[tw] Show "A Little Life": Tragedy After Tragedy in this Misery-Soaked Epic

photo: www.barnesandnoble.com

I've seen this book for at least a year now, circling through BookTube, Bookstagram, and book podcasts. I picked it up with only the vaguest of notions. I didn't even know the premise. I just knew that it was well-written and seemed to be depressing.

Well. Let me just say that I am no stranger to sad, misery-coated books. But A Little Life is not coated but drowning in misery. I was not prepared for the wealth of heavy topics that exist within these pages, and I have to preface this review and the novel itself with the largest of trigger warnings, which includes, but is not limited to, sexual/mental/emotional abuse, rape, kidnapping, death, self-harm, and suicide.

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The novel opens up with two friends moving into an apartment in New York City. It's small and grimy, but for Jude and Willem, it's perfect. They get to live in New York, with each other. Their best friends JB and Malcolm help them move in, grimacing at the ugliness of the space, but happy that the four of them will be in the same city, even after college.

Jude is a frighteningly brilliant law student who grows to become a prominent litigator. Willem, once a waiter auditioning for small roles on the side, makes it big as a Hollywood actor. JB, after years of searching for the perfect artistic outlet, rises to fame in the art world. And Malcolm goes from toiling at a respected, yet thankless architecture firm to designing buildings around the world.

While each of the four friends achieves career and financial success, their lives aren't perfect. They struggle with normal concerns of romantic relationships, having kids, and moving. They deal with family issues and addiction. But the one struggling the most is Jude, who's remained an enigmatic figure to even his closest friends. He's strikingly handsome but permanently handicapped and no one knows the details of the car accident that impaired him. He's never been in a relationship, never speaks of his past or his family, and maintains a careful distance from everyone who cares about him.

When Jude's past is finally revealed, and the full circumstances of his misery are revealed, tragedy compiles again and again, offering no refuge or respite from the world and the cruelties Jude has dealt with.

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For all of its sadness, I expected this novel to continue the way it began. As a friendship novel, essentially. I couldn't help but want that, that reaffirming presence of strong friendship holding the characters steady through the years. And there is friendship, strong, unshakable friendship here, but it isn't the focus of the novel as it progresses.

Instead, the novel narrows its focus little by little on Jude and the way he interacts with the world. Jude is miserable, mostly from the things he experienced as a young boy. The book piles tragedy after tragedy on him, and just when you think things will get better for him, something else flings happiness away from him.

Author Yanagihara talked about the premise for this novel, in which she said she wanted to explore a "level of trauma from which a person simply can't recover" (interview with Electric Lit). Knowing this after finishing the book, what she does makes sense, but I'm still not sure how I feel about it. It was well-written, but it was deeply depressing, and Jude and the other characters flickered in and out of reality, as if they weren't fully on the page.

7/10 📕