A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara was published by Picador in 2015. It was nominated for several literary prizes, including the Booker Prize (2015), Women's Prize for Fiction (2016) and the National Book Awards (2016). My kindle edition comprises 737 pages and the novel is divided into 7 parts, with three chapters each. I read this book with my siblings as part of our book club. My brother had been gifted it 6 years earlier and had only read a few pages. I am often hesitant to read American fiction but agreed to this one because it is by a woman of colour. I will briefly discuss the general outline of the novel and how it is written before exploring some of the core themes and my final thoughts.
The novel is about four graduate friends who are trying to make it in New York. We are immediately introduced to them, that is Malcolm, JB, Jude and Willem, through scenes of them together or in pairs. Yanagihara then focalises into each protagonist's background to contextualise them. Jude's contextualisation comes last, and is the most ambiguous and lingering. It consequently takes several chapters to finally piece together Jude's history. Generally, the novel follows a chronological structure, with some flashbacks which are interspersed with other narratives in the present and future, which discuss events retrospectively. The narrative spans around three decades, if not five.
Thematically, Yanagihara explores profoundly human and haunting social issues. The most obvious theme is that of friendship, but this is nuanced as she explores the spectrum from co-dependency to betrayal. In addition to this, the novel examines notions of belonging, race and ethnicity, identity, sexuality, understanding of success and fulfilment, addiction, disability, child abuse, mental health and family. As the protagonists are going from youth into adulthood, we witness their disillusionment of youth and their attempts to navigate adulthood. This requires facing up to their own insecurities or they risk ending up being self-sabotaged by them.
Yanagihara varies the narrative voice throughout the novel, which adds diversity and offers different perspectives to specific events. Sometimes the narrative voice is in the third person with an 'omniscient' narrator who focalises into certain characters' lives and at other times it is in the first person (of either Harold or Willem). Gradually more of the novel focuses in onto Jude and the other characters' interactions with him. The writing style competently deals with dark themes with a lightness that does not overly traumatise the reader, yet Yanagihara is also able to effectively evoke shock, for example, of violent relationships.
I noticed that this novel opposed traditional literature as it is a woman writing about four male protagonists. Though my brother remarked that it does not discuss manhood as such, and thus could have been equally a story about four women. In that respect, the novel is genderless. This fluidity of gender and sexuality has been one of the praised points in reviews. Moreover, it was interesting to note how Jude, considered an enigma, is race-less and genderless. This protects and frees him from the readers' bias and prejudice but it also means that the reader cannot place him. This neutrality emphasises that he lacks belonging to any "origin" and, for me, meant that I could not deeply empathise with him.
Another remarkable feature of this novel is how secular it is. There is no belief system in place and it is a space that simply deals with everyone's emotions and subjectivities, which are thus taken as realities. Despite the presence of names with religious connotations, such as Father Gabriel, Ahmed and Jude St. Francis, there is extremely little religious critique or commentary, if at all. That is to say, none of the catastrophes or epiphanies in the book are attributed to religion. In this respect, the novel fully embraced a liberalism that I had never read in fiction before now. For me, it felt strange and somewhat hollow in some respects due to this; it seems to be a novel about just existing for the self and others, which is a struggle as both can massively betray you.
In sum, I found the writing to be fluid and I was glad that it did not have the American twang that I usually struggle with in American literature. It is a very well-written novel but is extremely long and I, personally, did not find it life changing and would argue that you could live a good life without ever reading it.
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Have you read this novel? What did you think of it? Comment your thoughts below, I'd love to hear what you thought.
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