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A review by fictionesque
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
1.0
Okay, I have to DNF. 54%, page 444.
What the hell HAPPENED since her first book? I don’t know where to start, but the TL; DR of it is that this book has been making me physically nauseous and I no longer see fit to subject myself to that. I refuse to believe that misery on this level is high literature. Actually, I believe that misery on this level must disqualify something from being literature.
I don’t call books sadistic lightly, but I think the word is fitting for this novel. The first difference in this novel from Yanagihara’s first, The People in the Trees, is that horrible acts of abuse are no longer allowed to speak for themselves. We, the readers, must be subjected to pages upon pages of the abused characters’ degradation, horror, and anguish. Genuinely, the book I would call the best comp title for A Little Life is not Yanagihara’s debut but The Sluts by Dennis Cooper, for its excessive and offensive accounts of violence. Except I’m not sure that’s fair to Cooper’s novel, because Cooper understands how to let horrific violence breathe, how there are some acts so horrible that just to put them into language at all is more than enough for the reader to fully comprehend their weight and effect on the victim. Yanagihara does not seem to understand how to do that. In fact, one might say that this “novel” is less comparable to a novel than it is to a Bucky/Steve 200,000 word whump #trauma #PTSD #abuse recovery #mental health #m/m fanfiction wherein the terrible acts (including, of course, graphic depictions of sexual abuse that only an edgy 16 year old mind needing to vent could dream up) Bucky endured while he was being turned into the Winter Soldier by HYDRA or whoever (I haven’t seen a Marvel movie in a very long time) are detailed so painstakingly that one might be inclined to report the author to their high school counselor’s office.
It is possible there might be some kind of payoff for all this suffering at the end, but from what people say about this book, I doubt it. Even if there was payoff at the end where Jude is finally done justice, I actually don’t think anything could make up for the 444 pages I read. You just don’t come back from that. “Oh, oh, but Fran, that’s the POINT, dontcha geddit? The POINT is to show the reader what horrific abuse and self-harm and suicide and rape looks like!” How about fuck you? It’s a blessing to not know what the graphic details of these things look like, and I’m tempted to call this book irresponsible for detailing precisely what the ridges of years’ worth of self-harm scars look like. Self-harm and suicide especially are extremely contagious and talking about them in this kind of detail for 444 pages, from the perspective of a very sick character who considers his engagement in these things to be both necessary and virtuous, is likely to inspire some number of struggling people to take an interest in these behaviors. Question for all the people who read all the way to the end…why? Seriously, I cannot understand what the point is of reading a fictionalized account of suffering this graphic except for the purpose of psychological self-harm. There is so much real horror in the world. People on planet earth endure real abuse of this scale and they sometimes write about it. What about doing justice to an actual abuse victim by reading their story and uplifting their voice instead of self-flagellating with this self-righteous, poorly paced, torture porn? I can only conclude it is because liberals believe it is righteous to read about minorities suffering. Let me explain below.
Yanagihara’s book has an especially #diverse cast of characters. That’s great and all, but it would have been better if it didn’t feel so damn fake. I knew I was in for a ride when within ten pages of starting this book one of the black characters made a joke about how him and his friends fighting over bunk beds was “blacks versus whites.” The friends then literally go around the table and state their respective races.
Me after that joke looking up if Yanagihara is black:
It’s tokenizing and objectifying, not to mention just plain cringey. I think everyone should write whatever they want as long as it’s done well. I think men can write rape scenes about women if it’s done well and respectfully. I think white people can write black characters, I think straight people can write gay people, I think literally anyone can write anything as long as they do it, and this is the key word here, WELL. The trouble is that Yanagihara does not write her black, gay, or disabled characters well, and she takes a disturbing amount of liberty in torturing them with no reprieve.
