a compelling and thought-provoking read.

Summary of the Book

Literary analysis of the book, psychological themes explored in the book, social and cultural context of the book.

A. Plot Summary A Little Life tells the story of four friends — Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB — who meet in college and move to New York City after graduation. The book follows their lives over several decades as they pursue their careers and relationships, while also dealing with personal struggles and traumas. At the center of the story is Jude, a brilliant lawyer who has a dark and mysterious past that is slowly revealed over the course of the novel.

Main Characters and Their Relationships

• Jude: A complex and enigmatic character, Jude is the heart of the novel. He is a successful lawyer with a traumatic past that haunts him throughout the book. He is deeply private and struggles to form close relationships with others.
• Willem: Jude’s best friend and the person closest to him. He is a successful actor who remains devoted to Jude throughout the book.
• Malcolm: A successful architect who struggles with feelings of inadequacy and loneliness.
• JB: A talented artist who struggles with addiction and relationships.

Themes Explored in the Book

• Trauma and its effects on individuals and relationships.
• Friendship and the importance of human connection.
• The search for identity and meaning in life.
• Love and the complexities of relationships.

• Narrative Structure: A Little Life is structured around Jude’s life, with the story unfolding in a nonlinear fashion through a series of flashbacks and present-day scenes. This structure allows the reader to gradually piece together Jude’s past and the traumas that have shaped him. The book is divided into four parts, each representing a different stage of Jude’s life and marked by a significant event or turning point.
• Character: Development One of the book’s strengths is its richly drawn characters. The four main characters are complex and multidimensional, with distinct personalities and backgrounds. The novel’s focus on Jude allows for a deep exploration of his psyche and his struggles with trauma, identity, and relationships. Yanagihara uses vivid descriptions and introspection to create characters that feel fully realized and believable.
• Symbolism and Motifs: Throughout the book, Yanagihara uses a number of symbols and motifs to reinforce the novel’s themes. One of the most prominent is the recurring image of cutting, which represents both Jude’s self-harm and the emotional wounds that he carries with him. The novel also features a number of animal motifs, including birds and turtles, which serve to underscore the characters’ vulnerabilities and the fragile nature of life.

• Trauma and its effects: A Little Life explores the long-term effects of trauma on an individual’s psyche, relationships, and life choices. Jude’s traumatic past, which is slowly revealed over the course of the novel, has a profound impact on his life and relationships. The book examines the ways in which trauma can shape a person’s identity and behavior, and how it can be difficult to move past.
• Friendship and love: The novel also explores the complexities of friendship and love. The bond between Jude and his friends is a central focus of the book, and Yanagihara examines the ways in which these relationships are tested and strengthened over time. The book also explores the different forms that love can take, from romantic love to familial love, and the ways in which love can be both a source of comfort and pain.
• The meaning of life: A Little Life grapples with the existential question of the meaning of life. The characters in the novel are all searching for something, whether it is success, love, or purpose. The book raises questions about what gives life meaning and how we can find fulfillment in our lives.
• The search for identity: The novel also explores the search for identity, both individual and cultural. Jude’s struggle to come to terms with his past and his sense of self is a central theme of the book. The other characters also grapple with questions of identity, including questions of race, sexuality, and gender. The novel raises questions about how we construct our identities and the role that external factors play in shaping who we are.

The book’s commentary on contemporary society. The novel also offers a commentary on contemporary society, particularly on issues related to power, privilege, and inequality. The characters in the book come from a range of backgrounds and experiences, and the novel explores the ways in which these factors shape their lives and relationships. The book also grapples with questions of social justice and the ways in which individuals can work to make a difference in the world.

The book’s reception and impact on readers. A Little Life has been widely praised by critics and readers alike for its emotional depth, its richly drawn characters, and its exploration of complex themes. The book has been the subject of numerous book club discussions and literary analyses, and it has been hailed as a modern classic by many. The novel’s impact on readers has been particularly notable, with many readers describing the book as life-changing or transformative.

Through its exploration of trauma and its effects, A Little Life provides a nuanced portrayal of the ways in which our past experiences can shape our identities and relationships. The book’s examination of friendship and love is similarly rich and complex, highlighting the joys and challenges of these relationships. In exploring the meaning of life and the search for identity, the novel offers readers a thought-provoking meditation on some of life’s most profound questions.

