Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, published in 2015, is a plotless, sporadic, existential narrative that manages to be both shocking and beautiful, but never at the same time. From New York Times bestseller to BookTok stardom, A Little Life was sensationalized for telling a simple story of male friendship between four broke college graduates that cling to each other in the shared deprivation of New York City. Despite the novel being a lengthy 720 pages, Yanagihara writes beautifully of the interdependent narratives of each character as they find love and livelihoods, as they grow apart and come together, all while an undertone of emotional or physical suffering hums in the background. While Yanagihara is praised for being raw and capturing the totality of “a little life,” she sensationalizes and even debatably sells the shock factor of trauma and its lingering effects — winning $50,000 for the annual Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the accolades of being a Man Booker Prize Finalist.
The time frame is intentionally ambiguous as the characters allude to social climates of the late 90s to early 2000s and follow 50 years of friendships from the college students’ early twenties to their late fifties. In an unassuming but very New Yorker landscape of studio apartment buildings and Chinatown hole-in-the-walls, we meet the four leads: Malcolm, a nepotist son born into wealth, J.B. an ambitious egoist artist, Willem, a good-looking waiter and aspiring actor, and Jude, a pre-law student shrouded in traumatic mystery. Yanagihara carefully hyper-focuses on Jude, and therefore suffering, as his friends simply witness him cope with the trail of physical pain and PTSD stemming from his formative years as an orphan subjected to emotional and physical abuse. While the friend group intended to make life pacts, Yanagihara paints them in a fatalistic yet ideal reality where each of them rise to the top of their careers, while the rest is misery revealed through individual character profiles that intertwine.
A Little Life serves as a comprehensive collection of suffering as Yanagihara portrays topics of sexual abuse, self-harm, homophobia, chronic illness, disability, and suicide in an attempt to justify the over 700 pages, but casts them through a lens of romanticized fiction rather than a dialogue of awareness. Yanigahara employs picturesque prose, allowing the reader to understand the importance of visceral feelings with romantic descriptions to depict violence with equal attention and fluidity. The descriptive narration is dutiful and unrelenting in which Yanagihara’s talent to transport the reader to the sensual storyline of each character has been criticized as abuse of plot line. As domestic abuse and PTSD rear their ugly heads for the sake of the plot, how many trigger warnings is enough to necessitate depictions of trauma if it serves to represent the underrepresented?
As Yanagihara writes powerful descriptions and stunning imagery alongside dense, even chapter long scenes, of abuse, A Little Life represents the spoon full of sugar to the medicine of trauma dumping. The characters all balance between the friendship and contempt they share for one another as Yanagihara suggests the ambiguity of love to morph throughout the years. Likewise, the theme of balance persists through the comparison of companionship and suffering as Jude grapples with the fear and desire to be known and forever attached to the concept of pain. Yanagihara reserves her elaborate descriptions and conventions for the themes of trauma and friendship to highlight both transformative elements that create a semblance of consistency throughout the sprawling plot.
