A Little Life Review

The following review was originally written for goodreads

700 pages of beautifully written prose about a guy with absurd levels of trauma. Just having 1 or 2 of Jude's childhood "incidents" (The monastery, brother Luke, the truckers, Dr. Traylor) would have been enough to establish Jude as a traumatized, broken person, but instead Yanagihara feels the need to torture Jude past the point of believability. By the third incident, I was so desensitized to Jude's abuse that it genuinely contributed nothing to his characterization for me, and instead I found myself rolling my eyes at the absurdity of it. Considering her other books also focus on abused gay men, it feels like Yanagihara has a fetish for torturing gay men despite being a straight woman, growing up without abuse.

With that being said, the prose is some of the best I've read, and while the pacing stagnates at times, I never found myself wishing the book would've cut out the material that others have called superfluous or repetitive, excluding the aforementioned incidents. While I do think she could have traded some of those pages out to explore more characters (which she did such a good job of at the beginning), the repetition of Jude's self deprecation (putting it lightly), despite being wildly successful and surrounded by love, felt almost necessary for me to accept his character. As someone with an upbringing so different than his, his actions were initially illogical and unbelievable, and it took me almost until the book's end to understand him. I found the ending of the book to be satisfying, but whether that was true satisfaction and not relief from 700 pages of trauma porn I have not yet decided.

Which brings me to the main theme of the book, that some people are so beyond saving that nothing, especially not talk therapy, can save them. One of Jude's main conflicts seems to be his reluctance to share his childhood, and I held out a hope that talking to Willem or his therapist would finally fix him. But disappointingly (yet expectedly) nothing changes when he finally does. One quote that I found particularly interesting from the book was from Willem describing therapy:

But now, he was conscious of his own impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to it.

I think Yanagihara believes that therapy, with its rigidity to societal norms, can often do more harm to someone that is fundamental broken than letting that person cope with whatever "unacceptable" behaviors. In interviews, Yanagihara has compared therapy to hospice care: why is it socially acceptable to accept that someone cannot get better physically, and make their deaths comfortable, but completely unacceptable to accept that someone cannot get better mentally? While this may be true for some cases, I think the scope of people for which this applies to is a lot smaller than what Yanagihara believes, and more importantly, overestimating the size of this scope is dangerous. Unfortunately as someone who has grown up privileged I am unable to comment more deeply, but my gut feeling towards the book's main theme is one of disagreement.

With all that said, I overall do not regret reading the book. I felt connected to the characters, I was invested in their lives, and I spent the whole book holding out hope that the characters I so dearly cared about would make it out okay. A Little Life made me feel, and ultimately that's all I can ask of a book. While I don't think its possible to enjoy the book, I am glad that I read it.