The book’s representation of gender, race, and sexuality, as well as its commentary on contemporary society, makes it a particularly timely and relevant work. Through its diverse cast of characters and its nuanced portrayal of social issues, A Little Life offers readers a window into a range of experiences and perspectives.

Overall, A Little Life is a masterful work of contemporary literature that offers readers a moving and profound exploration of the human experience. Its impact on readers and the literary world is a testament to its enduring relevance and power.

Hi, I’m William Jones, the administrator of the exciting website explainedthis.com, which offers movie, music, and book reviews. With a deep passion for entertainment, I created this platform to provide a trusted source of information for fellow enthusiasts who want to stay up-to-date on the latest releases and trends.

I take great pride in my team of reviewers to provide high quality content that is informative and entertaining. Each review is thoroughly researched and written to ensure readers have a complete understanding of the subject matter.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

After reading A Little Life, you'll never be the same again.

There’s a certain look people give you when you tell them you’re reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. 

They wince, as though they’re in pain. Their eyes say, “I’m so sorry,” while they shake their head, sometimes accompanied by an audible groan.

It’s because they know you’re about to confront parts of human experience we spend our whole lives attempting to avoid. They know you will find yourself crying in bed, contemplating the meaning of life in the shower, and – at times – putting the book down because you have no other choice.

They know nothing they can say will help, and most of all, they know that what you’re about to read won’t ever leave you.

The 2015 novel, which spans over 720 pages, has been described as both “ tragedy porn ” and “ the great gay novel of our time ,” but both interpretations feel far too reductive.

Written over 18 months, Yanagihara follows the lives of four men; Jude, Willem, JB And Malcolm. We meet them at college, in their early twenties, and follow them into their thirties, forties, and late fifties. It is Jude, however, who we become closest to.

We know something has happened to him – something very bad – but we do not know what. Our imagination travels to dark places, entertaining a myriad of possibilities. As time goes on, we begin to discover what has happened to Jude, and the greatest revelation is that it is not one thing, but many.

It’s a world we rarely see in novels. We see ambition and despair coexist, with Jude living in both the past and the present. Time is not linear, it is messy and convoluted, with Jude’s past perpetually haunting him.

• Share via facebook
• Share via twitter
• Share via whatsapp
• SMS Share via SMS
• Share via e-mail

BONUS: Out Loud's Best Books To Read This Summer

SUBSCRIBER: Forget The Shooting, Everyone's Talking About Trump's 'Girlfriend'

A Little Life brings up the question of who your life belongs to. Do you owe your life story to your friends? What is just yours to keep? And can you ever truly know someone if there are secrets they’re keeping from you?

The themes of sexual, physical and psychological abuse, self harm, friendship, sexual identity, chronic pain, trauma and recovery – if such a thing even exists – are each explored in enormous depth through A Little Life , making us feel by the end that we have indeed somehow lived someone else’s little life.

There are many points throughout that Yanagihara could have chosen to end it, providing her protagonist with the resolution he so deserved. But that is not what life looks like.

In our increasingly anxious world, we spend so much of our time trying to disengage. We do not want to feel the unpleasant, or see the suffering that deep down we know exists. But A Little Life thrusts it upon us, forcing the reader to acknowledge that all is not well. Death and abuse and despair and depression and self-hatred are all part of the human experience and you, too, will experience them.

It presents a level of sadness difficult to comprehend, but elicits a response so visceral and so true, it can only be good for us.

After one reads A Little Life,  they won’t be the same again. You’re exposed to something you cannot unsee.

You are left with a sense that in every little life – some more than others – there is suffering.

And none of us are promised a happy ending.

For more recommendations, you can follow Jessie Stephens on Facebook.

• mamamia-book-of-the-week
• recommendation

A Little Life is the best novel of the year. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

by Jeff Chu

"Be quiet! Don't cry! Shhh. "

I cried my way through Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life. Critics have called it "exquisite," "a masterwork," and "a tour de force" ; Garth Greenwell describes it as "the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years." The novel — Yanagihara's second, after The People in the Trees —chronicles the relationships of four college buddies over three decades: JB, an artist; Malcolm, an architect; Willem, an actor; and Jude, a lawyer. Yanagihara records their peaks — all four achieve professional success — but dwells longer in their emotional and psychological valleys.

More from First Person

I read 164 books in 2015 and tracked them all in a spreadsheet. Here's what I learned.

