Okay, time for the long-awaited (or long-dreaded) peyton feignedremote A Little Life opinion post. TL;DR: it's a good book folks, solid 4/5, and above all, the haters are bad people.
My own first criticism is tentative and perhaps idiosyncratic. But one intriguing thing about A Little Life that sometimes gets forgotten given its infamy and "trauma porn" reputation is that it initially presents itself as a very different book than it ends up being. I remember hearing about it when it first came out in 2015, and it was described as a novel about the lives of a group of college friends in New York City. And for the first hundred or so pages, A Little Life alternates focus and seems like it's going to be about these four friends and their lives, a sort of group Bildungsroman for post-college young adulthood. But as the novel progresses, Jude becomes the clear center, and we recede into his past even as he ages and time passes. J.B. and Malcolm virtually disappear; Willem stays because of his closeness to Jude. I think this is an interesting narrative technique, and I don't dislike it in of itself--in fact, I'm fascinated by novels that initially present themselves as one thing and turn out to be something else. But I do think the early parts of the book do a really impressive job of capturing the milieu (socioeconomic and temporal) of the characters, and that strong sense of time and place falls away later. (I am perhaps biased because of my own experience; I went to a very competitive private boarding school, and I was struck by how much the characters and their feelings about themselves and their identities and their place in their rarefied elite environment reminded me of people I knew. And we certainly do not have a shortage of novels about wealthy Ivy League grads (lmao), so it might seem like an odd thing to highlight, but I was really impressed by how vivid and true to life the characters felt.) Later, the setting feels almost superfluous; minor characters (like friends outside of the core four friend group) are mentioned but feel meaningless, and they're still rich Manhattanites but the world around them never feels real to the same extent.
And here's my second, also measured, criticism. The prose, I think, is good but not remarkably so; it's enough to sustain the narrative and characters but every so often there are clunky passages, and I was never really wowed by it. Yanagihara's main strengths are in crafting the characters and the narrative (pacing, plot) and so I don't think the prose itself matters as much as it might in another book, but looking through the reviews linked on the novel's Wikipedia page, I was kind of surprised that so many positive ones mentioned the prose as a selling point.
But the negative reviews are much, much worse! Let's take one mentioned on the Wikipedia page: Janet Maslin for The New York Times describes the novel as "voyeuristic" and says, of a description of Jude and Willem's beautiful house, that "for a double dose of the vicarious, you are invited to press your nose to that glass and wait for Jude’s awful history to destroy him." Maslin also writes that "for all its strong passions and intense, even ghoulish, medical curiosity, this book is conspicuously squeamish about sex." So what, exactly, is are we as readers consuming vicariously and voyeuristicly? As Maslin acknowledges, the rape (although her review does not actually name rape, or abuse) is never remotely graphic; in fact, I think it's remarkably under-described considering just how much of it Jude has endured, and how central it is to his life. The descriptions of physical pain and injury are more prominent and linger more, but still, they don't strike me as gratuitous. Jude's injuries and disabilities are essential to his life and to the narrative; is Yanagihara just not supposed to describe them? Or should she not have written about them to begin with? Why is writing about pain and injury inherently suspect, as Maslin suggests it is? She doesn't actually quote any passages focusing on bodily sensation, so it's unclear what exactly she finds gratuitous. If it were Yanagihara's prose that Maslin objects to, one would expect her to provide an example. So are pain, injury, illness, disability inherently "voyeuristic" and "ghoulish" subjects? I think that's an absurd suggestion; pain is probably one of the most universal human experiences there is. Of course Jude's disabilities are more severe than what most people deal with, but they're certainly not implausible. Why shouldn't Yangihara write about a disabled person? In the last paragraph of her review, Maslin says "Ms. Yanagihara is still capable of introducing great shock value into her story to override its predictability. One major development here is gasp-inducingly unexpected, the stuff of life but also of melodrama." So now A Little Life is predictable? Much of Maslin's review describes the characters' wealth and social status, which is certainly rarefied, but also a bit absurd to dwell, on especially in a review for The New York Times, I think; it's hardly unique in being a novel about rich people in Manhattan. Yet Maslin has been portraying both the good parts and the bad parts of the characters' lives as almost unbelievable, so it's puzzling to talk about predictability. And what, exactly, is the shock value? I suppose Willem's death, but people die in car accidents all the time! It's shocking in the context of the book, perhaps--the reader is used to worrying about Jude, but not Willem--but "shock value" is a strange way to describe something so mundane. Maybe Maslin means that the extent of Jude's past abuse, but it's clear from early in the novel that something horrific has happened to Jude, and the abuse itself is revealed consistently over the course of the book; it doesn't just show up all at once out of nowhere. I find this review baffling. It almost reads like Maslin's talking about a totally different book with the same basic plot, or a weird bootleg adaptation. It's like she's trying to criticize the novel's execution (the writing style is gratuitous and voyeuristic, the plot is just shock value), but she doesn't offer any evidence to support why the execution is lacking. Really, I think she fundamentally objects to the premise and plot, as many readers have in the years since A Little Life was published.
It's frustrating because obviously a work of art being about rape or abuse or another potentially upsetting subject doesn't mean that it's beyond criticism, and yet in practice, the criticisms people offer so often feel like they have little to do with the work of art itself. If you've read this post this far, you've probably seen people on social media calling A Little Life trauma porn or suggesting Jude's backstory is excessive and gratuitous. I think it's crucial to push back against characterizations like that in general (not just when it comes to this novel), first because the idea that a life like Jude's is unbelievable is wrong and dangerous. People do endure years of abuse; people are raped many times, by multiple people, in separate incidents, and suggesting that those things don't happen has repercussions for real people. And I also really object to the idea that writing about someone who's had an exceptionally traumatic life is wrong, and that it can only be done out of a "voyeuristic" impulse. Again, it's striking that criticisms of A Little Life rarely discuss Yanagihara's writing itself; they find the book itself objectionable, which I think is a far more dehumanizing (and sure, anti-art as well) sentiment than anything expressed in the text. How can a life be too obscene to be written about? It can't, I hope.
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