Why A Little Life Is Not Worth Reading

I've never written a book review or posted on Reddit in my life but I need to put this into the world so here it is:

I knew A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara was a sad book when I decided to read it. I decided to read it because I’d heard it was a sad book—because I’d heard it mentioned in videos as “that one book that makes you cry a lot,” that’s “formative and important,” and that “you can instantly tell is going to be emotional.” A girl I’m subscribed to made a half hour-long video about it. I saw Antoni from Queer Eye wear t-shirts with the characters’ names on them on the show. This is what convinced me to read it: that it is widely regarded as an impactful story that makes those who read it feel very strongly. I thought that if there’s a book that’s so powerful it makes those who read it cry and carry the characters’ names around with them, then that means it must be worth reading. So I bought it off of eBay and read it.

In hindsight, I chose to read this book at a bad time. It’s April 2020, the pandemic is happening, and I read it over the course of about 12 days in quarantine during which I had nothing but time to sit in my room and read it for hours straight and think about it for days on end. A Little Life has been on my mind every single day for over two weeks now. At first, this was because I was in the middle of the story and was immersed in what was going on, anticipating where it would go. Then, it was because I’d finished it and was consumed by how devastating it was. Now, it’s because I’m genuinely angry that I let myself get so emotionally invested in a book that is in actuality terrible in every sense of the word. In short, A Little Life has deeply and personally upset me in multiple ways and I’ve come to realize I won’t be able to fully focus on anything else until I put into words why.

The blurb on the back of the book promises a story that “follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition.” It tells you what you’re about to read is “a hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.” Both of these things are lies and the second one, after a certain point in the book, almost reads like a sick, twisted joke.

But before that, here is what I initially loved—and still do appreciate—about this book. It is undeniably gripping from the first chapter to the end. Despite having little to no plot, just detailing the lives of the characters for 800 pages, this story kept me up reading until the sun came up more than one time. The first hundred or so pages gives such a solid introduction to (what you are deceived into thinking will be) the four main characters that you become invested in each of their lives, rooting for them individually along with dying to know more about their history and dynamic as a group. I knew A Little Life was different from any book I’ve ever read pretty early on when I started to feel it in my chest. It’s a physical ache that makes my chest feel hollow and heavy at the same time. That feeling has only gone away a few times since I’ve read the book, it keeps coming back, and it’s here right now as I’m writing this. I know this sounds so over the top but it’s true and that chest feeling is honestly the main reason I’m writing this—I want it to go away. That feeling started as a combination of genuine love developed for the characters, pain from the truths about friendship and life weaved within the narrative that hit me with an intensity I wasn’t ready for, sick anxiety for what could possibly be waiting in the following hundreds of pages I still had left, revulsion at the scenes I was being made to visualize, and eventually just pure sorrow for Jude and all the people who loved him. Hanya Yanagihara put something into the world that will stay with me forever, and there is absolutely something to be said for that.

But Hanya Yanagihara did not write a good book. It was poignant, and haunting, and unflinching, but I’ve learned through reading this and thinking about it nonstop that those things alone do not make a good book. She wrote a book that is not just dark and intense in subject matter, but that is excessive and visceral in its depiction of torture to the point of no longer being believable. The narrative is exhaustingly repetitive of Jude’s pain to the extent that no other characters get the room in the story they need to develop and grow. It becomes clear after reading scene after scene of nauseating violence and abuse that Hanya Yanagihara got carried away with detailing her protagonist’s suffering for what disappointingly seems to be no reason other than shock value and eliciting negative emotions from the reader. She is careless with the reader’s emotions, invoking pain in them just for the sake of it.

Here is where I’ll start to spoil the book and won’t stop for the whole rest of the time until the last paragraph.

Did Hanya Yanagihara think forced childhood prostitution wasn’t traumatic enough? Did she believe all the other horrors were necessary to make Jude’s past experiences warrant his current trauma? Not only does that seem to me like a slap in the face to all real-life sexual abuse survivors, but at a certain point it also begins to warp the narrative into something that is no longer plausible. For me, this point was when Jude hitchhiked from Montana to Philadelphia. Every single trucker he waved down was a rapist pedophile monster? Really? And before that, every counselor at the home was either a rapist pedophile monster or turned a blind eye to their rapist pedophile monster coworkers? Then, as an adult, the one guy Jude finally decides to date is the most batshit crazy evil fucker in all of New York City? I’ve never had to stretch my suspension of disbelief so thin as I had to to get through the Caleb part of the book. Jude’s abusers were cartoon villains, not characters, and this cheapened the story so much.