I'd give A Little Life all of the awards. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (it lost to Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings ) and has been longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction. Yanagihara's prose is occasionally so stunning that it would stop me, pushing me back to the beginning of a paragraph for a second read. It's particularly dazzling when she visits the complicated mind and spirit of Jude, who becomes the axis on which the book's world turns. Indeed, A Little Life may be the most beautiful, profoundly moving novel I've ever read. But I would never recommend it to anyone.

Jude suffers childhood abuse, the details of which Yanagihara slowly reveals via flashback. It seems at first extensive, then almost endless. Some reviewers have questioned how realistic Yanagihara's depictions of the abuse and its aftereffects could be. But no book I've read has captured as perfectly the inner life of someone hoarding the unwanted souvenirs of early trauma — the silence, the self-loathing, the chronic and aching pain.

"For many years," Yanagihara writes, Jude "had envisioned (unimaginatively) a vault, and at the end of the day, he would gather the images and sequences and words that he didn't want to think about again and open the heavy steel door only enough to hurry them inside, closing it quickly and tightly."

When I read that passage, I thought: I know that feeling.

"Be quiet! Don't cry! Shhh."

My grandmother, whom I loved more than anyone in the world, would whisper-shout this to me in Cantonese when I was a kid. This was the only thing that she, a retired Bible teacher, ever said to me in her corrective, classroom voice. When I was 4, 5, 6, I was a crier, so she repeated this lesson over and over and over.

Who was I to argue? I was reared on stories of her suffering. As the Japanese army swept through China in the early 1940s, she, my seminary professor grandfather, and their two young kids sprinted ahead of the soldiers. She also had to care for about 20 of my grandfather's students, who accompanied them. During those refugee years, my grandmother gave birth to three more children. Two lived.

More than 10 million Chinese civilians were killed during the war. My grandparents survived, but not without cost.

Mostly I saw it in Grandma's behavioral quirks — the milk jugs of pennies banked under the bathroom sink, just in case; $20 bills at the bottom of her yarn box, just in case; the molding food in the fridge that she couldn't throw away, just in case. But I also felt it in her tense silence whenever arguments erupted in our family. And I heard it in her admonitions whenever she sensed my oncoming tears.

I learned well. So: I was quiet and didn't cry when Mac, my fifth-grade bully, repeatedly mocked my slitty eyes and my coarse hair and told others that if they spent time with me, they'd get eyes and hair like that too. I was quiet and didn't cry when an HR guy outed me to colleagues while recruiting donors for an office blood drive. "Well," he said, "obviously Jeff can't do it." I am quiet and don't cry when the brothers of one of my dearest friends joke that I eat dog, as they have every time they've seen me for more than 15 years.

I most regret being quiet and not crying the summer I turned 15. We were living in Miami then, for my dad's job, but when school let out I'd return to my native California to stay with my grandparents in Berkeley. Some afternoons, I'd spend hours nesting amid the stacks of its used bookstores. Others, I'd sneak a movie, hoping Grandma wouldn't ask where I'd been, because she'd remind me films were "of the devil." (Why couldn't I be quiet when she asked that? Why didn't I just invoke my teenager status and not answer? I don't know.)

Occasionally, when I was feeling especially rebellious, I'd bum cigarettes from strangers.

I know that memories do more than just seep out. They morph, and they turn, and sometimes they turn on you. One day I saw a guy smoking in the courtyard of a small shopping center. He worked at the photo store. We made awkward small talk while we smoked.

I needed to pee, so I asked if he could unlock the shopping center's bathroom. He did. Then he followed me in and began to touch—

Then he walked me to his store and into the back room, where he—

I remember shivering — Fuck. I'm shivering now.

And then he pushed me down on my—

The only thing I remember him saying was, "Doesn't it feel good?"

Why didn't I say no? Why did I bum that cigarette? It was only five blocks away — why didn't I just go home to pee? Why didn't I shout? Why didn't I run?

"Be quiet. Don't cry. Shhh."

I didn't tell anyone what had happened, not for 12 years. When, finally, I began to tell the tiniest bit of the story, I called it molestation —an ugly word, but not the ugliest. Is it strange to say that Jude's story gave me new vocabulary — or permission? After A Little Life, I named it honestly for the first time: rape.

The best novels point us back to something real — sometimes physical, but more often intellectual or emotional or even visceral. As I've read reviews of A Little Life, I've been puzzled by the clinical way in which some critics address the trauma Jude suffers as a child and its echoes in his adulthood. Don't they have their own memory vaults? Or are they just more secure?

