In the inside jacket, the book was described as “a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance”, and for 720 pages, Yanagihara did just that, but also stretched the limit of her reader's patience and tolerance to tragedy and violence—which were at times infuriatingly and cruelly senseless, but always terrible, causing others to dub this as a “tragedy porn”. But up until the end, Yanagihara was consistent and resolute on what kind of story she’d embarked to tell and how she’d tell it. I can only imagine how difficult it was to write such a harrowing and lengthy volume, but Yanagihara had held out quite beautifully, filling A Little Life with wondrous sentences and remarkable prose that evoked intense emotions and characters that captured completely and elicited utmost empathy. And in spite—or perhaps, exactly because—of the anguish she caused, A Little Life is an unforgettable book, written with so much resolve and prowess.
This is a reread of the book. The first time I read this was in 2018 and it was safe to say that I was less critical then and more easily swayed by overwhelming emotions I mistake for quality and greatness. This led me to fail to recognize that this book, whose most parts I've read blurry through tears, had glaring flaws that somewhat dilute the merits it actually had and rightfully earned. Parts I through IV were some of the best writings and plotting I've encountered. Yanagihara was generous, but in her own pace. She had a mystery—that of Jude's past and extensively that also of his future—that she held tightly, sharing a peek, a foreshadow, here and there, but never all at once. But when this mystery was laid bare in the enormous—and ridiculously so, if we're being completely honest—Part V, it was devastating, but only to an extent, for too many events followed and diluted its potency and importance. Brevity is the soul of the wit, but Yanagihara desired to fully expose the genesis and the eventual demise of the soul she wrote a book on and had forsaken conciseness, at least in this too-long division of the story. Compared to most parts of the book that tell the lives and the events of the characters across a couple of years, three years at most, Part V, titled The Happy Years, spanned a decade. Memorable moments lit up the times, but most were mundane and boring and these easily overshadowed those flashes of, indeed, happy years. Had this part been shorter and edited tighter, the book would be at its best.
Admittedly, I know it is unfair to start the review with the flaw of the book, but I really just had to get that off of my chest. It is truly unfair because Yanagihara's writing is so strong in this book—dare I say, much stronger than her debut, The People in the Trees. She had the tendency to overly expound an idea and meander and—aside from the aforementioned enormous Part—I was grateful for that. It was during these thoughtful meanderings when she was, not only at her strongest, literarily, but also in her most personal. In the heartbreaking Part VI: Dear Comrade, Yanagihara concluded this study (for I believe this whole book is somewhat, consciously or unconsciously, a psychological case for her, to see how much can a human being endure) with a deeply introspective and moving look at life and living, through her character Jude amidst grief. Through Jude, Yanagihara asked, how can a person continue on living after so much heartbreaks, tragedies, and hardships? Is persisting to live and to survive a mere evolutionary trait passed through generations or is it “something in the mind itself, a constellation of neurons as toughened and scarred as a tendon, that prevented humans from doing what logic so often argued they should”? People can say things about Yanagihara’s choices in narrative, but her ability to write is superior.
However, it is not really unreasonable, or even wrong, when people call the sheer amount of misery in this book senseless, for it is objectively that. It would be far more unpleasant to have these misfortunes as events where lessons were learned. Jude’s tragic and violent past catalyzed the story and it was fine, compelling even, for that was such an intensely memorable plot. What I didn’t enjoy was when these tragedies were randomly inserted and used to make the story move after going so close to stagnancy, which was exactly what happened in end of Part V. I can only see this unexpected and random act of misfortune as something purposeless and it ultimately failed to work, aside from eliciting cheap and cheat cries (right from my very eyes the first time).
I now promise to leave Part V behind to talk about the chapters in A Little Life that were written as letters from Harold to Willem. These are easily the best sections of the book. While most of Yanagihara’s prose tend to be cold in its directness and simplicity, these letters, written in the second perspective, were so intimate, almost uncomfortably so—in the sense that it felt such a violation of privacy, especially because it was Harold’s thoughts, the one character whose perspective were never used in the book outside these heartbreakingly brief chapters. Between these chapters, The People in the Trees being a faux-memoir and the second part of To Paradise being a written message from a character to another, Yanagihara should write more epistolary-style books. She knows how to emotionally manipulate and in storytelling, that can be an asset, and it is through these epistolarian writings, Yanagihara's writings can be and are both at its most vulnerable and memorable.
From her debut novel, we can really see that Yanagihara is a world-builder. She created the world of Ivu’ivu and its people brilliantly and convincingly. In her sophomore effort, she had no new world or community which she fashioned. (Though it is interesting to see that the New York in A Little Life did not, in any way, present any connection to that of the real world; it is not necessarily a bad thing, just curious, as if, following my earlier theory of the book being a psychological case in the author’s part, Yanagihara did, in fact, build a world in A Little Life, somewhere where people were much crueler and less sensibly so. But this is perhaps simply a flimsy idea on my part, something I thought of to rationalize the intense tragedy in Jude’s life.) But her endeavors in intricately creating worlds was redirected in polishing her character-writing. The main lives she tackled in A Little Life were few, but were extensive. Pasts were shared, Presents were presented, and the Futures were revealed. A writer with less of a determination than what Yanagihara had would probably be daunted and caved in to the immensity and misery of this sophomore debut. (But with her third book, we saw that writing tomes about miserable lives and calamitous times was a thing she does.) And always, Yanagihara’s knowledge of her characters didn’t falter and her precision to writing and fleshing them out were incredibly keen. That is, if she was really focused on the character she was writing. For even though Malcolm was part of the central foursome of the novel, he was eventually lost right in the middle. And even though he had a character study chapter early in the novel, he was reduced to merely someone mentioned at times, at the same level as the numerous characters whose names were repeatedly included, but whose stories were not further discussed. Although altogether, the second half of the book did in fact focused on Jude and Willem, by comparison, JB still felt a central and essential person in the story, when Malcolm’s designed houses became much more relevant than the designer himself.
Hanya Yanagihara and her works completely polarize readers. During my first read, I remember loving the book, even antagonizing the people who criticize it. Years later and much wiser (though only in the sense that I can critique and organize my thoughts better than when I did when I was 21), I now see how fair the criticisms people had for A Little Life, for even I had the same comments. Despite this, I can confidently say that this is still one of my favorite reads, which, I know, is such a deranged thing to say. For how can someone claim such a tragic, horrifying book as their favorite. But while I read this the first time to see what the fuzz was all about and to see what was making these grown people cry, I reread and this time, appreciated, so much better, the storytelling that anchored this huge and heavy book. This is unforgettable, truly. But—slapping the iconic Peter Hujar portrait as the book cover—I won't ever reread this again.
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