Out of these cartoon villains, Dr. Traylor especially was entirely unnecessary. He had no motives, no depth, no character; he only served as a vehicle to deliver further suffering to Jude, just to really drive it home that Jude’s childhood was bad, if that wasn’t already clear. Jude’s character already had a central tormentor in Brother Luke. He did not need another to make the reader buy his suffering; the manipulation, physical pain, imprisonment, and perpetual shame he endured at the hands of Luke was enough. It was visceral and painful and hard to read, but it worked within the story because Brother Luke and Jude’s relationship was one that the reader got to see develop and change over time. We understood why Jude trusted Luke, how Luke exploited him, and the horrifying world that Jude was forced into because of him. Again, this was enough. Of course the car injury needed to happen, but that could have easily been worked into Jude and Brother Luke’s storyline. With each bonus villain, Yanagihara unwittingly draws the curtain back and exposes Jude’s life story for what it is: a series of unthinkably awful, unlikely tortures imagined by an author trying to make her book as emotionally taxing as possible just to get a strong response.

Not only does the excess of Jude’s suffering make the reader doubt the reality of the book’s world, but it diminishes the impact of all the other characters and their experiences. Yanagihara created complex, beautiful characters worth exploring and then threw them to the rats. This, for me, is the most unforgivable part about A Little Life. The bones of a powerful story about close friendship are there, but they are buried beneath the rotting flesh that is what this book actually turned out to be. Did nobody edit it? Did they not say, “Wait, what about those other two main characters? Hanya, did you forget about them? What about JB and Malcolm? Isn’t this their story too?” Even Willem is a victim of this. We meet them as lost twenty-somethings each struggling to make it in their respective careers, and then suddenly—with a brief interlude for JB’s glossed over battle with addiction— they’re all famous and successful and bathing in riches.

Even though this shift in circumstances was a little jarring, (though did any of their characters ever really grow or change in all those years?) there was still a beacon of hope I looked towards: Part 5. Titled, “The Happy Years.” Seeing that title in the table of contents, I was at first hoping, then at some point just assuming because of the lack of exploration of the friendship group in all the pages I’d already read, that this section would document Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm’s college years and I was so excited. Finally, a break from visceral descriptions of child prostitution and self harm, and now we actually get to see these friendships we’ve heard so much about develop. Now we get answers to the driving questions, “Okay, we know JB, Willem, Malcolm, and Jude love each other with every bone in their bodies. But why? Yeah, we know they were randomly put together in a cramped little dorm in Hood Hall, but what made them friends? Why were they known as an inseparable group throughout campus? What did they do together? What emotional connections did each of these boys form with each other that set them apart from the other randomly assembled college kids, and how? What are the first memories they have together? What fights did they have early on, and how did they learn to reconcile? In what ways did they struggle trying to stay connected after leaving the place that brought them together?” I thought, “I know these four very different people love each other, but now I’ll get to see how and why and when and where it all began. Almost 500 pages in, finally.” But you never get any of that. It's crushing.

The scenes with all four of them were some of my favorites in the whole book. They were the most powerful; the ones that made me cry for good reasons and for bad. Reading the roof/fire escape scene, I was holding my breath. That was a part of the book where we saw each of the characters' personalities, where we really began to understand how their dynamic works. That scene is one of the only reasons I have an understanding of their dynamic at all. It shows how JB calls the shots, how Malcolm is apprehensive and cautious but ultimately always follows him, how Willem contests JB, how Jude desperately doesn’t want to be pitied by the others, how Willem cares about Jude the most deeply and looks out for him the most, how Jude and Willem each have their own roles within the group and relationships with the others but also have their own separate bond just between the two of them, how Willem will do anything for Jude, how Jude, on the inside, not only appreciates but needs Willem’s support to keep him from falling, literally and figuratively, to a dark, dark place. All that from one scene.

And the scene in JB’s apartment is the most harrowing of them all. It had me crying harder than any other part of the book. The struggles of every single one of them in that room felt so real; JB’s to maintain some semblance of dignity in front of his friends, Malcolm’s to keep the peace, Jude’s to accept what he’s just heard come from the mouth of a person he loves and is trying to help, and Willem’s to save JB but then to fight for Jude once it all goes down. Those last three lines sting. The whole scene does.

If there had been even just a few more scenes with the four of them that matched those ones in detail and rawness, A Little Life might have been the book it pretends to be. It’s deeply disappointing to me that there aren’t.