Sarah Churchwell, in an exasperated, empathy-deficient review in the Guardian , questions Yanagihara's decision to write about Jude in the third, not first, person: "This is not thought: it is voiceover," Churchwell writes, "Such narration is distancing: it leaves us watching what Jude feels, rather than actively sharing in his confusion, pain, suffering." But first person or third, narration is still narration. It isn't "actively sharing" in trauma or its consequences. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Watching Jude, not being Jude, reflects wise editing, because Jude is a spectator too. He cannot control his memories — they control him. His vault is porous. His strategy for containing the past "wasn't effective," Yanagihara writes. No matter his efforts, "the memories seeped out."

I know that memories do more than just seep out. They morph, and they turn, and sometimes they turn on you. Absent the original perpetrator (Jude's dies, mine disappears), you assume that role. You play both parts — attacker and attacked, punisher and punished — in a twisted drama of substitutionary atonement. You seek but never find absolution for something you didn't do, for something that was done to you. Sin is sin. Someone has to pay, right?

Jude bleeds all over A Little Life — he's a cutter. It makes for difficult reading, but I bristled when Stephanie Hayes, writing in the Atlantic , describes Jude as "an alien other, haunting readers with his ordeals." Yanagihara illustrates the internal processes that inspire Jude's self-harm by creating a menagerie: His self-loathing is an uncaged "beast," his memories prowling "hyenas." Hayes dismisses this as "surreal and relentless imagery, almost as if to deflect humanizing sympathy for his struggles."

Alien? Surreal? No. Yanagihara's descriptions embodied my feelings — and reactions like Hayes's eye-rolling and her "don't be so dramatic" condescension are what I fear. Because this is my daily litany: I pierce myself with self-criticism until I reach numbness. I surgically examine my friendships to see what others could possibly want of me, and then drain them of their lifeblood: love. If my friends knew what's been done to me, and what I've done since, these relationships would never last anyway. If I shared my story, you'd walk away. If you knew the truth, you'd disappear —or worse, you'd stay to mock me.

"At night," Yanagihara writes, "he prayed to a god he didn't believe in — and hadn't for years: Help me, help me, help me " So I've sought extra locks for my vaults. Yet the memories still seep out, especially when other people are around. At parties, I escape repeatedly to the bathroom to splash water on my face. I preemptively try to run away from reincarnations of Mac, my fifth-grade bully, who returns to comment on my eyes, still slitty, or my hair, still coarse. I imagine men chewing over the best joke about what pets I may or may not eat. Summer can be the worst. I almost never wear shorts in public because the photo shop guy did that day, and when I see a particular stocky build and muscular calf—

The relationship that matters most in A Little Life isn't between Jude and Willem, or Jude and Malcolm, or Jude and JB — it's between Jude and Jude. This book is about internal warfare: Does he live alone with his festering hurt, or does he risk trusting others with his secrets? This book is about love: If perfect love casts out fear, perfect fear must block both the giving and receiving of love, and Jude's inability to love himself prevents him from feeling the embrace of the patient, kind love of those around him.

"At night," Yanagihara writes, "he prayed to a god he didn't believe in — and hadn't for years: Help me, help me, help me, he pleaded. He was losing himself; this had to stop."

I've prayed that same prayer many times, more vigorously in recent months than ever. I'm not quite Jude; I guess I do believe in God. I want to believe that my prayer is being answered. Last winter, inexplicably, I started to cry again with some regularity. And though I rarely read fiction, along came A Little Life, which I picked up though I had no idea what it was about.

At its best, storytelling is communion. Human experiences converge, and isolation withers at the intersection. I read A Little Life when I wasn't ready to talk about trauma or even to hear about it. But Jude's inability to address his wounds compelled me to begin to address mine. His struggle to find his peace emboldened me to try to find mine.

I don't know what healing might look like. But admitting to my husband that I believe I'm damaged goods — that's something. To let my closest friends see some of my deepest wounds — that's something. Acknowledging and apologizing for the ways in which I have, in my silence and fear, rejected others' kindness and dishonored their friendship — that's something. I've still never told anyone the whole story — not my husband, nor my therapist — and maybe I never will. But being able to say that I'm not a lost cause, and to believe it (mostly) — that's something too.

My grandmother has been dead 20 years, but sometimes she still whisper-shouts in my head. At last, I am ready to whisper-shout something back: "Be quiet, Grandma. Shhh. "

Jeff Chu is a contributing writer at Fast Company and the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America . He lives in Brooklyn.

