A Little Life

He had looked at Jude, then, and had felt the same sensation he sometimes did when he thought, really thought of Jude and what his life had been: a sadness, he might have called it, but is wasn't a pitying sadness; it was a larger sadness, one that seemed to encompass all the poor striving people, the billions he didn't know, all living their lives, a sadness that mingled with a wonder and awe at how hard humans everywhere tried to live, even when their days were so very difficult, even when their circumstances were so wretched. Life is so sad, he would think in these moments. It's so sad, and yet we all do it. We all cling to it; we all search for something to give us solace.

A Little Life is either a work of genius that I didn't totally get or a laughably mawkish manipulation that's tricking a wide readership into thinking it's genius (and I'm more than willing to put the fault on myself and my own powers of understanding). At just over 700 pages, this book is a long examination of friendship and heartache and the limits there are to saving another person from himself. There is a relentless procession of scenes of horrific child abuse and self harm, everyone attains an unbelievable degree of fame and riches, every friend is a paragon of love, patience, and understanding – and if these extremes are meant to raise the plot to the level of allegory, then I can almost accept them. But if I as the reader am supposed to believe the plot literally, the extremes serve only to make the story laughable.

In the beginning, we meet four friends who are poor and striving – recent college grads who are newly settled in NYC, ready to begin their adult lives – and although at first it seems that the book will concentrate on each equally, it soon becomes clear that Jude's story is the central focus. The other three – Malcolm the architect, JB the artist, and Willem the actor – are very protective of Jude (a lawyer), and as he is secretive about his past and the mysterious “car injury” that gives him a strange gait and sporadic, intense pain attacks, his friends are equally protective of Jude's safety and his privacy. As the book skips ahead through the years, Jude's past is revealed through memories and infrequent confessionals, and as the book is so long, the implausibility of his history is mostly hidden within the bulk. And here's what I mean by saying that the extremes of the plot make it laughable: When I was at just over 500 pages in, my daughters asked me what this book is about, and that was the first time that I had to put Jude's story in chronological order. ** spoiler ** Jude was left in a Dumpster as a baby, and when he was found, he was sent to a monastery to be raised. There, he was beaten all day by the monks who taught him, and raped most nights, too. When Jude was 8, one of the monks offered to run away with him – to a cabin in the woods of Texas where they could live as father and son – but once they were on the road, this Brother Luke was pimping Jude out to strange men in motels all across the country. Soon, Brother Luke was raping Jude most nights, too, except to Luke, it was a supposed act of love. This went on for four years, until the cops broke down their motel room door one night, Luke had time to hang himself in the locked bathroom, and Jude was sent to a boys' home – where the counsellors beat and raped him for the next few years. This was as far as I had gotten in Jude's backstory in the book, and my daughters (20 and 17) were already laughing at the implausibility (right from the start – what baby in a Dumpster gets sent to a monastery today? And if he was, would no social worker ever check up on him?), and as I read further, one or the other of my daughters would walk by and ask, “So, who's raping Jude now?” So eventually I got to tell them that after Jude was raped in the barn one night, the drunk counsellor fell asleep and Jude finally escaped from the home. He had a dream of making it to Boston from where he was in Montana (because Brother Luke had filled his mind with college dreams) and as Jude hitch-hiked across America, he understood that he would need to exchange sex for rides from truck drivers (and while this was technically consensual, it introduced another nonstop string of pedophiles who were interested in statutory rape with a minor boy). When Jude made it to Philadelphia, he collapsed at a gas station from an STD-induced fever, and an evil-pychiatrist-pedophile scooped him up and locked Jude in his purpose-built basement. After a course of antibiotics and some cleaning up, this Dr. Traylor began raping and beating Jude. Most bizarrely, when Traylor was eventually finished with Jude, he drove him to a field and told the boy to start running as he followed in slow motion at his heels in the car. When Jude was finally exhausted and collapsed, Traylor simply ran him over – causing the spinal damage that would curse Jude forever. Traylor was arrested (and eventually died in prison) and Jude was finally given proper medical care and the attention of a social worker – Ana, the first person Jude ever tells his story to – but within months she gets cancer and dies and Jude decides to never open himself up again. Jude goes to college two years early – because the excellent education he received from Brother Luke put him years ahead of his peers, and because Jude is naturally gifted with a prodigious memory, a mind for abstract math, a beautiful singing voice, etc., etc. – meets the three roommates who will become his lifelong intimates (despite him never revealing anything about himself ever), and when he goes to law school, he meets a supportive professor, Harold, and his wife Julia – who will adopt Jude as their own son when he turns 30. “So, who's raping Jude now?” When he's in his 30s, Jude eventually believes the protests of his friends that he's deserving of love and affection, and when a man asks him out, Jude accepts. And the man rapes and beats Jude for a few months and eventually leaves him for dead. After a few more years, Willem realises that he's in love with Jude, and although Jude craves the human contact, he is terrified of sex, incapable of being aroused, and even though he eventually consents to sex with Willem, it is only out of a sense of obligation – Willem might as well have been a truck driver; at its essence, this might as well be rape, too. While in a fever-induced delirium, Jude once imagined that Harold was trying to rape him, and although Willem was able to convince him otherwise, Jude is never comfortable being hugged by him ever again. Willem is eventually killed off in a car crash – we wouldn't want Jude to be happy – and a year later, JB misinterprets a situation and starts kissing Jude against his will and Jude regards that as a sexual assault, too. ** end spoiler ** When you put all of this in order, doesn't it seem over-the-top and unbelievable? Nearly parodic? It made my girls laugh with disbelief, and I'm sure that wasn't author Hanya Yanahihara's intent. This is how my daughters see Jude:

Because of his horrific past, Jude believes himself to be a disgusting and irredeemable creature, and ever since Brother Luke first showed him how, he was a cutter; frequently slicing up his arms with a razor. Jude has one doctor that he trusts – Andy, an upperclassman from college – and as he also relocates to NYC, Jude has regular appointments with Andy to have his legs (which are prone to open sores and infections) monitored, and despite years of Andy threatening to commit Jude for his self-harm, all the good doctor ever actually does is stitch up the worst of the cuts and beg him to see a therapist. Jude's friends all eventually learn of his cutting, and even though they also implore him to stop, they're all ultimately enablers who accept that fragile Jude can't be pushed to do anything against his will. And I found this doubly frustrating because at one point JB is smoking meth and the friends literally drag him off to rehab – and what's the difference between a drug addiction and a self-harm compulsion?

So in essence, A Little Life is a mystery revealed in flashbacks, and when we're not learning of Jude's hidden past, we're watching him self-obsess (and self-harm) over how miserable he is. He is surrounded by the most loving and supportive of friends – who, by the way, all become rich and famous in their fields: Willem is a mega-movie star; JB is an internationally respected artist who made his name painting portraits of the other three; Malcolm designs important buildings all around the world; not to mention Jude's adoptive parents, his doctor, the artist who lives in the loft below his, his coworkers and a vast cast of others who are always checking up on Jude despite his efforts to keep everyone at a distance – but no matter how much love and support they offer (over decades), Jude swans around like Hamlet, unable to get on with his life because of the misery of his first fifteen years. And this didn't make me sympathetic: it made me frustrated that Jude would choose to be trapped in the mindset of a petulant adolescent. Here he is at 51, talking to his adoptive father:

“I can't keep having this conversation,” he says at last, his voice scraped and hoarse. “I can't, Harold. And you can't, either. I feel like all I do is disappoint you, and I'm sorry for that, I'm sorry for all of it. But I'm really trying, I'm doing the best I can. I'm sorry if it's not good enough.” Harold tries to interject, but he talks over him. “This is who I am. This is it, Harold. I'm sorry I'm such a problem for you. I'm sorry I'm ruining your retirement. I'm sorry I'm not happier. I'm sorry I'm not over Willem. I'm sorry I have a job you don't respect. I'm sorry I'm such a nothing of a person.” He no longer knows what he's saying; he no longer knows how he feels; he wants to cut himself, to disappear, to lie down and never get up again, to hurl himself into space. He hates himself; he pities himself; he hates himself for pitying himself. “I think you should go,” he says. “I think you should leave.”

