On ‘A little life’ and its criticism

I enjoyed a little life while reading it but really soured on it once I had any distance and intellectualized it all. I didn’t have a problem with how abuse and the after effects were depicted. I actually thought most of it until the last 200 pages wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Maybe on its own the novel wouldn’t be an issue, but once it’s triangulated with Yanagihara’s other work, I find it troubling. I don’t like that she writes gay men just to be a vouyer in their suffering.

There are articles written better than I could on the subject. [This one](https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html) I found especially convincing.

I also am increasingly critical of how much media about queer men that takes off, makes money, and enters the mainstream is not by queer men.

The criticism I’ve seen of the abuse in A Little Life has less to do with how graphic it is, and more to do with the amount in general. At a certain point, I felt that the abuse stopped informing Jude’s character, but the author continued to torture him for no apparent reason.

That said, I think discourse around abuse obliterates discussion about any other aspects of the novel, so I want to mention a few additional things.

– The book takes place over 40 years, and all of those years are 2014. I get that the author didn’t want to write a historical novel, but it’s disconcerting and almost lazy.
– The Caleb plot was ridiculous. I think there was a really powerful story *somewhere* about Jude getting into an abusive relationship, but Caleb was cartoonishly evil far too soon and not even remotely convincing. Jude cut JB out of his life for mocking his disability in a less cruel away than Caleb, and that was a much longer running relationship.
– I don’t buy Jude as a ruthless corporate lawyer. He never seemed very passionate about the law, or driven enough by money to make up for it. We’re also never shown him succeeding in court, just told through the series of houses he buys and the nice things people say to Willem about him. In his personal life, Jude is far too passive and insecure to be believable as a mean lawyer. I know successful people who white knuckle it through life juggling serious mental health problems, but not quite like that.
– Everyone seems unrealistically successful. I mentioned in another comment that A Little Life reminds me of a Sims game, where logic only runs on the whims of the creator. Eventually, your sims get rich and famous because they showed up at the rich and famous factory every day. The characters’ paths to success are the same way. I know JB only exists to be an asshole and Malcolm only exists to supply Jude with tasteful ADA-compliant home renovations, but it’s also strange that Willem continues to bag leading-man roles after the age of 50.
– Speaking of JB and Malcolm, their sections at the beginning feel like they belong to a different book than the Jude show it turns into later. It’s odd that the 4 men get equal focus at the beginning, and then those two fuck off for most of the novel. Also, the way Hanya Yanagihara writes her black characters makes me somewhat uncomfortable. I’ve never seen anyone else talk about this, but I’d love to hear other perspectives on how she addresses race because I’m not sure how to articulate my thoughts on it.

Hanya Yanagihara also did some interviews about the book that rubbed me in a really bad way. In one, she spoke about how ALL is an exploration of what trauma takes away from people. Her words gave the impression that the book is an intellectual exercise on the effects of abuse rather than an empathetic one.
A Little Life’s thesis is that some people are so broken that suicide is their best option. That’s a deeply unkind thing to write about, and I think people would cut Yanagihara a lot more slack for all the trauma in the book if its thesis was literally anything else.

That said, people read fiction for emotional catharsis, and that’s found in spades throughout the book. This subreddit hates A Little Life, but it was still a bestselling novel, and enough people are reading it now that they’re still talking about it.

Personally, there’s a few aspects of the book I deeply connected with. I’ve been in a relationship like Jude and Willem’s, and I’ve never seen anything like it in fiction before. The passage where Willem talks about codependency and deep friendship feels like it came straight out of my brain, and I love it too much to say I truly hate the novel. Perhaps my opinions on the book will change over time, but I’d say the bad in this book outweighs the good by quite a lot, and I wouldn’t recommend it to any of my friends.

I agree with you. I work in mental health and have seen even more horrific and shocking things. It didn’t strike me as “torture porn” either. It felt real and raw. I recommend it to several work colleagues so we could discuss the book, and they all loved it too.

So I haven’t finished reading this book. I started reading it in 2016 and didn’t get far, then picked it up again in 2018 and didnt get far again. Again in 2021 and same story. Do I give it another go? It gets rave reviews everywhere but I just can’t seem to get into it. I have LOVED other books in a similar vein (Shuggie Bain and Pachinko)

tbh i had really high hopes for the book because everyone was praising it but after reading the first part only i started getting bored because there was too much unnecessary details so i left reading the book halfway

I liked the book, I didn’t like what it did to me. I was depressed and reflecting on all that trauma. It’s scary to me that others could feel the same.