First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines , and pitch us at [email protected] .

Most Popular

• Trump’s health care plan exposes the truth about his “populism”
• What happened to Nate Silver
• The Supreme Court is about to decide whether to interfere in the election again
• Is my dentist scamming me?
• Sign up for Vox’s daily newsletter

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Features

My generation was taught to change the system. That lesson came at a cost.

Some families of students with disabilities feel pushed out of public schools.

We are living through an inflection point in America’s relationship with guns. There may be no going back.

Algorithms changed the classic card game for good — but is it for the better?

“The garden party,” “old money,” and “cool girl” weddings are starting to feel more like dinner parties.

Countless rare animals lurk under the logs in the Appalachian Mountains.

• Literature & Fiction
• Genre Fiction

Sorry, there was a problem.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

A Little Life MP3 CD – Unabridged, November 3, 2015

• Language English
• Publisher Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio
• Publication date November 3, 2015
• Dimensions 5.25 x 0.6 x 6.75 inches
• ISBN-10 1511358602
• ISBN-13 978-1511358606
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (November 3, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1511358602
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1511358606
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.6 x 6.75 inches
• #2,139 in Asian American Literature & Fiction
• #8,350 in Books on CD
• #15,568 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)

About the author

Hanya yanagihara.

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.

http://instagram.com/hanyayanagihara

https://instagram.com/alittlelifebook/

https://www.instagram.com/toparadisenovel/

Customer reviews

• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 5 star 71% 16% 7% 3% 3% 71%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 4 star 71% 16% 7% 3% 3% 16%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 71% 16% 7% 3% 3% 7%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 71% 16% 7% 3% 3% 3%
• 5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 71% 16% 7% 3% 3% 3%

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Customers say

Customers find the book incredible, unforgettable, and worth every word. They praise the writing quality as exceptional and vivid. Readers describe the story as compelling, heart-wrenching, and a true story of sweetness. They appreciate the fully realized and recognizable characters. Reader's describe it as profound, insightful, and provocative. However, some find the chapters too long and torturous. Opinions differ on the emotional content, with some finding it powerful and intense, while others say it's uplifting.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the book incredible, devastatingly beautiful, and unforgettable. They also say it's worth every word. Readers describe the prose as architectural, cerebral, and drawn-out. They say the writing is descriptive and seductive.

"...It's about relationships and some of them are so beautiful that their warmth makes you cry from the happy moments...." Read more

"...of the reader’s reaction to the novel, A LITTLE LIFE is an incredible accomplishment and a work which haunt the reader for a long time...." Read more

"...is an accomplished pianist with a beautiful voice, is well-read, a superior cook , and is what I would identify as that rare contemporary Renaissance..." Read more

" Outstanding work , the author puts into words the internal struggles of someone who survived trauma...." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book exceptional. They say the dialogue is vivid and genuine. Readers describe the book as an emotional, challenging read that takes hold of them from page one. They also mention the author is sympathetic.

"...I LOVED this book. At 700+ pages it was an emotionally challenging read that takes hold of you from page one and puts you through the wringer...." Read more

"...The author’s characters are real to life, the dialogue is vivid and genuine , and the quality of the writing as well as the tone of the novel is..." Read more

"...Jude, however, is an accomplished pianist with a beautiful voice, is well-read , a superior cook, and is what I would identify as that rare..." Read more

"...This book is one of the most dazzlingly brilliant, emotionally moving books I've ever read, and it will be a long time before I can get these..." Read more

Customers find the story poignant, compelling, and heartbreaking. They say the narrative weaves a complex tapestry of themes, exploring the intricacies of human emotions. Readers also mention the author does a masterful job of unfolding the story as the novel moves forward. However, some find the heavy storyline compelling, insightful, and provocative.

"...The writing is truly fantastic. Even mundane events are made to shine and descriptions very subtly shift based on which character perspective we are..." Read more

"...Regardless of the flaws, I stuck with the novel; Jude was so captivating , even in his reticence, that I wanted to see it through...." Read more

"...The last part of the book was a great ending , soft and tragic as it was expected from the very beginning, although expected, it keeps u engaged in..." Read more

"...This is a story that finds wonder in the mundane but also dwells on truly troubling issues as well...." Read more

Customers find the characters fully realized and recognizable. They also say the plot is extensive.

