Official A LITTLE LIFE Thread

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flipp525
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Re: Official A LITTLE LIFE Thread

Post by flipp525 »

Great article from the WSJ about the unexpected success of A Little Life:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-little-li ... 1441312965
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flipp525
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Re: Official A LITTLE LIFE Thread

Post by flipp525 »

First off, it's hard to believe that this book was written in just eighteen months. And while the author was holding down a full-time job as the editor of a major magazine. That's astounding to me.

Tee, I cosign 100% the last paragraph of your post. "Soul-engrossing" is a very on-point description of the experience of reading this book.

To continue on a couple interesting points raised by Tee and to put forth a few others (some of these thoughts are very random):

So, while I was reading, I was like, "Well, of course this is who Jude ends up with in his first adult relationship." Yes. I can totally believe that there are men like Caleb out there. Very realistic. So, Tee, I totally get what you're saying when you state that Caleb is a "wonderful character." He's just very wonderfully true, especially in that moment for a character like Jude. I also think that his appearance in the story is a major turning point for the novel. For, it's after Caleb that Jude's full past with Brother Luke is finally revealed as well as the subsequent suicide attempt (which Yanagihara, of course, haunts the character - and the reader - with for the rest of the novel until he finally succumbs). I've also definitely never read about a fictional gay male domestic violence situation and this one is just so brutal, it's difficult to read - one of my first moments of having to seriously put the book down and summon the will to go on, fearful of what I was going to read next. I also don't think I've read a book where a single character is raped this many times. I simply lost count at a certain point.
Mister Tee wrote:But I do think Malcolm was given somewhat short shrift by the narrative. All other characters get major attention at some point – Willem for his career and his many feelings about Jude, JB for his family history and drug issues (and for being an unusual presence in the lives of the others: a friend, by longevity, but someone you can never really trust won’t turn on you and wound you grievously, as he does to Jude in the moment flipp highlights).
In my mind, Yanagihara pulls a bait-and-switch in the first quarter or so of A Little Life, luring you into thinking it's a certain kind of novel: four young men making it on their own in NYC, sort of an all-male version of Mary McCarthy's The Group, a comparison I had thought about before reading it in a couple reviews. But then she reveals that she has a larger, darker project in mind. But, yes, Malcom definitely gets short-shrifted, a choice that Yanagihara seems to have made and completely stuck with for the duration of the novel. What I thought was interesting though was that after Mal's death, Jude revisits the Irvine family and we get some details about Malcom and his life during the years that we haven't really been treated to in real-time, including that wonderful detail about the time when Malcom says to Jude that Jude doesn’t understand what it's like having parents or something and then is immediately regretful of saying it to him and apologizes again for it years later. That felt very "Malcom" to me. He seemed like a stabilizing force for Jude. And his parents were also very important to him. I was interested that Malcom had a crush on Willem that was described early on in the novel in his (one) section. I had thought the author might revisit that later when Willem and Jude become a couple, but it almost seems like any angst he might've had over that union is grafted onto the character of JB.

I thought the section after Willem died was a very true exploration of someone experiencing profound grief. I had a feeling that Jude wouldn't last too long without Willem, but he lasted longer than I thought he would. As soon as Andy said that he was giving up his practice, I knew Jude wouldn't make it.

I loved the slow reveal of Jude and Willem's relationship and how, like Tee mentioned, we're reading about it almost in post at times. I didn't see it coming that they'd become romantically involved. (And, as an aside, I was so scared during the part where it seemed like Willem might hit Jude. That would've been devastating for me to read at that point.) And how the issue of sex is handled between the two is just incredibly (and respectfully) explored by the author, you mentioned. It was interesting to hear about sex from Jude's point of view and then to learn from Willem that Jude is very dexterous in bed. There's such a strange feeling we have as readers because we know the sad truth of why he's such an old pro in the bed even though Willem does not and enjoys being with him so much physically.

I found it pretty thrilling how utterly real the art described in the book felt to me. JB's paintings seemed especially realized on the page. I could very much picture them especially, "Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story" which I loved the description of. Also, "Jude with a Cigarette." Yanagihara posted a painting on Instagram that she says mimics the style of JB's work (in her mind) on that feed.

