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.

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.”

Miraculously, he escapes this morass. With the help of a kind (but, of course, dying) social worker, he gets into college (on a full scholarship), the first step up into another world. From there he takes a law degree at Harvard and is then sluiced into the starting gates of Manhattan. Suddenly he’s flipped from the B to the A side. Now his friends are wonderful and wealthy. They have lots of parties and lots of houses. They hitch rides to Bhutan on one another’s private jets. Jude is loved by all of them. Harold, Jude’s former law professor, and his wife, who have lost their own son, offer to legally adopt him.

Ironically, Harold is the first elder in ­Jude’s life to worry about doing him wrong. He sees that Jude is a free spirit and is sorry he pushed him to become an orderly thinker, a good lawyer. “I opened the van door, I invited him inside. And while I didn’t drive off the road, I instead drove him somewhere bleak and cold and colorless, and left him standing there, where, back where I had collected him, the landscape shimmered with color, the sky fizzed with fireworks, and he stood open-mouthed in wonder.”

None of Jude’s success and well-­appointed lifestyle can blot out the shame he has brought with him from those early years, and the isolation that comes with not being able to reveal any of it to anyone, not even his adoptive father. “Whenever Harold asked him questions about himself, he always felt something cold move across him, as if he were being iced from the inside, his organs and nerves being protected by a sheath of frost.”

The trauma of his past makes it difficult to connect with even those he trusts. Further, his unspecified diseases, various conditions and injuries separate him from others. He is in pain most of the time. To gain some agency over this, he begins cutting himself with razor blades. (The reader spends a lot of time in Jude’s bathroom.)

But as much as he fears contact, “he also wants to be touched, he wants to feel someone else’s hands on him, although the thought of that too terrifies him. Sometimes he looks at his arms and is filled with a self-hatred so fiery that he can barely breathe: Much of what his body has become has been beyond his control, but his arms have been all his doing, and he can only blame himself.”

Where Jude blames himself, JB, the high-living painter, blames life itself, for turning out to be so disappointing. As JB muses: “The thing he hadn’t realized about success was that success made people boring.” He feels that “the most glorious years, the years when everything seemed drawn in fluorescents, were gone.” In an effort to keep the colors coming, JB takes on a drug habit. Meanwhile Malcolm marries. Willem walks the red carpet.

The friends continue to amuse one another with lame jokes, reward one another with easy laughter. At a restaurant a big-cheese legal acquaintance comes over to the table where Jude and Willem (by now a huge movie star) are having lunch. Turns out he’s a big fan. Once he’s left, Jude “grinned at Willem. ‘Now are you convinced you’re famous?’

“ ‘If the benchmark for fame is being recognized by 20-something female RISD graduates and aging closet cases, then yes,’ he said, and the two of them started snickering, childishly, until they were both able to compose themselves again.”

They still get together at parties, but ­already, in their 30s, the ties are beginning to fray. Willem and Jude “knew why they kept attending these parties: because they had become one of the few opportunities the four of them had to be together, and at times they seemed to be their only opportunity to create memories the four of them could share, keeping their friendship alive by dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smoldering black smudge of fire. It was their way of pretending everything was the same.”

Years drift by like the fluttering calendar pages in old movies, although which years is hard to tell, as they are not adherent to any real-world calendar. Wars, elections, 9/11, climate change, skinny jeans, salted caramels — all have been sucked out of the translucent bubble these characters inhabit. And without a larger world to consider or respond to, they seem trivial, pasted in, their conversations more like captions. They discuss their renovations, their vacations, their glamorous anticipated GPS locations.

What remains most constant, and binds them, is Jude’s well-being, both physical and mental. As he becomes more fragile, they rush to the rescue. Caring for Jude gives them something the parties and joking don’t — a small mission. For the most part they exist on the page as who they are to him.

Yanagihara’s success in creating a deeply afflicted protagonist is offset by placing him in a world so unrealized it almost seems allegorical, with characters so flatly drawn they seem more representative of people than the actual thing. This leaves the reader, at the end, wondering if she has been foolish for taking seriously something that was merely a contrivance all along.

