4 hours ago
3
First of all, let’s get one thing out of the way: my only major criticism of the novel. Yanagihara has stated multiple times that one of her motives for writing A Little Life was her desire to create a character who never gets better, a character who can’t be saved. As cruel of an intention as it may sound to some, it’s actually highly technical. What Yanagihara was interested in was not creating a living embodiment of misery but rather a character who contradicts traditional characterization. The majority of narrative art could be described as a character’s journey from a point A to a point B. On the other hand, Jude goes all the way around point A to point Z, just to end up where he had started from. What would be the narrative tension and the momentum of such a book? When would the reader-simultaneously with and alongside Jude himself-realize what the inevitable conclusion of Jude’s life will be? How would the reader manage to remain engaged in Jude’s life, in much the way he has managed to remain engaged in his own life, despite having that knowledge?
Having said all about that-admittedly technically intriguing-stuff, some of that aspect of the novel was partially (yet not entirely) bombed by the fact that Yanagihara failed her original quest, meaning that not only Jude COULD be ''saved'', but also WAS practically saved, before she had to violently take it away from him with Williem’s death (more on that later)
Anyway, despite that ''fail'', I think that in the process Yanagihara somehow ended up creating something far greater and much less gimmicky from what she first had in mind. I consider Yanagihara to be a wise woman. Perhaps a tad bit insensitive at time-though not nearly as much as some people make her out to be-but wise nonetheless. And A Little Life to me is her manifesto of the human condition: What it means to inhabit a human body and the pain that comes along with it. The tyranny of memory. Friendship. Love. Loss. Sorrow. Need: to love and to be loved. Shame. Violence. All those often contradicting yet distinctly human qualities that make us what we are depicted and explored (in my opinion exceptionally well) throughout the novel, often within the space of a single page, paragraph, even sentence. And if that’s not enough to make A Little Life one wildly ambitious novel, I don’t know what is.
Going on, I was always really intrigued by Yanagihara describing the book as a fairytale, the operaticness of its neat calculated structure in contradiction to the utter melodramatic chaos that consists the action of the book, its total detachment from historical reality, it giving the reader nothing to look at other than the life of Jude. Last but not least another very overlooked aspect of the novel, is that its very existence is a response both to the redemption narrative deeply rooted within American society, but also the equally popular, punishing, cruel, belief that happiness is something purely dependent upon one’s ability to achieve it, which suggests that if a person is for incapable of finding happiness they are to blame.
At the end of The Happy Years,>! Williem’s death!<, feels at first, rushed, clumsy, forced, the easiest way for Yanagihara to ensure the novel will end as miserably as she wishes it to. But Dear Comrade is actually the opposite of that, it does masterfully yet with painful accuracy encapture the very essence of grief. So I was not exactly surprised to hear Yanagihara say that the accident was planned from the very start and that it was so difficult for her to write that she almost backed out of the idea altogether. The very existence of the Happy Years is not way for Yanagihara to torture Jude even further (she gives him a taste of hapiness for the first time in his life just just so that the pain when he loses it will be even greater than before, when he hadn’t ever had it so he naturally couldn't long for it). Honestly, even in this sub (which supposedly consists of dedicated and experienced readers) the level and quality of discourse I see regarding the novel is pretty low, considering I've encountered this very take countless times.
According to Yanagihara herself (this was my personal perception of it as well) it was instead a sense of guilt that drove her there. The knowledge of what was going to happen to Jude for her artistic vision to be fulfilled and the feeling that she owed him at least some sort of genuine joy for a portion of his life. Honestly, I found this idea, of a writer betraying their artistic vision to provide a fictional charcacter even a little bit of contentment, profoundly moving. The very fact that she employs the voice of Harold, the grivieng father, just so that through his own attempts of reassurance that his beloved son is there the reader get soothed a bit as well, touches my very much. But maybe that's just me. I also want to give a mention to the discussion between Jude and Williem about Rudolf Nureyev featured towards the end of the Happy Years which I think illuminates the reason why and argues that, no matter how the novel ended, those years were happy and should be seen as such.
Apart from the literary aspect of it (everything mentioned above + Yanagihara's exceptional prose), the book also means a lot to me personally. As a gay man who has been suicidal for much of his life, a human being who has naturally experienced the loss of loved ones, I’ve never felt any more understood regarding those aspects of my experience and identity than I did while reading about Jude. And that matters to me. Of course all of us have different experiences with such matters, so it’s impossible to feel represented and seen by the same things. I’m, the absolute last person to tell someone how they should feel about such sensitive matters. Having said that, so is everyone else when it comes to my own personal life experiences.
I'm pretty much prepared to a handful of vicious responses to this (I've received many of those when talking positively about the novel here), but quite honestly, at this point, I've grown not to care very much. But I'm very much looking forward to constructive takes, both negative and positive that hopefully won't include aphoristic bs such as the ''torture porn'' arguement which has been parroted so much since the release of the book that it has nothing interesting or new to offer (not that it ever did).
Last, but not least, in response to the Andrea Long Chu article (which I have accepted will inevitably pop up in the comment section), I'll love a piece about the novel from one of my favorite queer writers, Garth Greenwell, that praised the novel more articulately than I ever could.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/a-little-life-definitive-gay-novel/394436/
That's about it from me. The baton's on you all now.
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