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What it argues
A Little Life follows four men from college into middle age and beyond — Willem, an actor; JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; and Jude, a lawyer with a past that is revealed in increasingly devastating detail as the novel progresses. The four are close in their twenties, and the novel is partly a portrait of a deep male friendship network. But the novel's true subject is Jude and what he carries: a childhood of abuse so severe and prolonged that the full picture takes hundreds of pages to emerge, and which has left him unable to believe he deserves to live.
Yanagihara is doing something extreme and deliberate with the accumulation of Jude's suffering. The novel has been criticized for piling on trauma beyond what any reader (or plausible life) can absorb, and that criticism is fair in a narrow sense. What the novel is asking is a harder question: what does it mean to love someone whose damage is so profound that love alone — any love, all the love his friends and later his adoptive father Harold pour into him — cannot repair it? Jude does not get better, not in the way readers accustomed to therapeutic narratives expect.
What it gets right
- 1.
The novel refuses the narrative of recovery — Jude's trauma is not resolved by love, therapy, friendship, or success, which is either its deepest honesty or its deepest manipulation, depending on your reading.
- 2.
Male friendship — its intensity, its physical tenderness, its capacity for care — is presented with a specificity that is rare in literary fiction, and not sentimentalized.
- 3.
The novel's accumulation of trauma has a formal purpose: it is asking whether there is a quantity of damage that love cannot repair, and giving you the evidence for its answer.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist and the editor-in-chief of T Magazine, the New York Times style magazine. Her debut novel, The People in the Trees, was published in 2013. A Little Life, her second novel, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award in 2015, and became a major international bestseller. Her third novel, To Paradise, appeared in 2022. She lives in New York City.