A LITTLE LIFE

By Hanya Yanagihara

720 pp. Doubleday. $30.

Carol Anshaw’s most recent novel is “Carry the One.”

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

100 Best Books of the 21st Century:  As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics  and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

Examining Joan Didion:  Since her death, Didion has become a literary subject  as popular for her image and writing as for the fascination she inspired for almost half a century.

A Dutch Love Story in a Time of Silence:  In Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, “The Safekeep,” the writer spins an erotic thriller  out of the Netherlands’ failure to face up to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Aleksei Navalny’s Prison Diaries:  In the Russian opposition leader’s posthumous memoir, compiled with help from his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny faced the fact that Vladimir Putin might succeed in silencing him .

The Book Review Podcast:  Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

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.

• 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
• Home & Garden
• Broadband deals
• Fashion & Beauty
• Travel & Outdoors
• Sports & Fitness
• Hotel Reviews
• News & Advice
• Simon Calder
• Australia & New Zealand
• South America
• C. America & Caribbean
• Middle East
• Politics Explained
• News Analysis
• Today’s Edition
• 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
• Casino 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.

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

clock This article was published more than  9 years ago

Book Review: ‘A Little Life,’ by Hanya Yanagihara, inspires and devastates

Hanya Yanagihara's new novel, " A Little Life ," is a witness to human suffering pushed to its limits, drawn in extraordinary detail by incantatory prose.

At the opening, four young men move to New York City after having finished college. They are devoted to one another, each with bright paths glimmering before them: JB, a gay, brilliant and arrogant figurative painter, is the only one of the four sure of his inevitable success; Malcolm, an architect, is a disappointment to his high-income parents, unsure of his sexuality and perplexed about his “insufficient blackness”; Willem, a handsome, unambitious actor, works as a waiter while being desired by men and women alike; and Jude, an orphan with a mysterious past, is an assistant prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Despite the brothers-in-arms setup, however, the narrative quickly concentrates on Jude. “As long as they had known him,” Willem observes, “they had known he had problems with his legs,” and despite gentle prodding from his friends, Jude never attempts to share his secretive past, prompting JB at one point to call him “post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.” What remains unspoken to the boys, however, remains agonizingly, self-destructively clear to Jude, and it’s his desire to maintain a veneer of control despite his past physical and sexual trauma that creates the major dramas in the narrative.

Throughout the novel, Yanagihara, an editor-at-large with Condé Nast Traveler, evokes New York’s subcultures and socioeconomic groups, rather than any particular time period. Those who have trod similar paths will be familiar with the phase of dividing a meal in Chinatown “to the dollar,” followed by the wandering period before people’s careers and lives begin to take their various turns.

This timelessness also allows Yanagihara to maintain a tight focus around the effects of Jude’s sexual abuse. As he progresses through life — eventually being legally adopted by a kindly law professor — Jude, as many victims do, retreats to self-harm.

“You have to talk about these things while they’re fresh. Or you’ll never talk about them,” says a social worker who cares for him early on. “It’s going to get harder and harder the longer you wait, and it’s going to fester inside you, and you’re always going to think you’re to blame.” As Jude rejects his friends’ attempts to intervene, this prediction sadly becomes more and more realized.

As Yanagihara paints it, however, his friends’ love — real, selfless love — is the thing that could save him, if only he would let it. When he eventually falls into a romantic relationship with Willem, there’s a hope that his life will turn out after all. But sometimes people are beyond repair.

“I don’t think happiness is for me,” Jude says during a drunken session with Willem. As upsetting as that is to hear, the implication is clear; and when further gutting losses come — and come they do — it’s impossible not to look back and wish that earlier on there had been a tithe more care for Jude.

Through insightful detail and her decade-by-decade examination of these people’s lives, Yanagihara has drawn a deeply realized character study that inspires as much as devastates. It’s a life, just like everyone else’s, but in Yanagihara’s hands, it’s also tender and large, affecting and transcendent; not a little life at all.

Nicole Lee is a writer based in New York.

A LITTLE LIFE

By Hanya Yanagihara

Doubleday. 720 pp. $30

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.