Actual big spoilers coming up, if you ever want to read the book stop here

I tried as hard as I could to accept Willem and Jude’s relationship for the sake of all the time and emotion I’d invested in these characters and their story, but truthfully I could cry thinking about how bad Yanagihara fucked it up. The way their relationship unfolded made me sick. Earlier in the book, she wrote that whole passage about the inherent value of friendship that I can flip to right now in three seconds as I write this because it resonated with me so much I highlighted the page,

“Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn’t hurt anyone, so who cared if he was codependent or not? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified…”

and then she put the characters of the only fully fleshed out friendship in this entire story in a romantic relationship? Not only a romantic relationship, but one that is in its early stages the most gutting thing to read as Jude is, devastatingly unbeknownst to Willem, made to relive the hundreds of rapes of his childhood by the one person he’s ever truly loved. There were beautiful moments in their relationship that I loved so much, but oh god, that part made me so sick. I could almost forgive it if it were done differently. In fact, I could forgive it entirely if it was done differently. If Willem and Jude had, from the beginning, had the seeds of those feelings for each other. If they were anywhere to be found. If we had gotten snippets of Willem feeling attraction towards Jude in college, and in their twenties, but pushing them aside because Jude is his friend, and he can’t feel that way about him, and Jude would never open up to him enough for them to become anything more than friends, and besides, he’s straight...right? And if we’d seen Jude feel inexplicably drawn towards Willem, but never being able to do anything about it because Willem is his friend, and he’s the one everyone wants, he’s the gorgeous lady killer and besides, he’s so fucked up from his childhood that he doesn’t ever want to put himself through the horrors of physical intimacy again..but he still can’t shake those feelings for him. If that had been written into the story not only would it have been forgivable, it might have been hard-hitting and powerful. And, if JB and Malcolm had actually gotten to fulfill their spots as main characters, we still could have gotten the friendships in the story that were promised. But, instead of that, what we have is two characters whose relationship was one of the strongest platonic relationships I’ve ever read, the only relationship in the book—save for Jude and Harold, Jude and Andy, and, upsettingly, Jude and Brother Luke—that was actually explored at length, hastily morphed into a romance for one fucked up reason: so it hurts more when Willem dies.

Aside from the disappointing friendships and relationships in this book, the other, equally upsetting thing is what followed when I finished the book, closed the back cover, and couldn’t help but question, “What was Yanagihara’s intention in writing this story?” I understand why

Biggest spoiler yet

Jude killed himself. It broke me to pieces but, given the agony he endured every single day of his life, I will never argue that it didn’t make sense. But it really makes me wonder what her purpose was for putting this story into the world. This is a story about trauma. It’s a story about what a person’s life becomes when, from the very start, they are physically and psychologically broken down in every way imaginable. It’s a story about how that kind of trauma never ever leaves you, and how you have to find your own ways to cope just to make it through your remaining days. So what is her message for the readers out there who are like Jude? The sexual abuse survivors? The human trafficking survivors? The domestic abuse survivors? Those who cut themselves, those with eating disorders, those living with chronic pain? That even if you find an escape, become unimaginably successful, travel the world, and, most importantly, form lasting, meaningful relationships with angelic people who support you and love you from the bottom of their heart, that there is still no hope for you? That life for the abused is a lost cause? From what I understand, her message is that it never gets better. I think Yanagihara did something irrevocably dangerous: she created a book, that has now somehow gained popularity and critical acclaim, in which she wrote suicidal ideation from the perspective of a suicidal person with such conviction that she forces the reader to begin to see his side; that killing himself would in fact end his pain, and at this point the reader loves Jude so much that all we want is for his pain to end. She writes from this perspective and then does not rectify it. Yes, she makes it clear that Willem and Harold and Julia (Julia, who got no characterization but deserved so much) and JB and Malcolm and Andy love him, and that they’re doing what they can (I know they really could have done more, but I’m not going to go off about that because I understand Yanagihara was making a point about the agonizing struggle that is trying to maintain the balance between respecting your loved one’s autonomy/protecting their dignity and knowing when it’s time to cross a boundary in order to keep them safe and having the courage to cross that boundary; it’s part of the tragedy and one of the most realistic parts of the story, so I get it) but in writing what she wrote, she sent the message that unconditional love is not enough. And when Jude kills himself, what she’s said is that in the end, he was right. That suicide was the only thing that made his pain go away. And she is wrong for that. She wrote a devastating story, intentionally making readers connect deeply to her characters just so she could make it hurt when she ruined them, and she neglected to include even a shimmer of hope; the one thing essential to stories like this. In A Little Life there is only misery and no solace. And it is just not worth it.

A Little Life is a cathartic book to read. It’s unforgettable. Between the despair, there are a few small pockets of joy and triumph that made my chest swell with good feelings instead of hollow from bad ones. It reveals harsh truths in a way so subtle yet so strong it takes your breath away. It made me feel an aching, powerful love for the main characters. But, for all the above reasons, from the bottom of my heart: fuck this book. Thank you goodnight.