A Little Life

I have had 'A Little Life' by Hanya Yanagihara from the library twice; I had to send it back first time as I did not have time to get through 700 pages. It follows on quite nicely from my review of Lilian's Story in that it is the story of a little life. Although some small parts follow other characters the main focus of the book is Jude, and the group of friends around him. I both loved it and hated it. It made me cry but it infuriated me. I was angry because parts of it felt like torture porn. She takes this child and gives him the worst life, then bad things happen, then more cruelty, then he escapes, but finds more pain and cruelty, then he escapes again, and finds more pain and cruelty, and on ad nauseam. Why does nobody help him? And through his life, as his self-destructive behaviour deteriorates, none of the people who claim to love him truly help him. I was left wondering just how much pain it is acceptable to inflict on one character. The book becomes the worst parable of how childhood experiences never leave you and shape everything about how you see yourself and affect all your future relationships. And he suffers, and believes he deserves to suffer and envisions no end to his suffering. And then, when he is happy, the author smacks him down again and I cried out in protest (both because she did it and because she telegraphed it in a clichéd and lazy way that made me angry). 

I feel like this could become a rather critical review because there were so many aspects of the writing and story that I found annoying. It was repetitive. Tedious unnecessary lists of people who came to parties or Thanksgiving dinner. Repetitive descriptions of Jude's self harming. The timeline was unpredictable; sometimes small incidents being anecdotally inserted, sometimes extended bits of back story. Occasionally the story is narrated first person and I was left wondering who was being talked about. It was as if initially she was going to make it about all four of the friends and then changed her mind. And then there's the whole rich people thing. I wonder if writers do that because it allows the characters to self-obsess more. If your characters don't have to struggle to make a living, if they have a comfortable life, they have time to sit around and muse on the meaning of their existence. Also repetitive descriptions of their beautiful New York lofts (these people are not just rich, they are very rich). It also allows Jude to have endless very expensive medical treatment that normal people would be bankrupted by. There are more hours in Jude's day than a normal person. He would spent hours of his day swimming, or cutting himself and then recovering from it, and still manage to do the kind of work hours that corporate lawyers are expected to do. He works till midnight but still seems to have time to have dinner with people. And if you were really in the amount of pain he was in you would not be able to function, you would not be able to work, you would collapse from exhaustion. And his doctor friend would not see the level of self harm and not do something. It just would not have carried on like that. 

So I hated it, you must conclude. But no, it sucked me right in, mostly because I yearned for Jude to heal, to learn to trust people and accept love as real. And occasionally she did stuff like this, that was just quiet and understated; here Willem is wondering if he will 'make it' as an actor:

"But then the feeling would dissipate, and he would be left alone to scan the arts section of the paper, and read about other people who were doing the kinds of things he didn't even have the expansiveness, the arrogance of imagination to dream of, and in those hours the world would feel very large, and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he were back in Wyoming, waiting at the end of the road for Hemming, where the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parents' house, where the porch light washed the night with honey." (p.55)

Also this, it is so delicate. Jude has broken a mug made by Harold's (deceased) son, and his vulnerability is exposed so rawly here, and Harold's response is so touching:

"Harold went upstairs to his study with the mug in his hands, and he finished his cleaning in silence, the lovely day graying around him. When Julia came home, he waited for Harold to tell him how stupid and clumsy he'd been, but he didn't. That night at dinner, Harold was the same as he always was, but when he returned to Lispenard Street, he wrote Harold a real, proper letter, apologising properly, and sent it to him.

And a few days later, he got a reply, also in the form of a real letter, which he would keep for the rest of his life.

'Dear Jude,' Harold wrote, 'thank you for your beautiful (if unnecessary) note. I appreciate everything in it. You're right; that mug means a lot to me. But you mean more. So please stop torturing yourself.

'If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realise that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

'Actually - maybe I am that kind of person after all.

'Love, Harold.' " (p133-4)

Very shortly after Harold tells him about their son Jacob and how he experienced the loss of his son:

"And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn't matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you had previously enjoyed about them, everything you had previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It's not biological: it's something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one's genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe's feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what's yours.

The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you'd expect to feel, feelings so well documented by so many others that I won't even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that's written about mourning is all the same, and it's all the same for a reason - because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

But here's what no one says - when it's your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

Ah, you tell yourself, it's arrived. Here it is.

And after that, you have nothing to fear again." (p.163-4)

Jude's fear is focussed on himself and I came to feel that the book is an examination of that fear. After a childhood of abuse it is his ability to be in control of his body that is his only solace, and yet his fear and memories cause him to simply inflict more pain on it. He has only himself he can rely on, and even his own body, with all it s damage, often seems to be against him. His inability to trust and rely on others is at the core of the book. This passage is quite visceral, because you feel both his yearning and his revulsion for physical/emotional intimacy:

"But as self-conscious as he is about appearing normal, he doesn't want a relationship for propriety's sake: he wants it because he realises he is lonely. He is so lonely that he sometimes feels it physically, a sodden lump of dirty laundry pressing against his chest. He cannon unlearn the feeling. People make it sound so easy, as if the decision to want it is the most difficult part of the process. But he knows better: being in a relationship would mean exposing himself to someone, which he has never done to anyone but Andy: it would mean the confrontation of his own body, which he has not seen unclothed in at least a decade - even in the shower he doesn't look at himself. And it would mean having sex with someone, which he hasn't done since he was fifteen, and which he dreads so completely that the thought of it makes his stomach fill with something waxy and cold. When he first started seeing Andy, Andy would occasionally ask him if he was sexually active, until he finally told Andy that he would tell him when and if it ever happened, and until then, Andy could stop asking him. So Andy never asked again, and he has never had to volunteer the information. Not having sex: it was one of the best things about being an adult." (p.305)

And for contrast here is Willem talking about Jude:

"And yet he sometimes wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, or course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day. His work, his very life, was one of disguises and charades. Everything about him and his context was constantly changing: his hair, his body, where he slept that night. He often felt he was made of something liquid, something that was being continually poured from brightly-colored bottle to brightly-colored bottle, with a little being lost or left behind with each transfer. But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude's very witness of him made him real." (p.436-7)

And another scene, so sweet and touching, and yet, for all that, in the back of your mind you know all that you know about Jude you think that Jude is not experiencing this moment in the same way that the others are:

"Now he shakes his head to clear the memory. 'I'm going to go up and check on him,' he tells Harold and Julia, and then he hears the glass door slide open, and all three of them turn and look up the sloping hill to see Jude holding a tray of drinks, and all three of them stand to go help him. But there is a moment before they begin heading uphill and Jude begins walking toward them in which they all hold their positions, and it reminds him of a set, in which every scene can be redone, every mistake can be corrected, every sorrow reshot. And in that moment, they are on one edge of the frame, and Jude is on the other, but they are all smiling at one another, and the world seems to hold nothing but sweetness." (p574)

So traumatised is the main word I used when describing to Julie how I felt about this book. I feel like I am a positive person, and so read on, hoping with each page turn that something would break through the protective shell that Jude created around himself, that someone or some thing would reach in to him, that he would find a way to heal, that new experiences would reshape him. But that was not to be. Nasty, brutish and short is a well known description of human life. This book is titled a little life, as if Jude's existence was somehow insignificant, and I think to him he was. He was made to feel he didn't matter and nobody managed to change that for him.

Stay safe. Be kind. Remember you matter.