Some of Willem's films seemed really good! I was particularly interested in "The Dancer and the Stage" (or, "The Happy Years" as it's originally titled) as well as "Henry and Edith" about the friendship between Henry James and Edith Wharton. Yanagihara's ability to fill out a world with particularly just felt utterly seamless to me throughout the novel. I could really picture Jude's Greene Street condo (as well as the Lispenard Street apartment, Jude and Willem's country home, Harold and Julia's dusty, professorial cozy warren in Truro, etc.) because of the descriptions of characters doing things inside of them. So many times in reading stories during my MFA years, it would feel like the writer had characters living in a boundless, immaterial void with no specificity. In this book, that was just never the case.

There is an interesting lack of redemption in the book. I listened to this great podcast recently with Yanagihara discussing what she was going for in that regard and it was really illuminating. She was questioning this idea that people should always pick themselves up by their boot-straps and soldier on through life no matter what. She was like, "Sometimes they just shouldn't. Sometimes they can't." I thought this was incredibly astute commentary. I can understand how even with the amazing successes in Jude's life and fortifying relationships of his adulthood that he couldn't shake his past. I think Yanagihara builds a past for him throughout the novel (painstakingly and brutally) that would be almost impossible to shake. In the same podcast, she talks about how she wanted to know what happens to these young victims after their trauma. Such an interesting jumping off point.

During the same podcast, Yanagihara described some of her childhood which sounded very transient. She mentioned spending a lot of time in motel rooms across the country which is something that obviously found its way into this novel. And passing by the motels on highways and wondering what was happening in them and realizing that there were so many stories that no one got to hear. If I can find a link to the podcast, I'll post it in this thread because I really got a ton out of it.

I loved that moment when Willem recognized that he was a simple person who'd somehow ended up with the most complicated of people. That made perfect sense.

I think the extreme wealth of the characters is a way of going over-the-top in order to heighten the fable-like, fairy tale nature of what the author is trying to achieve. They really all are fantastically successful though! And, Tee, I thought the award Willem won was actually the Oscar (who would really care who he'd "brought" with him to the SAG awards where they're all seated at those tables?) Winning the Oscar also seemed to fit in with the "extreme success" theme of the book.

The Harold sections were just beautifully written. And what a good choice to end the book on one.
Mister Tee wrote:As to flipp’s structural question about Jude’s backstory: in general I was fine with how the details evolved; from the throwaway references, I got to know the cast of characters, and I presumed we’d eventually get to the worst stuff. But I have to say it petered out for me by the later chapters. Insensitive as this may sound, after a certain point of reading piled-up atrocities, there comes a narrative need for each to top the previous one, and I didn’t feel that last sequence, with Dr. Traylor, quite did the job. I’d long figured the “car injury” meant someone had run him over, so there was no surprise there, and the fact of his being imprisoned for a few weeks didn’t feel that much worse than the apparent non-stop barrage of sexual abuse he’d been experiencing in the monastery, with Brother Luke, and in wherever he’d been placed afterward. I hate to think in these terms, but that thread of the story could have used a bigger finish. (Tangential issue: though I approved of most ellipses in the book, I was frustrated at never hearing how Dr. Traylor was caught. Jude refers to Ana having told him what the doctor confessed, but I can’t see, from the story as presented, how he’d have been tracked down. I was also a bit unclear how Jude made the leap from there to getting into college.)
I absolutely agree with you that Jude's backstory needed a "bigger finish." By the time I got to the Dr. Traylor section, I (like you, I think) was expecting something on the level of the Marquis de Sade, especially with the previous descriptions of how mottled and damaged the skin on Jude's back is. Are we supposed to believe that he got those from beatings in the barn at the home? Because that just didn't seem enough. Dr. Traylor was beyond creepy (and I couldn't help but think that his basement had been home to several other young men before Jude), but there were plot-holes there too. How did Jude go from getting run over by Traylor in a remote, icy field to being rescued and then placed into Ana's care? How was Traylor caught? For a novel that trafficks (poor choice of words, perhaps) so much in Jude's backstory, it did feel like she had possibly run out of steam at the end OR felt like she needed to ease the pedal off of the atrocities that Jude had suffered up until that point (which, to - I think - both of us, was not the right choice.)