I do find it kind of unrealistic but for me that’s the point? “A little life” its supposed to show how one man’s life can capture the highest highs and lowest lows. When the book is sad its very sad yes but also when its happy its very happy like I felt my heart lifting with joy as well as being crushed by sadness. I don’t think it’s just “torture porn” I personally find that a lazy critique. For me it dud what it set out to do which was make me feel a lot

I don’t think it’s torture porn per se. Just because it’s unbelievably horrific doesn’t mean it can’t actually happen in real life. There are people in the world who have bad things happen to them over and over again – and you wouldn’t understand as to why and how. As for Jude it does make sense for him to repeatedly attract people who take advantage of him. People who have suffered trauma oftentimes find themselves in relationships similar to their trauma as it’s the one thing that feels familiar (e.g. growing up with a narcissistic mother and finding „love“ in a narcissistic Partner later in life).

however one thing I genuinely couldn’t bear was Jude’s deep persuasion of how worthless he is. It is so difficult to follow somebody’s life story and have them go against any kind of affection, any compliment and every ounce of positivity toward his person. It’s beyond exhausting and made me stop reading.
It’s one thing to deal with people like that in real life but a whole other thing to read about it. Where’s the value in that? It’s just beyond depletive and didn’t bring me any joy.

Andrea Long Chu wrote a scathing review of the book, very enlightening

https://www.vulture.com/article/hanya-yanagihara-review.html

It’s a melodrama. Melodrama can be awesome on its own terms-just ask Pedro Almodovar.

I think a lot of the criticism comes from miscalibrated expectations based on its huge accolades, which signal a sort of realism/literary merit that we don’t usually associated with melodrama. I mean I wouldn’t take it to the desert island over Moby-Dick or even a Colson Whitehead book. But it very much succeeds on its own terms.

*Spoilers below*

I have finished reading this book about two months ago and I have thought about it every day since. I can confidently say that it’s the best book I’ve ever read (which I never have been able to say about any other book I’ve read before). I could rant for hours about everything that makes this book a masterpiece, but here’s my two cents about the criticism I’ve read about it:

I honestly understand why people think the misery is too much – when I reached the Dr. Traylor chapter I thought “dear god, will this boy ever get a break?” But although this amount of misery (luckily!) doesn’t happen to people often, that doesn’t mean it never happens. As someone who works in psychiatry, I have heard the most terrible stories from my patients, some even worse than Jude’s, and I have witnessed how, in a way, misery can attract misery, because people fall back on earlier acquired coping and survival strategies, which often aren’t the healthiest. Diminishing those experiences by calling them misery porn or too unrealistic is a bit naive – I’m really glad people can’t imagine this kind of misery happening to a person and that imagining it makes them uncomfortable (it should!), but I think we should be aware of our own privileges and realize that these things do in fact happen to people.

And I think for all the misery there are also a lot of beautiful things happening to Jude. >!The adoption, becoming a successful litigator, having a close group of supportive friends, being successful at a lot of his hobbies, falling in love and starting a relationship with his best friend, building their dream house together.!< I think by writing about both an extreme amount of bad things and an extreme amount of good things happening to someone, the author illustrates that those things do not cancel each other out but they coexist. This is a really interesting thing to think about and it reminded me of people who are terminally ill and want euthanasia (euthanasia is legal in my country): most of those people have spouses and children and friends and families who they love and they don’t want to leave them behind, but the pain is just too much. The happiness in their lives, however big it may be, doesn’t make their suffering less, it just makes them want to tolerate it longer until it becomes intolerable. Which is what makes Dear Comrade such a painful chapter: >!Jude’s suffering is at an all time high with no sight of it getting better (even after being admitted to the hospital and starting therapy it doesn’t get better, and you can see him tolerating it for so long, not for himself but for his parents and his friends, until it gets too much.!<

