A little life review//spoilers
Two disclaimers before I start this. First, I have never written a review before from either fear or pure laziness, so take me easy on this one (also English is only my second language). Second, this is my opinion, if you loved this book then cheers to you. At the end of the day you got a new favorite book and all I got is the sweet taste of indecision.
With that being said, let’s start. I didn’t hate this book, I didn’t love it even though I enjoyed a big part of it. Do I feel like it has the potential of becoming a new classic? Absolutely not. But let’s start with the beginning, the writing style. I don’t usually pay too much attention to this unless it is extremely good, but this time there were a couple of aspects that were nagging at me. It seemed really try-hard. Try-hard to sound deep, try-hard to sound poetic, try-hard to sound pretentious (that The Secret History good pretentious). The descriptions were at times way too long and unnecessary just like the phrases themselves. A sentence could go on for 5 lines and by the time you got to the end you were filled with so much information that you didn’t even know what was important to the scene at hand and what not.
I’m not saying that the writing style was complete rubbish, it had its charm at times and there were also a lot of quotes that I enjoyed throughout the book, some beautiful descriptions, but even those were spoiled from time to time with sentences that were just too long.
Now that we got the writing style out of the way, let’s move on to the plot. In this book’s case, there’s not much of it. Not that it bothered me, it reminded me of The Goldfinch, a book I loved. The main difference between this book and The Goldfinch though is that the length is not justified. A Little Life could have easily lost at least 200 pages and it would not have made a difference. The plot got repetitive and to be honest quite tiring. I remember the joy with which I started this book, so curious to find out more about our mysterious Jude and then I remember my only thought approaching the end: “Is this over yet?”
The book was simply too long in my opinion and it had little to nothing on which I could get hooked. I was curious for the end, but not that curious. I knew there was going to be death, it was expected, but I will admit that I was not expecting the actual death count.
And speaking about death, let’s get to the characters, shall we? A Little Life was advertised as a novel about friendship that followed the lives of 4 ex-college roommates through the years. And while that’s true to some extent, more often than not we seem to be concentrating on only one of these 4, Jude St. Francis. And don’t get me wrong, I do get it. Jude is the one with the most baggage, with the most interesting life and back-story, but if that’s the case, at least tell us from the beginning that this is a story about Jude! Don’t advertise JB, Malcom and Willem as main characters when they are not really, not when you know who you really want to write about.
I’ll express my opinion on each of these characters individually now and I’m going to be starting with Malcom since he is the most neglected out of the 4. I get very angry when I think about Malcom and his “character development” throughout this book or the lack of it. We get this dude’s POV once in a 720 pages book! And he is called a main character! A main fucking character! And what’s even worse, when we see him, the only time we really see him, he is filled with indecision, about his future, about his job, about his sexuality, about living with his parents. You want to tell me that these things are not interesting enough to follow, to see how a character gets out of his own head and decides for himself what his own life is going to be? After his short POV in the beginning of the book (which also seemed a little like a cheap anticipation of Jude’s part of the story, like starting with these 3 not so important characters to get them out of the way) we never really find out how he solved all of his problems. We get mentions of him getting a new job, one that he is actually proud of, finding a girlfriend who also becomes his wife later on and moving out of his parent’s house. But we never get his thought process, what made him take attitude in the first place, how he figured out his sexuality. Malcom’s whole character comes off as lazy writing. The author didn’t seem to care enough about Malcom to give him a proper story. Why make him a main character then? Malcom in my opinion had a lot of potential as a character, his constant indecision, still present in the story even without his POV, would have offered great literary material, a great conversation starter on the indecisiveness of people. But no, Malcom had to be resumed to an episodical character who was more often mentioned than present only to feed into the book’s theme of friendship. We could also consider Malcom as an instrument in establishing the theme of loss also present in this book. Malcom was killed off along with Willem and Sophie (a character who spoke a total of 0 words in the entire book) for a purpose unknown to me. Let’s say Willem and Sophie died and Malcom lived, wouldn’t that have offered him an opportunity to be seen by us, really seen, again? The death of the two could have been followed by Malcom’s point of view along side Jude’s. The author could have used it as an introspection into Malcom’s life and all it represented up to this moment. His character could have been redeemed and we would have also gotten an emotional roller coaster that would have brought us to tears. This would have saved the character of Malcom for me and it would also have brought him justice. In the end, Malcom was just a wasted opportunity for me.