So, not to brag or anything, but I just had to share this: Hanya Yanagihara sent me a custom-made tote bag with "Jude&JB&Willem&Malcom" printed on it. It arrived in the mail this week. She gifted it to me as a thank you for my support of her novel. (She found me on Instagram and sought out my mailing address.) I consider A Little Life to be a watershed book in my extensive reading life thus far and getting something like that directly from the author herself was beyond thrilling.
Last edited by flipp525 on Fri Sep 04, 2015 6:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."

-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Re: Official A LITTLE LIFE Thread

Post by FilmFan720 »

Haven't read these yet, but just loaded this onto my Nook...can't wait to delve in!
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Re: Official A LITTLE LIFE Thread

Post by Mister Tee »

I still don’t have the time to do the book justice, but some thoughts to get it started. (And, yes, thanks to okri for providing the space)

It was an easy book for me to dive into and empathize with: college friends who move to NY, to pursue mostly arts-related careers, is pretty much my life (though it takes place in a far different NY than the one to which I moved in the 70s. The book spans several decades, but, by technology and neighborhood references, it appears to begin present-day and then just move forward.) I was drawn in by all the characters at their youthful, just-getting-a-toehold stage, and found each of their family histories compelling; I was quickly ready to follow them through their life journeys.

Of course, it turns out that, while the book deals with the career progress of all four, it’s ultimately more concerned with the interior lives of those characters – especially Jude, who has a background of abuse that boggles the mind, but also JB, who fights drug demons, and Willem, who needs to come to grips with a love that doesn’t fit inside usual boundaries. There are of course a few major events along the way (the adoption, the suicide attempt, the car accident), and much detailed revelation of Jude’s past, but mostly the book soars on its accumulation of small details. Life, as the title implies, is a collection of little things that are important – some awful, some beautiful.

My niece called it a book “thoroughly entrancing in its sadness”. It’s certainly got many moments that evoked heartbreak -- maybe moreso for me than some, given that I’ve both taken care of an invalid over a long period of time AND lost the person most central to my life – so I can empathize with both Willem and Jude. But I don’t see the book as just a downer. It’s rather an attempt to come to grips with a character – Jude – so brutalized in his early years that dozens of people telling him he’s worthy of their love can’t convince him of the fact. Many of us, I imagine, have some smaller version of this running in our heads, but with Jude it goes to the bone. And yet…for a while, Willem makes him almost accept the idea that maybe/kind of/on certain days, he’s worth something. But then Willem is cruelly snatched away from him, at which point it becomes incumbent on the other characters – Harold, especially – to accept that it’s Jude’s life, and if ending it is the only way to alleviate his pain, you have to grant him that option.

Harold is a wonderful character, by the way, and so is Andy (and, in a hideous-but-compelling way, Caleb is, as well).

A style-choice I particularly like is Yanagihara’s skipping past certain dramatic flashpoints – not avoiding them altogether, but stopping the narrative just prior to a confrontation (say, Willem making his proposal to Jude, or Jude making the suicide attempt), and resuming with the deed already in the past: Jude reflecting on the fact that he and Willem have been together for a while now; Jude waking up in the hospital, clearly still alive. The key moments aren’t omitted – they’re mostly fully described, but in retrospect, so the sense of dread or discomfort we might feel having to live through them is alleviated; dealing with the fact of them, not the suspense surrounding them. This applies a certain level of grace to the story-telling. In fact, I think Yanagihara achieves unusual grace in her writing throughout – even when she describes awful things done to Jude, it isn’t in such grisly fashion that I felt any impulse to turn away (though I never quite got accustomed to Jude cutting himself; that hurt anew each time). She also manages to write extensively about sexual matters without ever letting it turn cheaply erotic. Let me add: there’s nothing wrong with cheap eroticism in other contexts, but, given how sensitive a subject it is for Jude, it would have been a betrayal of him as a character if any of the moments described had offered any level of turn-on. The gentle distance Yanagihara achieves feels like just the right approach for the subject matter.