For instance, let’s take the black characters, JB and Malcolm. Malcolm is a biracial black man who struggles with feeling “black enough.” He is barely in the 444 pages I’ve read, however, and his personality consists of being called “o*eo” (yes, this is a real thing the author wrote) and moping about how he isn’t black enough, and he doesn’t have sex, and he still lives in his parents’ house. JB, in contrast, loves being black, and he loves art. He is a gay black guy who is renowned in the art world for his painted portraits of his friends. By 40, he is a fat meth addict. Yes, you heard me correctly. He becomes a fat meth addict who mocks his disabled friend of many years and can think of nobody else but himself. The chapters in his point of view were so shocking and egregious that I have no choice but to assume the author is mocking the reader for believing that a black gay guy could be a successful portrait painter, that he could be happy. I have no problem with characters struggling or hitting bumps in the road or not getting happy endings, but one chapter he was a successful artist, and the next, he was a meth addict. The character was not done the justice of explanation. It was never shown how he got where he was. In fact, it literally doesn’t make sense why he got to where he ended up. He had a great home life, according to his chapters, and he had a successful career, but according to his internal monologue he had a disgusting level of selfishness and judgement towards others (to give you an idea, once, when thinking of the severely abused character, Jude, JB thinks to himself that he wishes he’d had an abusive childhood, because it would have made him more interesting). What the hell is that implying, except that he must have been a bad person?? I suppose it might have worked if I felt I trusted the author to do the characters justice, if I trusted that this was part of a larger arc for JB, but I really don’t believe it is. Tell me if I’m wrong and he ends up in a better place, and the latter 400 pages are not as much of a trainwreck as the former. I think it’s pretty fucked that Yanagihara wrote two black characters whose identity is so wrapped up in their race (JB stops talking to all his white friends for 30 days as part of an art experiment, which I think was meant to be a cheeky aside to “haha social justice politics amirite kids?” but really was just a slap in the face considering where JB ends up) with both of them ending up miserable. It seems like she does not know how to humanize black characters, how to write them with personalities outside of race-based suffering. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong when I read To Paradise but Malcolm and JB really do read as racist stereotypes, not characters. They further the cultural narrative that one cannot be black and happy, black and ambitious, black and successful. They naturalize black suffering as an inevitability, or a deserved fate, or an ingrained trait.
Now, a few asides about the other characters.
First aside is that Willem is the most boring and annoying character I’ve read in a long time. He is a pretty boy Hollywood actor and a womanizer with a soft spot for the disabled protagonist, Jude. I guess I’m supposed to “ship” those two at the expense of all the women Willem betrays (he cheats on his girlfriend and abandons several more after year long relationships). In actuality, I hope that Willem never gets another gram of pussy for the rest of his sorry life. He was completely unsympathetic, and I found him profoundly dull to read.
Second aside is that this book has…no women in it. I do have to comment that I think there is a sort of self-hatred implied in the lack of complex female characters in not just one, but two Yanagihara novels. You tend not to see male authors who don’t write complex male characters. Moreover, after reading the protagonist’s repulsed descriptions of his female colleague (her menstruation; her fatty body; and her supposed vapidness, lack of academic talent, and instinct for nurturing) in The People in the Trees the absence rings louder in this book. The female characters exist at the periphery, in the shadows. They are the mothers who birth and adore their sons, they have silly little crushes on the male characters, and they are the girlfriends Willem cheats on. They could never hope to have any deep sort of relationship with a man. Not like men love men. Would love to assume this is a blackpill feminism moment for Yanagihara about how men always choose other men over women, but I don’t think so. I suspect she hates herself a great deal for being a woman, and that she does not know how to write women outside of the sexist stereotypes men view us as, because all the women in her novels so far have been sexist stereotypes. I find it hard to respect female writers like this. Everyone, please note the awards this book won. See how women who push themselves to the periphery of art are rewarded? See how those who choose to write about the REAL deep subjects, men, are heralded, no matter how shitty their writing? Take note.
The next thing I have to address is Jude. Jude is a disabled character who was horrifically sexually abused his entire life. Yanagihara is quick to overshadow his brief moments of happiness in this book with more brutality. The long and short of it is that I don’t know how to interpret Jude’s character as anything but ableist. I’m shocked I haven’t seen anybody talking about this. This is not my fight, I am not disabled, but this to me seems clear as day and it needs to be said: making a disabled character suffer like this for 400 pages is absolutely disgusting. There is no other way to frame Jude’s treatment. I felt, reading his character, that I was watching a sociopathic child play with a doll. “What will happen next? I’ll cut him to ribbons. I’ll throw him down a flight of stairs. I’ll beat him bloody. His limbs will literally rot.” The graphic descriptions of Jude’s degradation (the blood on his *** after being repeatedly raped, the scars from his self-harm because he blames himself (of course), the fluids leaking from his rotting legs, his deformed face and missing teeth after yet another person beats the living daylights out of him) were so grueling that I have to do something I don’t normally do and say that it was ableist. Using a disabled person as torture porn in your Groundbreaking Gay Magnum Opus is disgusting and is a classic example of using disabled people’s suffering as a way to lift non-disabled people up. “See how hard they have it?” etc. etc. Disabled people do not exist to further YOUR narrative and I think it’s repulsive, regressive, and cheap that this author would write about a disabled abuse victim going through all of this without giving him even a shred of dignity or self-respect. I could not dream of having the audacity to write a character like this and treat him in this way. You can write disabled characters, and you can write them suffering, but to do so in the way this novel did is sick in the first degree and I think it’s a perfect example of the Twitter brainrot that plagues literary communities today that nobody, despite all our diversity trainings and hashtags and ~listening and learning~, could see that this is actually a very base example of ableism the likes of which a high schooler could recognize (or maybe they could before the internet, lol). We talk about “isms” endlessly but cannot see them when they are right in front of our faces.
