A Vast and Devastating Vivisection: Hanya Yanagihara’s ‘A Little Life’
Where to even begin? It’s taken me days to transmute the storm this book wreaks on the heart into coherent words. I had to stay in Euston station for an extra hour after I got back from my last trip home to Scotland to just sit and absorb the final fifty pages. It was nearing midnight. It was freezing. But I couldn’t move until I’d finished.
A Little Life is quite simply one of the most quintessentially devastating books I have ever read.
It dives deep into the most acidic depths of loneliness, depression, anxiety, despair, and the all-encompassing visceral fear of loss. On the one hand I would hope no one would ever have to feel that kind of gut-wrenching panic, on the other it would mean living without the source of that fear. And there is no extreme of pain I would not endure for the source. But that kind of fear is physically impairing. It’s like being shoved off the edge of a building, when suddenly the floor beneath your feet is heaving like a dinghy in a maelstrom. Hanya Yanagihara distils this feeling on the page like nothing I’ve ever read before.
“For the first time in his life, he understood, viscerally, what it meant when people said their hearts were in their throats, although it wasn’t just his heart he could feel but all his organs thrusting upward, trying to exit him through his mouth, his innards scrambled with anxiety.”
I’ve been trying to work out why – why – this book exists… how the author could possibly have sat down in the 21st century to do what Nabokov did with Lolita, write a book so unutterably awful but rendered with such lyricism that you can play at sadism with your readers around how something so horrible could be so beautiful. Once you start reading interviews with her the sheer egregiousness of this endeavour is exposed. She literally wanted to write an ombré cloth. That’s it. And the irresponsibility of author, agent, publisher, editor et al. in bringing this book to market has been infinitely exacerbated by the sadistic voyeurism of all those who have sensationalised the reading experience ever since, who press it into the hands of every single reader they meet as the best book they’ve ever read, one that omg you have to read it, it’ll destroy you. The violence of it all.
At moments this book is harrowing beyond cognition let alone comfort, the magnitude of abuse and trauma it explores too affecting to even imagine. I mean, it could maybe help with grief, or make some passing stab at sense of it? Not sudden, transient grief, that waxes and wanes like the seasons, but real horrifying incalculable loss, and the comprehension of that loss. Because it doesn’t attempt to soften, or to gild. It explores every agonising second of getting worse, and getting better, and getting worse again. It neither patronises nor glorifies the enormity of that suffering. The awful sickening horror of it. And that stark and brutal rendering, sharp as a scythe in the clarity of its edges, is possibly more cathartic than any amount of remorse or denial or futile attempt at explanation could ever be. Maybe?
“Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities. Right and wrong, however, are for – well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.”
This book will make you think and feel more deeply and viscerally than few other things ever will. And not in a good way. Especially if you’ve had to contend with loss, abuse, mental illness, the repression of identity, and the list goes ever on and on… It does perhaps have some soaring or uplifting or, at the very least, lyrical moments, on a sentence-by-sentence level. The real DNA at its root core is friendship, the kind that’s forged in fire and ends only with death. And if someone doesn’t feel in their veins and in their bones the power of such a thing, I really would doubt their lives have ever literally hung on those kinds of friendships. The ones that mould and fuse like the magma in life’s rift zones, cooling into implacable dystopian formations that you know will stand till the end of time.
For frame of reference, other books that have devastated me as much as this one: Elie Wiesel’s Night, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Jon Swain’s River of Time, Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
The fact that three of those are non-fiction is telling. They’ve also been some of the most philosophically enriching reads of my life. But that’s the thing. They’re non-fiction.
For a bit more in the articulation of the innards of this leviathan, I’d turn to the characters. There are four main players, and this is what we learn about them in the opening pages:
- JB – figurative painter, Haitian-American, gay, artistic, known to quip “ambition is my religion”, works at a magazine.
- Willem – actor, Adonic, white, poor, works at a restaurant, Wyoming-born son of an Icelandic ranch hand and a Danish immigrant, speaks Swedish, two other siblings died before his older brother Hemming (who has cerebral palsy), compassionate to his core and cares for the latter throughout his whole childhood.