As I said, I have a few quibbles:

I don’t mind that a book that starts out about four friends eventually becomes dominantly Jude’s book – he’s the most unique character, for certain. But I do think Malcolm was given somewhat short shrift by the narrative. All other characters get major attention at some point – Willem for his career and his many feelings about Jude, JB for his family history and drug issues (and for being an unusual presence in the lives of the others: a friend, by longevity, but someone you can never really trust won’t turn on you and wound you grievously, as he does to Jude in the moment flipp highlights). But Malcolm, except for the very brief “I feel guilty about being rich” section near the start, feels negligibly developed – as if his main function is simply to be the “other” victim in the car crash. I’m not asking for a ton more – in a book that’s plenty long – but it feels out of balance for one character to be short-changed like this, and maybe under-thought.

And on the subject of wealth: I found it a bit hard to accept (even believe) that each one of the four characters would become so unimpeachably successful in their chosen fields. JB gets exhibitions at major museums, Willem wins some kind of top award (the book’s coy about labelling it, but it’s SAG at minimum), Malcolm seems to be designing for half the world, and Jude is such a killer litigator they offer him control of the firm. In my experience, college-era friends achieve varied levels of success: I know people who’ve done extremely well, others who’ve floundered at mid-level. Here, they’re all masters of the universe, which, by late in the book, brings them all to a level of affluence that’s a tiny bit alienating: when they start making each other feel better by meeting together in some exotic foreign restaurant, I’m thinking, must be nice being in the .01%. It cut me out of their world, a bit.

As to flipp’s structural question about Jude’s backstory: in general I was fine with how the details evolved; from the throwaway references, I got to know the cast of characters, and I presumed we’d eventually get to the worst stuff. But I have to say it petered out for me by the later chapters. Insensitive as this may sound, after a certain point of reading piled-up atrocities, there comes a narrative need for each to top the previous one, and I didn’t feel that last sequence, with Dr. Traylor, quite did the job. I’d long figured the “car injury” meant someone had run him over, so there was no surprise there, and the fact of his being imprisoned for a few weeks didn’t feel that much worse than the apparent non-stop barrage of sexual abuse he’d been experiencing in the monastery, with Brother Luke, and in wherever he’d been placed afterward. I hate to think in these terms, but that thread of the story could have used a bigger finish. (Tangential issue: though I approved of most ellipses in the book, I was frustrated at never hearing how Dr. Traylor was caught. Jude refers to Ana having told him what the doctor confessed, but I can’t see, from the story as presented, how he’d have been tracked down. I was also a bit unclear how Jude made the leap from there to getting into college.)

These are all, I assure you, small issues for me – just things I’d have offered the writer had she asked me for notes on her work. But I’d also have told her this was as soul-engrossing a novel as I’ve read in some time; that I devoured its 700 pages in about ten days, and resented being called away by life-necessities when I could have been reading further; and that, once I’d finished, I felt regret at leaving this universe in which I spent such compelling time.
Last edited by Mister Tee on Tue Sep 01, 2015 10:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Official A LITTLE LIFE Thread

Post by Mister Tee »

I'm working on comments, but, surprise, they're a little lengthy, and I haven't yet had time to organize them all. Am busy this evening, as well, but I hope to find some time tomorrow to get it coherent.
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Re: Official A LITTLE LIFE Thread

Post by flipp525 »

Thanks for creating this thread, Okri.
Being me, I of course have some quibbles, but they're probably better saved for another thread, to avoid spoilers. What I'll say here is, this a hugely ambitious and successful novel, and I recommend it highly.
Looking forward to getting into a discussion when everyone is ready.

I'll start off with one thought/question: Yanagihara does a lot of intentional withholding of information in the novel - predominantly about Jude's past. How effective was it for you as a reader to learn about Jude's backstory in such a methodical, onion-peeling way? I appreciated the way she would drop small hints in the present-day narrative that spoke of much darker material that was on its way. For example, "Not having sex: it was one of the best things about being an adult" (p. 305). That was just shocking.

Two of the scenes from the novel that have most stayed with me (although there are many) are 1) when JB does his cruel imitation of Jude's walk and 2) the horrifying scene when Caleb beats Jude and then kicks him down the stairs at the Greene Street condo leading to the breathtaking "x=x" passage which is some of the strongest prose in the entire book.

Could there ever be a successful film adaptation of this novel?
Last edited by flipp525 on Mon Aug 31, 2015 7:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."

-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
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Official A LITTLE LIFE Thread

Post by Okri »

For Flipp and Tee (and anyone else who has read the book). I just got my copy today, so I'll stay out of this thread for now.
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