Amy 
fiction
A Little Life is the story of four men who met as college
roommates and maintained their tight friendship through adulthood. Each has survived childhood issues, especially
Jude. His past was so bad that he won’t
talk about it and his roommates are protective of him.
I’m always impressed by male friendships. Men seem to be
more relaxed and loyal in their friendships than women. In my experience, men are able to let things
slide and are more accepting and forgiving than women. I enjoyed connecting
with the tight-knit group of Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm and watching them
grow old and redefine their friendships. I find it interesting that this novel
was written by a woman.
Warning: This is a very difficult novel to read and,
overall, is very depressing. There is a
lot going on and the story is populated with wonderful characters. But the main
story is about living through a horrific childhood and surviving as an adult
with depression and no formal support system.
Hanya Yanagihara did a great job of informing the reader
about each member of the group in due time. The obviously mysterious one was
Jude. The mechanics of their friendship with him was unusual and almost
unbelievable. Indeed, even Jude wondered why they put up with him. But none of
them were free of oddities. I did not understand all the characters’ choices
but their lives were certainly interesting. I was drawn to them and wanted to
keep spending more time with them through their successes and their tragedies.
But, mostly, the pull of the story is to find out what exactly happened to Jude
in his childhood. The early flashes of
insight are intense and disturbing. And
then, the more you read, you realize it’s even worse than you could have ever
imagined. And then you wonder why on Earth the author went there. And then it
gets to be so much and too far-fetched that it made me feel like I’d discovered
the wizard behind the curtain and the author’s manipulations were over-the-top
ridiculous and took me out of the story.
But then tragedy struck anew and I was again swept into the story
despite the fact that the self-pitying sections started to get too long-winded.
Jude’s past drove him to succeed but it also destroyed his life.
This book was so emotional. Despite all the shock and
horror, the story had hope and happiness and I couldn’t put it down. It was such
a roller coaster. It was riveting, traumatizing, despicable, horrifying, sweet,
brutal, and gut wrenching. I laughed, I
cringed, I cried, I clenched my teeth in horror, I fidgeted in discomfort. It was too terrible to read at times. I stayed up so late reading but then had to
make myself stop reading because too much crying would make it difficult to
fall asleep and the tragedies would keep my mind too busy to sleep.
Big complaint: I always dislike when authors do not announce
whose point of view we are reading and this novel was one of the worst
examples. I sometimes had to read several pages into the chapter before
discovering whose point of view it was.
This was pure frustration and not nice to the reader. It interrupts the
flow of the novel because it provides no basis from which to draw pictures in the
reader’s mind. I kept thinking “Who is this?” instead of focusing on the text.
A few times, I had to go back and start over once I knew whose experience I was
reading.
Smaller complaint: Yanagihara has a really bad habit of
interrupting sentences frequenty with tangent
comments. Sometimes the embedded “aside” went on for so long that I had
to start the sentence over and read it without the tangent segment to comprehend. This, along with the big complaint above and the
fact that the material itself was difficult to think about, made the experience
of reading this novel extremely rough. And yet, it was a great novel that
opened my eyes to how fortunate most of us have been in our lives. Most problems are surmountable and manageable
in the end. For some people, they will
never be.
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