I often see people criticizing Andy for enabling Jude’s behavior. Would I as a health care provider have treated Jude differently than Andy? I don’t know. I know the author has some views about therapy that I don’t agree with. For instance, the book never really touches on trauma therapy which I think Jude really could have benefited from. But even though things like EMDR are very effective, they don’t always cure people entirely, especially people with a very complex trauma like Jude. At one point Andy tells Jude >!he’s often considered involuntarily admitting him to the hospital, but he chooses not to so he doesn’t disturb the equilibrium in his life!<, which I found really interesting. People often think the goal of treating someone who self-harms is getting rid of the destructive behavior altogether, but sometimes it just isn’t. Sometimes (a lot of times, actually) it’s about getting people to function in a society despite their destructive behavior – and despite everything, Jude has a job and a relationship and friends and hobbies. Obviously as a provider or as someone who is close to someone who SH’s it can be really hard and frustrating to witness this because you want the best for them, you want them to stop hurting themselves, but that just isn’t realistic for everyone, even with all the therapy in the world. One of my patients used to SH three times a day, but now they do it twice a week, and because of this they are able to volunteer at an animal shelter, and they have befriended a coworker… you see? It’s not always about stopping altogether, it’s more about functioning in society. And this way, Andy ensured that Jude would keep trusting him and that he would see him when he needed a doctor if necessary. Who knows what would have happened if Jude had stopped trusting Andy. He probably would not have visited another doctor voluntarily and we have all read about all the times Andy’s treatments saved Jude’s life.

This got a bit out of hand but I hope my rambling was somewhat insightful!

edit: grammar and spoilers

I agree with a lot of the things others have said. Besides that, something that really bothers me, as a mathematician, is how poorly the subject is treated in the book. For example, a lot of emphasis is placed on the whole “proving an axiom” thing, which is meaningless – axioms are literally statements which do not need proof, since they are the foundation on which every proof is based. The meaning of some axioms is also completely misunderstood: the axiom of equality has more to do with the definition of the symbol “=“ than with something or somebody staying always the same. Writing a novel whose main character is a mathematician, among all the other things, would require some more research or assistance by actual mathematicians.

I despised A Little Life. I didn’t think it was well-written except maybe for food porn fans or believably plotted.

Yanagihara’s most recent novel *To Paradise* got a scathing [review](https://harpers.org/archive/2022/01/ad-nauseam-hanya-yanagihara-to-paradise-the-pandemic-novel/) in Harper’s, with the critic aiming some entertaining critical bon mots at *A Little Life*:

– “*A Little Life is a blazing success. You may have loved it, or you may have hated it, but if you’re anything like me, you spent the entire second half begging the main character to please, for the love of God, kill himself already. Then again, I’m not the target audience for A Little Life. I downloaded the audiobook under duress, after I’d been asked to write this review. (Pro tip: at 2.6x speed, the novel can be completed in under thirteen hours, and the more gratuitous self-harm scenes take on a pleasantly businesslike quality.)*”

– “*Famously, the editor Gerry Howard called A Little Life a ‘miserabilist epic’ and suggested that Yanagihara cut out some of the suffering heaped upon her protagonist—advice she did not take. Howard has since retired, but following the novel’s critical and commercial success, Doubleday evidently learned its lesson: To Paradise appears not to have been edited.*”

The book was one that I was really, really in to while reading it, but it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth afterwords. Now, unlike the rest of the sub, i still think it’s a good book, but when you take a step back and look at the big picture, it has a bad vibe all around it. Idk. Again, don’t hate it, or even dislike it, but it’s very unrealistic and occasionally cringey in the amount that the author wants to make her main character suffer.

I think the book was amazing really. Brought me to tears as well.

As bad as it sounds, the book gets easier to read when you realise you don’t have to like any of the characters. This doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have empathy, but the way it is depicted the entire ~~plot~~ premise of the book surrounds the idea of “oh, poor Jude. How can we help Jude? Precious 50 year old Jude, talk to me!”

If I was rating the book based on the excerpts of law and mathematics, I would immediately think it was a 5 star. Those parts were absolutely beautiful and philosophical.

But it honestly just felt I was reading the same thing over and over. No plot, no character development, just vibes and “Jude’s lived such a hard life.”

Hanya Yanagihara must be an extrovert. Why did this book have to be 700+ pages long?

I wouldn’t regard this as torture porn, nor a masterpiece as some argue.

I’d regard it as a mumbly jumbly excerpt of life-long trauma. There would have been better ways to communicate struggle.

At one point, I’m not sure where, my sympathy for Jude evaporated and I became a little angry with him. All these wonderful people were jumping to fulfill his every whim, and he doesn’t really try to overcome his past, which I do admit, was horrific.