- Jude – lives with Willem, poor, has some kind of chronic leg pain, perennially serious and reticent with absent parents, not white but no one seems to know the details of his past, works as an assistant prosecutor in the criminal division of the US Attorney’s Office.
- Malcolm – lives with his rich parents, biracial, deeply unsatisfied with life, lost and listless in just about every area of it, works as an architect for a big corporate firm.
And so the curtain rises on Jude and Willem trying to find a place in NYC. Everyone is young, scrappy, and hungry. Everyone is searching for a virtuous and meaningful life (to paraphrase Paul Kalanithi).
“There was a period – or at least you hoped there was – with every painting or project when the life of that painting became more real to you than your everyday life, when you sat wherever you were and thought only of returning to the studio, when you were barely conscious that you had tapped out a hill of salt onto the dinner table and in it were drawing your plots and patterns and plans, the white grains moving under your fingertip like silt.”
I used to get this book recommended constantly alongside The Secret History, which is my soul book, but to suggest these two are akin is an unforgivable act of artistic terrorism. The core is similarly a group of young creatives but it chronicles their entire lives (not just an incident in college) and how they all intersect and tangle around Jude St Francis. Because Jude is really the aching heart of this story, and you will live and die with him in its 800 traumatising pages as you uncover the secrets of his past and the forces that have brought these players onto the stage at the same time, in the same place. It’s also a book about art and academia and found family and New York and identity. But Jude is and always will be the centre of gravity holding everything in orbit, albeit an orbit no one would ever ever want to get trapped in.
“People wanted to know so much, they wanted so many answers. And he understood it, he did – he wanted answers, too; he too wanted to know everything. He was grateful, then, for his friends, and for how relatively little they had mined from him, how they had left him to himself, a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified slowly into stone.”
No longer will I recommend A Little Life as indiscriminately as I did at Waterstones (because several booksellers notorious for inflicting it on everyone insisted that it should be recced alongside every Donna Tartt sale). In fact, I think the following trio of books hit all the existential themes I was promised this accursed one would evoke, explore, and affirm without the crippling spiritual desolation: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Those are sweeping, soaring, life-affirming reads – books that can save you. Whereas I’d never ever consciously recommend A Little Life to anyone; in fact I’d beg them not to read it. If someone happens to accidentally stumble into it or finds themselves encouraged by the wildly misplaced hype not at all helped by the appalling trend of vlog reactions then they need to be made aware of the incalculable list of content warnings that come with it, and they’ll need someone to weather it with, if only for the desolate middle-of-the-night messaging.
Because this book shreds you. The whole reading experience is a vast and devastating vivisection and I wouldn’t wish it on literally anyone.
“Now he got out of bed and wrapped his blanket around himself, yawning. That evening, he’d talk to Jude. He didn’t know where he was going, but he knew he would be safe; he would keep them both safe. He went to the kitchen to make himself coffee, and as he did, he whispered the lines back to himself, those lines he thought of whenever he was coming home, coming back to Greene Street after a long time away – ‘And tell me this: I must be absolutely sure. This place I’ve reached, is it truly Ithaca?’ – as all around him, the apartment filled with light.”
The last line of this review used to be: But this book will also force you to confront and even discover the most fundamental truths of your own little life… But 18 months on I’d like to amend that desperate attempt to find the most fleeting reason for this book to exist in the world to a single plea: do not read it.
UPDATE: 12th January 2022
Three years – three years of wandering and wondering and raging at the gaping glitch in the matrix that could have enabled such an implacable shroud of delusion to suffocate the literary world utterly unruffled for so tortuously long. And then today… Today! A hurricane that has flayed every wisp of dew from the sky. This article by one of America’s most notoriously excoriating critics has so masterfully distilled and articulated everything I’ve been feeling with such exponentially compounding fervour about this book I will be feasting on the sheer tectonic force of the vindication forever.
Vindication.
https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html
