A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.

REVIEW:
This book is a hard one for me to review, which I suppose is fitting because it was a hard book to read. For one thing, 800+ pages is a commitment; for another, the subject matter, so blithely described on the flap copy as friendship and love, would more accurately be described as trauma and loss with a distant but fading hope of redemption. 

This novel is heartbreaking, enraging, and emotional. It messed with my heart rate and it made me cry, more than once. It also kept me up at night, reading and thinking and reading and thinking. Yanagihara's prose is elegant, drawing the reader into each and every scene. The story follows four male friends from college through late middle age, chronicling personal and professional successes and failures through the complex bonds of friendship. Early in the narrative it becomes clear that one character (Jude), the quietest and most mysterious of the group, is actually the hub around which the rest of the story turns; as excruciating details of past childhood traumas and current secret demons are slowly revealed, the reader is forced to constantly reassess Jude's character and his relationships, just as his friends in the book are doing. 

Many critics of this book have focused on how 'unbelievable' it is that one child could have suffered so much cumulative trauma, and how 'unrealistic' it is that his entire adult life may be affected. I actually think one of the greatest strengths of this novel is Yanagihara's unflinching acknowledgement that suffering like Jude's is in fact so real, the level of abuse he has faced is the lived reality of too many people, and the impacts of childhood trauma on adult functioning can be myriad and devastating. 

I highly recommend this book, I couldn't put it down even when I wanted to escape from it. It isn't an easy read, but it will change you. 5 stars.