REVIEW: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

“What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.” - Hanya Yanagihara

Trigger Warning: Literally everything. Mental illness, rape, child abuse... Literally, everything you can possibly come up with.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara follows the life (and sorrows) of Jude St. Francis. The events are told in non-chronological order (though the novel is definitely well-structured), sometimes from his perspective, sometimes from the perspective of his closest friends and familiars.

The book is extremely well-written in terms of style and superstructure (except for the last 100 pages, in my opinion). There is no typical build-up (introduction - > problem - > solution - > ending) and the plot constantly revolves around immensely heavy themes like (child) psychological, physical and sexual abuse, but if that doesn’t faze you, I’d undoubtedly recommend reading it.

I loved hating it. :)

However, I would love to discuss/state three things concerning the book:

Trauma Porn

Before reading A Little Life, I heard the term “trauma porn” being thrown into conversations about it several times. I don’t agree.

While horrible event after horrible event after horrible event happens to Jude, the descriptions of the situations causing his traumas are usually rather vague. Except for some illustrations of his wounds and the final fight with Caleb, there is almost no graphic imagery actually describing the traumatic events. There are no descriptions of what exactly the men in the motels or the Brothers at the monastery or Dr. Traylor did to him, no description of the car “accident”… And while I’m eternally grateful for that, I think that this is what causes me to reject the term "trauma porn" in this case.

Yes, the book is a chain of traumata, a listing, a never-ending (if you ignore the last chapter) storm. And if the sheer amount is what defines the term “porn” in this case, then so be it. But I myself refuse to simply make “quantity” the decisive factor. I think “trauma porn” is too pejorative of an idiom for what this book is. I don’t know what A Little Life is, but dismissing it as simply that feels lazy and unjust considering the abundance of things. Thank you for listening to my TED-talk.

Jude Hype

One of the things that caused me to not give this book the fifth star is how annoyingly perfect everybody finds Jude (except Jude, of course, which is kind of the main conflict of the whole damn book). I feel like Hanya Yanagihara used his obvious superiority opposite the average man as a stylistic device to give his horrible experiences more weight but I found it to be annoying, lazy and also a bit dangerous.

He’s incredibly goodlooking, plays the piano, he can sing, he is a kick-ass lawyer though he’s actually too smart to be a lawyer and has the mind of a mathematician or a philosopher, yet he doesn’t see one appealing thing in himself. The entire quartet of them, Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and J.B., all end up filthy rich and successful, which, I think, was supposed to contrast Jude’s traumatic past but, in all honesty, it just felt like Jude was a massive “Gary-Stu”. This upsets me because, in reality, people who suffer from the traumatic events Jude did, usually end up with poor education, little money, the minority of them is overly attractive… And their trauma is still just as bad, just as valid, just as unjust.

Yanagihara (very successfully) tried to make us feel bad for this rich (potentially) white man and his friends - and in no way am I trying to say that trauma and PTSD are in any way less painful if you are rich and play the piano or something - but she also ended up creating this ridiculous narrative of “he thinks he’s worth nothing but he’s actually so good at so many things”… Like, even if he was ugly and a little slow and awful at playing anything except minecraft… His trauma would still be effing VALID! The problem with Jude hating himself was never a lack of reasons to love himself. Even if you “achieve” nothing, you still deserve to be loved. You do not earn love through anything. Jude didn’t get that, and I feel like through constructing his character like that, Yanagihara only played into that dangerous line of thought that in the end was her character’s demise (and no, I don’t think she did that deliberately to make that point exactly).

The Ending

Honestly, I feel like she fumbled the ending. The last 100 pages made me lose connection to the book so badly that I didn’t even cry when Jude died.

I think it was a pretty good call to have Willem die, just to bring in some tragedy that’s really “just an accident” and not some other person being horrible. I also “liked” that Jude ended his life, just like I liked that sex with Willem was still horrible for him, because it’s just more realistic this way; you don’t “fix” severe trauma with love and there’s only so much a human can take.

So I didn’t mind the suicide. What I minded was how carefully prepared his two first attempts were by the author, while the third, the successful one, was just, yeah, he tried again and managed. Bye. We didn’t even get suffering from Harold. We didn’t get an explanation as to why Jude was trying so hard to gain back the weight… We got this detailed, insightful book and his death just didn’t do it justice, not because he ended his life but how that was written.

I think she was trying to get across that sometimes it looks like things get better, sometimes we try again and again but still fail(/succeed) the third time, sometimes the end of a life is not satisfactory, thus how disconnectedly she delivered the message of his death (had you only skimmed that page or read too fast, you could’ve easily missed that little sentence) … I GET what she was trying to do, but I feel like she didn’t succeed. She lost me, and not in the artsy “like Jude lost himself” way.

The more I try to voice my thoughts on this (”After Willem’s death, there was so much happening and at the same time nothing at all”, “In the end I just didn’t care anymore”, “The third attempt felt a bit random/poorly set up”, “It was all so non-dramatic, compared to the rest of the book”…), the more I feel like, one can always throw a “Yeah, like Jude”/”Yeah, that’s how life/suicide is” in my face and I get it. Maybe I’m just not smart enough to “get it”, but the thing is, I didn’t want closure. I didn’t want a happy ending. I didn’t want drama. I wanted anything BUT that pretentious-arse scene of Harold asking Jude to list three things he likes about himself and Jude not being able to name ONE thing (except “I’m tall-ish”), another not-subtle-at-all “He can’t see how perfect he really is” and then everyone else just DYING as well after Jude as well. I actually laughed when I read that. “Oh yeah, the Andy gets a heart-attack, then Richard… Jude was just their reason to live, you know”. What the hell was that? Nothing of ANYTHING.

So yeah, those were the three things I had to get off my chest after this. All in all, I guess what I just wanted to say is this:

• The book is a painful masterpiece, not trauma porn.

• It’s okay to have PTSD even if you’re ugly and can’t sing.

• Worse than an unhappy ending is an ending that’s nothing at all, not even a metaphor for life or death or… Anything.

Right, me out. Imma go read an Ali Hazelwood for SOMETHING now, even if it’s rolling my eyes at the tackiness (I secretly don’t hate it).