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A review by owlette
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
2.0
I stopped reading around 300 pages. It wasn't for me. Good for everyone else raving about this book, but my sentiment was best described by Andrea Long Chu in her review: "The first time [Jude] cuts himself, you are horrified; the 600th time, you wish he would aim."
The writing is all right. There are a couple of terrible lines that could have come out of some cheesy movie ("You're not just my weird friend, Jude. ... You're also my weird friend."), but there's an undeniable momentum that keeps you turning the pages. There is a Toni-Morrison-like quality to Yanagihara's imagery when she describes the yellow hue of the lighting as "less like syrup and instead crisper, like the skin of a late-fall apple." I deliberately slowed down for the first 100 pages to resist being swept up. The effort was in vain because, sooner or later, I was going to be stuck with Jude for the rest of the 700 pages.
What rubs me the wrong way is not that A Little Life is a torture porn or that it's a glamour travelogue disguised as a novel. No, what disturbs me is that no one, including the author, criticizes Jude for his flaw, his narcissism. Like every depressed person, he wallows in self-hatred so much that he effectively abuses the very people he loves and love him.
Actually, there is one scene that comes close to that. It's the scene where J.B., delirious from taking meth, tells Jude, "You think you get to be a part of the club and you never have to say anything, you never have to tell us anything?" and then mocks his limp by mimicking his walk. Jude and Willem never forgive J.B. afterward and break off their friendship with him, putting an end to the quad. It's true that what J.B. did was ableist and wrong, but we shouldn't forget that Jude himself stubbornly refuses to confront his disabilities. Before this scene, when Malcolm tries to add a bar handle to his bathroom, Jude says, "I don't want this to be some cripple's apartment." It's very rich of Jude to be offended by J.B.'s behavior while being drugged when he himself has also internalized ableism so much that he can't stop hurting his own body. Later, Jude, thinking back to that night with J.B., poses in front of a mirror the way J.B. had done: "J.B. was right, [Jude] think. He was right. And that is why I can't forgive him. Now he drops his mouth open. Now he hops in a little circle. Now he drags his leg behind him. His moan fill the air in the quiet, still house." This is not a person hurt by ableism; this is a person hurt because someone had rightly pointed out his fragile ego.
I groaned when I read that, and this was when I decided to stop reading. I was reminded of J.D. Salinger's deftness in [b:The Catcher in the Rye|5107|The Catcher in the Rye|J.D. Salinger|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398034300l/5107._SY75_.jpg|3036731] when he included the scene where Holden nearly trips over peanut shells when he runs away from his boarding school. The comical scene is Salinger's decisive critique of his protagonist's immaturity; he doesn’t let Holden have a heroic moment of escape. I feel like I'm not going to get that kind of objectivity from Yanagihara even if I read to the end. Another example is David Foster Wallace's short story, "The Depressed Person." This is a remarkable story that, like Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the author is the first and foremost critic of his own character. In a few pages, Wallace diagnoses the psychological distortion going on inside the head of a self-hating person: you are so up your own ass that you flatten everything else around you. Everyone either loves you or hates you, and there isn't much of a difference between the two. No one is given the benefit of the doubt to be indifferent toward you because your sense of self is so inflated. It's a terrible world to inhabit.
The writing is all right. There are a couple of terrible lines that could have come out of some cheesy movie ("You're not just my weird friend, Jude. ... You're also my weird friend."), but there's an undeniable momentum that keeps you turning the pages. There is a Toni-Morrison-like quality to Yanagihara's imagery when she describes the yellow hue of the lighting as "less like syrup and instead crisper, like the skin of a late-fall apple." I deliberately slowed down for the first 100 pages to resist being swept up. The effort was in vain because, sooner or later, I was going to be stuck with Jude for the rest of the 700 pages.
What rubs me the wrong way is not that A Little Life is a torture porn or that it's a glamour travelogue disguised as a novel. No, what disturbs me is that no one, including the author, criticizes Jude for his flaw, his narcissism. Like every depressed person, he wallows in self-hatred so much that he effectively abuses the very people he loves and love him.
Actually, there is one scene that comes close to that. It's the scene where J.B., delirious from taking meth, tells Jude, "You think you get to be a part of the club and you never have to say anything, you never have to tell us anything?" and then mocks his limp by mimicking his walk. Jude and Willem never forgive J.B. afterward and break off their friendship with him, putting an end to the quad. It's true that what J.B. did was ableist and wrong, but we shouldn't forget that Jude himself stubbornly refuses to confront his disabilities. Before this scene, when Malcolm tries to add a bar handle to his bathroom, Jude says, "I don't want this to be some cripple's apartment." It's very rich of Jude to be offended by J.B.'s behavior while being drugged when he himself has also internalized ableism so much that he can't stop hurting his own body. Later, Jude, thinking back to that night with J.B., poses in front of a mirror the way J.B. had done: "J.B. was right, [Jude] think. He was right. And that is why I can't forgive him. Now he drops his mouth open. Now he hops in a little circle. Now he drags his leg behind him. His moan fill the air in the quiet, still house." This is not a person hurt by ableism; this is a person hurt because someone had rightly pointed out his fragile ego.
I groaned when I read that, and this was when I decided to stop reading. I was reminded of J.D. Salinger's deftness in [b:The Catcher in the Rye|5107|The Catcher in the Rye|J.D. Salinger|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398034300l/5107._SY75_.jpg|3036731] when he included the scene where Holden nearly trips over peanut shells when he runs away from his boarding school. The comical scene is Salinger's decisive critique of his protagonist's immaturity; he doesn’t let Holden have a heroic moment of escape. I feel like I'm not going to get that kind of objectivity from Yanagihara even if I read to the end. Another example is David Foster Wallace's short story, "The Depressed Person." This is a remarkable story that, like Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the author is the first and foremost critic of his own character. In a few pages, Wallace diagnoses the psychological distortion going on inside the head of a self-hating person: you are so up your own ass that you flatten everything else around you. Everyone either loves you or hates you, and there isn't much of a difference between the two. No one is given the benefit of the doubt to be indifferent toward you because your sense of self is so inflated. It's a terrible world to inhabit.