Finally, without going into the weird pacing, the overreach, the useless chapters and the need of editing in this novel, as well as the poor character development and the embarrassing dialogue, I do want to touch on the gay characters, all of whom are implied to be gay but none of whom are particularly proud or happy. Not everything has to be fluff, but I’m starting to get a little wary at the amount of abusive, pedophilic gay men in Yanagihara’s books. They have been a heavy feature in two now. At 444 pages in this book, there have been graphic depictions of men raping men, and one description of JB getting a half-hearted blowjob in order to further his career. There is no romantic gay sex, no handholding, not a fond glance that lingers too long. There is nothing but suffering and repression in this book which is supposed to be about intimate male bonds. Is this what the author believes gay men to be? Is this what the readers giving this book five stars believe gay men are, or should be? Do they feel more righteous reading about straight men who could be gay than about actual real life gay people, or gay people written by gay people instead of self-hating women? Is this more comfortable for the average person? I suppose the answer must be yes. I suppose that this accoladed, glued-and-bound torture porn is a sign of the times: that liberals living in an age of unprecedented potential and privilege feel the most productive thing is to dream of new forms of suffering for marginalized people (except women, who are to be ignored, as they are boring), patting themselves on the back as they do penance by considering new ways that black people, and disabled people, and gay people, might be or have been degraded. We are every bit as puritanical as the conservatives whose uptightness we mock. Baseless suffering and victimhood, in this age of privilege, is the greatest virtue, and so it is in Yanagihara’s book. Wow.
What the hell HAPPENED since her first book? I don’t know where to start, but the TL; DR of it is that this book has been making me physically nauseous and I no longer see fit to subject myself to that. I refuse to believe that misery on this level is high literature. Actually, I believe that misery on this level must disqualify something from being literature.
I don’t call books sadistic lightly, but I think the word is fitting for this novel. The first difference in this novel from Yanagihara’s first, The People in the Trees, is that horrible acts of abuse are no longer allowed to speak for themselves. We, the readers, must be subjected to pages upon pages of the abused characters’ degradation, horror, and anguish. Genuinely, the book I would call the best comp title for A Little Life is not Yanagihara’s debut but The Sluts by Dennis Cooper, for its excessive and offensive accounts of violence. Except I’m not sure that’s fair to Cooper’s novel, because Cooper understands how to let horrific violence breathe, how there are some acts so horrible that just to put them into language at all is more than enough for the reader to fully comprehend their weight and effect on the victim. Yanagihara does not seem to understand how to do that. In fact, one might say that this “novel” is less comparable to a novel than it is to a Bucky/Steve 200,000 word whump #trauma #PTSD #abuse recovery #mental health #m/m fanfiction wherein the terrible acts (including, of course, graphic depictions of sexual abuse that only an edgy 16 year old mind needing to vent could dream up) Bucky endured while he was being turned into the Winter Soldier by HYDRA or whoever (I haven’t seen a Marvel movie in a very long time) are detailed so painstakingly that one might be inclined to report the author to their high school counselor’s office.