"...Pros: stellar writing, rich character development , diverse characters (in terms of racial background and sexual orientation), emotionally evocative...." Read more

"...The author’s characters are real to life , the dialogue is vivid and genuine, and the quality of the writing as well as the tone of the novel is..." Read more

"...Excellent pace, great character building , changes in character felt a bit rushed in my opinion, some of the events describe very traumatic events..." Read more

"...Yanagihara is a writer of exquisite beauty and she has created fascinating characters ; none more so than Jude and Willem...." Read more

Customers find the book profound, insightful, and provocative. They say it makes them realize life itself needs to be appreciated more. Readers also mention the book is not an easy, uplifting read. They appreciate the heartwarming interactions and humanity.

"...This is a story of perseverance , a human story, of life, and its darkest edges...." Read more

"...to answer these questions, which is precisely why this novel is so thought-provoking and indelible...." Read more

"...Complex, full of emotion and genuine feeling, full of ‘quotable’ things without it ever being overbearing or ‘too much.’..." Read more

Customers find the emotional content intense, amazing, and poignant. They say it's a horrible story of profound sadness. However, some readers find the book enormously emotionally tolling, depressing, and unrealistic.

"...(in terms of racial background and sexual orientation), emotionally evocative . Sensitive portrayal of the long term impacts of trauma...." Read more

"...Thus, A LITTLE LIFE does not make for easy reading. It is emotionally jolting and at the same time riveting...." Read more

"...The last part of the book was a great ending, soft and tragic as it was expected from the very beginning, although expected, it keeps u engaged in..." Read more

"...and love—platonic, romantic, filial—but it is also a story of the fragility of emotions , the fears we must confront, and the devastating effects a..." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some mention it sucks them into breathless passages and leaves a lasting impact. Others say the 200 pages are too wordy and at times drag.

"...Not just because of its length (720 pages), but, because it doesn't exactly grab you swiftly ...." Read more

"...I also liked that the book showed a different angle of abuse - how someone so seemingly successful and well-loved can be hiding great pain..." Read more

"...The childhood abuse is so pervasive, so widespread, so extreme , that at one point I almost abandoned the book...." Read more

"... Excellent pace , great character building, changes in character felt a bit rushed in my opinion, some of the events describe very traumatic events..." Read more

Customers find the book very long and torturous. They also say the font size is beyond them.

"...It’s difficult. It’s long ...." Read more

"...My only complaints about the book are I truly feel it was too long and too repetitive, as well as the punctuation through me off quite a bit because..." Read more

"...While the book is long , overlong is not a word that would be used; in fact, if there were an equally long (or longer) sequel..." Read more

"...excited to read, was beautifully written but a little life was very torturous long and once you think is getting better, it sucks again and at the..." Read more

Reviews with images

4.75-Stars: Excruciating and Diabolical, but Masterfully Written

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• About Amazon
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell products on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon and COVID-19
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices

• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Advertisement

How bad is modern life for our body clocks – and what can we do?

Modern life disrupts the circadian rhythms controlling our biology – increasing our risk of developing conditions ranging from diabetes to dementia. Lynne Peeples's new book The Inner Clock explores and offers solutions

By Helen Thomson

18 September 2024

Humans defy internal clocks; the little penguin (pictured below) lives by them

Alex Ramsay/Alamy

The Inner Clock Lynne Peeples (Out 24 September: Bloomsbury Tonic (UK); Riverhead Books (US))

The little penguin ( Eudyptula minor ), a tiny, blue bird living off the coast of southern Australia, speed-wobbles from the ocean to its burrow home at the same time every day – just after sunset. Timing is crucial: too early and they miss the day’s final catch; too late and encroaching darkness makes them prey for orcas and feral cats.

Fortunately for those who come to watch, environmental cues like sunlight and phases of…

Sign up to our weekly newsletter

Receive a weekly dose of discovery in your inbox! We'll also keep you up to date with New Scientist events and special offers.

To continue reading, subscribe today with our introductory offers

No commitment, cancel anytime*

Offer ends 10 September 2024.

*Cancel anytime within 14 days of payment to receive a refund on unserved issues.

Inclusive of applicable taxes (VAT)

Existing subscribers

More from New Scientist

Explore the latest news, articles and features

The complicated role loneliness plays in 26 common health conditions

Why everyone needs to stop joking that they're "a little bit OCD"

A fresh understanding of OCD is opening routes to new treatments

Subscriber-only

How the most precise clock ever could change our view of the cosmos

Popular articles.

Trending New Scientist articles