The next “main character” that I’m going to bring up is JB. In no way as neglected as Malcom, but also not getting as much screen time as Willem or Jude, JB is a pretty interesting character. Selfish, self-centered, “always politically correct” and susceptible to bad habits, JB seems to be anything but a hero. That’s what makes him fascinating to watch, he goes from incidents like making fun of Jude’s walk to painting his friends in magnificent lively colors. We get to explore both his admiration for his own person and his hatred. JB is a complex character, not necessary my favorite personality wise, but definitely my favorite building and development wise.
Moving on to Willem, the character that gets screen time because he is the love of our main character’s life. Maybe that was slightly exaggerated, but we’ve all been thinking it. Willem is a very likeable character, in the beginning he was actually my favorite, I’m not sure what happened along the way. It was probably the fact that the story was dragged out so much that I lost interest in most things. I thought Willem was a very kind soul who truly loved helping people and more importantly his friends. I prayed until the very last moment that the relationship with Jude would not happen though. On one hand it was because it was too predictable, I would have loved to see a pure friend love story since we don’t get much of those if any. Second of all, back to the point of friendship, this was advertised as a story about 4 friends, not about 2 friends who fall in love with each other and then 2 others who are only half relevant. I wanted to be surprised by a story in which nobody fell in love with their best friend, where the kind friend always took special care of his best friend because that’s who he was, not because subconsciously he always wanted to kiss him and hold his hand. I still liked Willem as a character, maybe he wasn’t as layered as I would have wanted him to be and maybe he was frustrating at times (who takes 30 years to talk to their BELOVED BEST FRIEND about their self-harm?), but he was a well-rounded character in the end. With that being said, I think his death was a magnificent writing decision. It was a brutal, come out of nowhere death and it spiced the plot up. Unlike Sophie’s and Malcom’s deaths, Willem’s was completely justified in my opinion. It gave Jude a new challenge, it broke the repetitive pattern and stirred our curiosity about what was going to happen next. Even though I do not agree with the actual ending of the book I still believe that the events leading up to it were a good choice.
And now to the character we’ve all been waiting for, Jude. Listen, as everyone else I was really exited about Jude, I was counting the pages left until his POV, he intrigued me. There were lots of aspects that I liked about his character. His mental illness (yes, Andy, he was in fact mentally ill) was decently portrayed, I could relate to his mental process concerning self-harm and he definitely struck a cord with me. With that being said, his story could have been shorter and it could have left more space for other characters (*cough* Malcom *cough*). Jude’s story contained a repetitive pattern that had been dragged out for far too long ending in a predictable conclusion. Let’s start with the beginning, the back-story, the thing that we all wanted to find out about. I’m going to critic it’s credibility in just a second, but first I just want to say that the author’s attempt at building suspense completely flopped on me. The way she tried to spread the back-story all throughout the book did not keep me on my toes, it only annoyed and bored me, I couldn’t wait to get it out of the way once and for all.
Now, let’s say the monastery made sense, even Brother Luke made sense, but everything that followed was total bullshit. Is this boy just a magnet for abuse? Do abusers just sense him from 5 miles away or what? I’m not trying to seem insensible, but for real now! And how come every single person he meets is both a pedophile and interested in guys? I refuse to believe that every single counselor at that home and every truck driver is gay. What’s the actual probability of that being the case? I mean does nobody like vagina or what? The back-story is clearly exaggerated, but I guess that it does make Jude’s learning to trust people again more remarkable. I did enjoy the relationships he built for himself after everything that happened to him (except the one with Caleb of course) and I admired the courage it took him to trust Andy with his body, Harold with his fear of belonging to someone and Willem with his love and life. But in the end it was all for nothing, Jude still kills himself, all his progress is flashed down the toilet and you are left wandering what was it all for. I’m not saying all endings should be happy endings, damn, I love me a good sad ending, but making Jude’s suicide in the end come out as ok and acceptable just doesn’t send a good message, that he had nothing left to live for when he still got his goddamn parents who loved him more than anything else. Suicide should never be portrayed as something ok to do, something justifiable. Yes, Willem’s death was heart breaking for Jude, even more than that, it wrecked him all over again, but I really thought that this death would be used as an opportunity for Jude to get better, to show that you can get through anything. I get that life isn’t like that, I get that in real life suicide would probably be the actual thing a person would choose most of the time (hell, I don’t know what I would do if faced with this situation), I am not judging Jude, I am not condemning him, I’m just saying that there could have been a better ending. The least that could have been done was to still try to give it a positive note, Harold to remark that even though he understands why Jude did it and that he still loves him, there were alternatives, there was still a chance for him to be at peace with the world without dying.
All and all, I enjoyed A Little Life most of the times and I do not regret reading it even though it made me very angry at times. It is still a book I recommend, but I recommend reading it with a critical eye.