It is possible there might be some kind of payoff for all this suffering at the end, but from what people say about this book, I doubt it. Even if there was payoff at the end where Jude is finally done justice, I actually don’t think anything could make up for the 444 pages I read. You just don’t come back from that. “Oh, oh, but Fran, that’s the POINT, dontcha geddit? The POINT is to show the reader what horrific abuse and self-harm and suicide and rape looks like!” How about fuck you? It’s a blessing to not know what the graphic details of these things look like, and I’m tempted to call this book irresponsible for detailing precisely what the ridges of years’ worth of self-harm scars look like. Self-harm and suicide especially are extremely contagious and talking about them in this kind of detail for 444 pages, from the perspective of a very sick character who considers his engagement in these things to be both necessary and virtuous, is likely to inspire some number of struggling people to take an interest in these behaviors. Question for all the people who read all the way to the end…why? Seriously, I cannot understand what the point is of reading a fictionalized account of suffering this graphic except for the purpose of psychological self-harm. There is so much real horror in the world. People on planet earth endure real abuse of this scale and they sometimes write about it. What about doing justice to an actual abuse victim by reading their story and uplifting their voice instead of self-flagellating with this self-righteous, poorly paced, torture porn? I can only conclude it is because liberals believe it is righteous to read about minorities suffering. Let me explain below.
Yanagihara’s book has an especially #diverse cast of characters. That’s great and all, but it would have been better if it didn’t feel so damn fake. I knew I was in for a ride when within ten pages of starting this book one of the black characters made a joke about how him and his friends fighting over bunk beds was “blacks versus whites.” The friends then literally go around the table and state their respective races.
Me after that joke looking up if Yanagihara is black:
It’s tokenizing and objectifying, not to mention just plain cringey. I think everyone should write whatever they want as long as it’s done well. I think men can write rape scenes about women if it’s done well and respectfully. I think white people can write black characters, I think straight people can write gay people, I think literally anyone can write anything as long as they do it, and this is the key word here, WELL. The trouble is that Yanagihara does not write her black, gay, or disabled characters well, and she takes a disturbing amount of liberty in torturing them with no reprieve.
For instance, let’s take the black characters, JB and Malcolm. Malcolm is a biracial black man who struggles with feeling “black enough.” He is barely in the 444 pages I’ve read, however, and his personality consists of being called “o*eo” (yes, this is a real thing the author wrote) and moping about how he isn’t black enough, and he doesn’t have sex, and he still lives in his parents’ house. JB, in contrast, loves being black, and he loves art. He is a gay black guy who is renowned in the art world for his painted portraits of his friends. By 40, he is a fat meth addict. Yes, you heard me correctly. He becomes a fat meth addict who mocks his disabled friend of many years and can think of nobody else but himself. The chapters in his point of view were so shocking and egregious that I have no choice but to assume the author is mocking the reader for believing that a black gay guy could be a successful portrait painter, that he could be happy. I have no problem with characters struggling or hitting bumps in the road or not getting happy endings, but one chapter he was a successful artist, and the next, he was a meth addict. The character was not done the justice of explanation. It was never shown how he got where he was. In fact, it literally doesn’t make sense why he got to where he ended up. He had a great home life, according to his chapters, and he had a successful career, but according to his internal monologue he had a disgusting level of selfishness and judgement towards others (to give you an idea, once, when thinking of the severely abused character, Jude, JB thinks to himself that he wishes he’d had an abusive childhood, because it would have made him more interesting). What the hell is that implying, except that he must have been a bad person?? I suppose it might have worked if I felt I trusted the author to do the characters justice, if I trusted that this was part of a larger arc for JB, but I really don’t believe it is. Tell me if I’m wrong and he ends up in a better place, and the latter 400 pages are not as much of a trainwreck as the former. I think it’s pretty fucked that Yanagihara wrote two black characters whose identity is so wrapped up in their race (JB stops talking to all his white friends for 30 days as part of an art experiment, which I think was meant to be a cheeky aside to “haha social justice politics amirite kids?” but really was just a slap in the face considering where JB ends up) with both of them ending up miserable. It seems like she does not know how to humanize black characters, how to write them with personalities outside of race-based suffering. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong when I read To Paradise but Malcolm and JB really do read as racist stereotypes, not characters. They further the cultural narrative that one cannot be black and happy, black and ambitious, black and successful. They naturalize black suffering as an inevitability, or a deserved fate, or an ingrained trait.
Now, a few asides about the other characters.
First aside is that Willem is the most boring and annoying character I’ve read in a long time. He is a pretty boy Hollywood actor and a womanizer with a soft spot for the disabled protagonist, Jude. I guess I’m supposed to “ship” those two at the expense of all the women Willem betrays (he cheats on his girlfriend and abandons several more after year long relationships). In actuality, I hope that Willem never gets another gram of pussy for the rest of his sorry life. He was completely unsympathetic, and I found him profoundly dull to read.
