A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara Review

Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and JB are best friends. But, as close as they are, they know next to nothing about Jude. They don’t know why his legs hurt him. They don’t know if he has any family. They don’t know where he’s from. But they respect him enough to leave him be. As the years go by though, Jude’s secrets are slowly revealed to a select few. And they are terrifying…

Hanya Yanagihara’s door-stopper of a novel, A Little Life, is almost comical in how bleak it is at times. I mean, pitch black, never seen before in a novel, purest human misery distilled into a book. So yeah, if trigger warnings are a thing for you, this one ticks off quite a number: child abuse, self-harm, suicide, domestic violence, rape - it’s all here! Nervous nellies, this ain’t for you. It’s also a genuinely brilliant novel.

It’s like a modern Dickensian novel in a way, given its ambitious length, how obscenely repulsive some of the characters are - Brother Luke, Dr Traylor, Caleb - with Jude as a sort of doomed Pip or David Copperfield-type character. If Dickens was into cutting that is. Yanagihara does spend time developing the other characters as well but the book is mostly about the life of and an extremely deep and detailed character portrait of Jude St Francis.

The author skilfully peels back the revelations of Jude’s awful past (and sometimes equally-bad present) in a way that’s definitely slow but also necessarily so. It took me a little over two months to read this book, which is slower than average for me. Not just because this is a 700+ page novel but because the material gets too intense and too dark at times. It’s why I appreciated Yanagihara dipping in and out of those episodes, showing another glimpse of pure horror before pulling back again. It makes for a more interesting sustained read while also sparing the audience’s nerves for any prolonged disturbing scenes. I still couldn’t rush the reading experience though, despite this. It’s too sad at times. It’s a credit to the level of quality writing though that the author is able to elicit such powerful emotion.

Yanagihara’s prose is a little difficult to get into at first, however, like a lot of lengthy narratives, your brain eventually clicks into the author’s wavelength and it’s easy to get into after a spell. That said, it’s not the most elegant prose I’ve read - there are a lot of run-on and/or multi-clause sentences that make up entire paragraphs - but it’s still effective generally. Also, the penultimate part, Dear Comrade, drags a bit as not that much happens. It’s basically Jude in mourning, which becomes repetitive to read quite quickly.

Mostly though, A Little Life is an amazing achievement. It’s a richly-realised character piece that’s also a vivid portrayal of trauma and the psychology behind it. It’s also about stories: how our lives fill with stories and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our lives. It’s hard to get through at times but it’s definitely worth it. A Little Life is more than a little impressive.