So if all of this is an allegory – as suggested by these and other noted reviews – then I suppose the point is that, despite our current obsession with self-help books and You Can Do It! platitudes, sometimes a person is so broken that he can't be fixed? That if this story had followed a conventional course and Jude was eventually taught to love himself, that that's the unbelievable plotline? Well, that's a depressing conclusion and it takes the reader through a lot of misery to reach it. It is only because of the possibility of this allegorical interpretation that I'm not going to rate A Little Life lower.

Some more thoughts:

• This bullet is a total spoiler! I found Jude to be so unlikeable, so unsympathetic, that his eventual suicide was a selfish and unforgivable act; which it always is anyway for the effect a suicide has on those left behind, as in Harold's reaction:

That he died so alone is more than I can think of; that he died thinking that he owed us an apology is worse; that he died still stubbornly believing everything he was taught about himself – after you, after me, after all of us who loved him – makes me think that my life has been a failure after all, that I have failed at the one thing that counted.

What a terrible ending that makes for. 

• Thinking about the title, at one point Willem laments that becoming famous had given him a public persona that could be reduced to a couple of brushstrokes (good at girls, bad at math) and that “it made his life, which he knew was small anyway, feel smaller still”. So, one way of looking at it is that even a movie star, or even a survivor of child abuse, no matter how big these biographies seem, are just living their own little lives. More insidiously (and this is spoilery), Brother Luke had once chided Jude, “When you're with your clients you have to show a little life; they're paying to be with you – you have to show them you're enjoying it.” But then there's another interpretation: I had been intrigued by the photo of the man on the cover of this book long before I started reading it, and although I assumed it was meant to be a representation of one of Jude's pain attacks, I eventually noticed that that photo is called Orgasmic Man by Peter Hujar – and there must be something to the little death/little life dichotomy.

• There's something confusingly fluid about the sexuality of the characters. It seems everyone has a sister with a girlfriend or a nephew with a husband – and while that might seem like a lot, it could reflect the Cambridge/NYC setting or, more specifically, their arts communities – but even the main characters have one friend who had boyfriends all through college, came out to his parents, and then married a woman (with no mention ever again made of his former orientation). Another of the main characters begins a committed relationship with another man but protests that that doesn't make him gay. I do appreciate that Jude himself might be confused about his own sexuality because he was never given a choice, but I don't know if all of this fluidity is enough to justify The Atlantic calling this “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years.” Despite so many gay characters, this doesn't feel like a book about "the gay experience" and I don't know what to make of that.

Ultimately, I didn't love this book. And if that means that I'm too unsophisticated to recognise a five star read when I have it in my lap, so be it.

The Guardian says that A Little Life is the odds-on favourite to win this year's Man Booker Prize and that would be a great disappointment for me. Sigh.

Man Booker Longlist 2015:

Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have a Family

Anne Enright  - The Green Road 

Marlon James  - A Brief History of Seven Killings

Laila Lalami  - The Moor's Account 

Tom McCarthy  - Satin Island 

Chigozie Obioma  - The Fishermen 

Andrew O’Hagan - The Illuminations 

Marilynne Robinso - Lila 

Anuradha Roy - Sleeping on Jupiter

Sunjeev Sahota  - The Year of the Runaways 

Anna Smaill - The Chimes 

Anne Tyler  - A Spool of Blue Thread 

Hanya Yanagihara  - A Little Life 

I was really pleased that A Brief History of Seven Killings took the prize; even more pleased that it didn't go to A Little Life as seemed inevitable.

*****

I am delighted that The Glorious Heresies won the Bailey's Prize: the best of an uneven but respectable shortlist; here in my ranking order.

The 2016 Bailey's Prize shortlist:

Lisa McInerney: The Glorious Heresies
Anne Enright: The Green Road
Elizabeth McKenzie: The Portable Veblen
Cynthia Bond: Ruby
Hannah Rothschild: The Improbability of Love
Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life