Second aside is that this book has…no women in it. I do have to comment that I think there is a sort of self-hatred implied in the lack of complex female characters in not just one, but two Yanagihara novels. You tend not to see male authors who don’t write complex male characters. Moreover, after reading the protagonist’s repulsed descriptions of his female colleague (her menstruation; her fatty body; and her supposed vapidness, lack of academic talent, and instinct for nurturing) in The People in the Trees the absence rings louder in this book. The female characters exist at the periphery, in the shadows. They are the mothers who birth and adore their sons, they have silly little crushes on the male characters, and they are the girlfriends Willem cheats on. They could never hope to have any deep sort of relationship with a man. Not like men love men. Would love to assume this is a blackpill feminism moment for Yanagihara about how men always choose other men over women, but I don’t think so. I suspect she hates herself a great deal for being a woman, and that she does not know how to write women outside of the sexist stereotypes men view us as, because all the women in her novels so far have been sexist stereotypes. I find it hard to respect female writers like this. Everyone, please note the awards this book won. See how women who push themselves to the periphery of art are rewarded? See how those who choose to write about the REAL deep subjects, men, are heralded, no matter how shitty their writing? Take note.
The next thing I have to address is Jude. Jude is a disabled character who was horrifically sexually abused his entire life. Yanagihara is quick to overshadow his brief moments of happiness in this book with more brutality. The long and short of it is that I don’t know how to interpret Jude’s character as anything but ableist. I’m shocked I haven’t seen anybody talking about this. This is not my fight, I am not disabled, but this to me seems clear as day and it needs to be said: making a disabled character suffer like this for 400 pages is absolutely disgusting. There is no other way to frame Jude’s treatment. I felt, reading his character, that I was watching a sociopathic child play with a doll. “What will happen next? I’ll cut him to ribbons. I’ll throw him down a flight of stairs. I’ll beat him bloody. His limbs will literally rot.” The graphic descriptions of Jude’s degradation (the blood on his *** after being repeatedly raped, the scars from his self-harm because he blames himself (of course), the fluids leaking from his rotting legs, his deformed face and missing teeth after yet another person beats the living daylights out of him) were so grueling that I have to do something I don’t normally do and say that it was ableist. Using a disabled person as torture porn in your Groundbreaking Gay Magnum Opus is disgusting and is a classic example of using disabled people’s suffering as a way to lift non-disabled people up. “See how hard they have it?” etc. etc. Disabled people do not exist to further YOUR narrative and I think it’s repulsive, regressive, and cheap that this author would write about a disabled abuse victim going through all of this without giving him even a shred of dignity or self-respect. I could not dream of having the audacity to write a character like this and treat him in this way. You can write disabled characters, and you can write them suffering, but to do so in the way this novel did is sick in the first degree and I think it’s a perfect example of the Twitter brainrot that plagues literary communities today that nobody, despite all our diversity trainings and hashtags and ~listening and learning~, could see that this is actually a very base example of ableism the likes of which a high schooler could recognize (or maybe they could before the internet, lol). We talk about “isms” endlessly but cannot see them when they are right in front of our faces.
Finally, without going into the weird pacing, the overreach, the useless chapters and the need of editing in this novel, as well as the poor character development and the embarrassing dialogue, I do want to touch on the gay characters, all of whom are implied to be gay but none of whom are particularly proud or happy. Not everything has to be fluff, but I’m starting to get a little wary at the amount of abusive, pedophilic gay men in Yanagihara’s books. They have been a heavy feature in two now. At 444 pages in this book, there have been graphic depictions of men raping men, and one description of JB getting a half-hearted blowjob in order to further his career. There is no romantic gay sex, no handholding, not a fond glance that lingers too long. There is nothing but suffering and repression in this book which is supposed to be about intimate male bonds. Is this what the author believes gay men to be? Is this what the readers giving this book five stars believe gay men are, or should be? Do they feel more righteous reading about straight men who could be gay than about actual real life gay people, or gay people written by gay people instead of self-hating women? Is this more comfortable for the average person? I suppose the answer must be yes. I suppose that this accoladed, glued-and-bound torture porn is a sign of the times: that liberals living in an age of unprecedented potential and privilege feel the most productive thing is to dream of new forms of suffering for marginalized people (except women, who are to be ignored, as they are boring), patting themselves on the back as they do penance by considering new ways that black people, and disabled people, and gay people, might be or have been degraded. We are every bit as puritanical as the conservatives whose uptightness we mock. Baseless suffering and victimhood, in this age of privilege, is the greatest virtue, and so it is in Yanagihara’s book. Wow.