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Book reviews roundup: PostCapitalism, A Little Life, Latest Readings

What the critics thought of Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Clive James’s Latest Readings

I t was unsurprising that Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism , in which the Channel 4 News economics editor predicts seismic change was less than favourably reviewed in the more conservative niches of the press. “I confess to an initial despondency on being asked to review this book,” wrote Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times. “Mason is someone I wouldn’t trust in his analysis of the present, let alone the future.” “Unnervingly dense” and “irritatingly shrill” found Gillian Tett in the Financial Times; “deeply misguided ... utopian folly,” thundered the Telegraph’s Liam Halligan . In the Times, Tim Montgomerie ’s imagination ran riot, with “a future police service led by a chief commissioner Mason – kitted out in berets and Che Guevara T-shirts – swarming all over Switzerland.”

Less predictable, however, was the critical kicking Mason got in more progressive publications: the former Labour MP Chris Mullin wrote in the Observer that “although undoubtedly bright, erudite even, he still appears to be shackled to the remnants of a hopelessly impractical ideology”. Even the Socialist Worker was resolutely unimpressed, with Dave Sewell noting that “Paul Mason’s enthusiasm about high-tech work sounds like he has just seen an advert for a job at Google”. Not that all these buckets of cold water seem to bother Mason’s fans: at last glance the book was number seven in the Sunday Times’ bestseller list.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, a graphic exploration of the far-reaching consequences of child abuse, was recently shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. The novel received rave notices in the US, but on these shores critics have been more circumspect. For the Observer’s Alex Preston , it is a book that has missed its moment, recalling a previous era in which an obsession with misery and self-harm was very much the order of the day. “It is a serious book, taking itself seriously in a very American, very 90s manner,” he wrote. For Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times the novel was a victim of its own excess: “Plot, character, detail – everything is in thrall to Yanagihara’s programme of exaggeration, which is deeply kitsch in its relentless insistence on tragedy,” she wrote. The author “turns up the volume until amplification becomes distortion.” In the Independent, Lucy Scholes agreed that the premise was over the top, but found that “in practice, A Little Life makes for near-hypnotically compelling reading, a vivid, hyperreal portrait of human existence that demands intense emotional investment”. “It’s an achievement, for sure,” wrote Anthony Cummins in the Telegraph, “though I’m not sure I’ll want to return to it any time soon.”

Finally – or, with any luck, not so finally – critics enjoyed Latest Readings , another valedictory publication from Clive James, who has carried on producing poetry and criticism despite his incurable leukaemia. “He has written more in the shadow of death than many writers manage in a procrastinating lifetime,” wrote Tim Adams in the Observer . “As a critic, James has been capable of sustained rigour here it is mostly his old brilliance for epithet and concision that is to the fore.” In the Financial Times, Jason Cowley found that both essays and poems “are death-haunted but radiant with the felt experience of what it means to be alive, even when mortally sick, especially when mortally sick.”

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'A Little Life': An Unforgettable Novel About The Grace Of Friendship

John Powers

A Little Life

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America is hooked on stories of redemption and rebirth, be it Cheryl Strayed rediscovering herself by hiking the Pacific Trail or the late David Carr pulling himself out of the crack-house and into The New York Times . We just love tales about healing.

But how far should we trust them? That's one of the many questions raised by A Little Life , a new novel by Hanya Yanagihara, whose acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , came from seemingly nowhere 18 months ago. This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience . As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night.

The book follows three decades in the life of four friends from a posh college. There's the kindhearted actor, Willem, and the self-centered artist, JB, of Haitian stock. There's the timorous would-be architect, Malcolm, born of a wealthy, mixed-race family and the handsome, lame Jude, a brilliant attorney addicted to cutting himself. As the book begins, they've moved to New York to make their fortune, and over the next 700 pages — yes, 700 — we watch them rise, lose their bearings, fall in love, slide into squabbles and wrestle with life's inevitable tragedies.

Yanagihara has a keen eye for social detail, and reading her early riff on actors like Willem who work as waiters, you may think she's offering something familiar — a generational portrait like Mary McCarthy's The Group or the witty, emblematic realism of Jonathan Franzen. In fact, the book's apparent normalcy lures you into the woods of something darker, stranger and more harrowing. Turns out that everything largely orbits around one of the four, Jude, whose gothic past Yanagihara slowly reveals.

For those who want trigger warnings, consider yourself warned — Jude's tale has enough triggers for a Texas gun show. The poor guy may endure the harshest childhood in fiction, one that's equal parts Dickens, Sade and Grimm's Fairy Tales . Evidently named for the patron saint of the hopeless and despairing, Jude is treated so badly that I flashed back to my mom reading me the book Beautiful Joe , about a dog so cruelly abused that I melted into inconsolable weeping.

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago. Sam Levy/Courtesy of Doubleday hide caption

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago.

Yanagihara writes with even more trenchant precision about the scars on the adult Jude's soul — the self-hatred and self-destructiveness, the yearning for love laced with utter mistrust, the baroque defense mechanisms he erects to keep anyone from learning who he really is. He struggles again and again, in long frustrating detail, to recover from his past, along with support from his friends, his doctor, Andy, and his law-school mentor, Harold, who becomes a father figure.

Now, I should also warn you that these struggles become too much, as sometimes happens with a John Cassavetes movie. Readers will be ready to move on, even if Jude is not. Then again, the book's driven obsessiveness is inseparable from the emotional force that will leave countless readers weeping.

Besides, Jude's condition is Yanagihara's way of exploring larger issues. Even as the book pointedly challenges the neat, happy arc of popular redemption stories — "People don't change," Jude decides — it calls on our imaginative sympathy. Yanagihara is fascinated by how we understand minds very different from our own. Here, Jude's ghastly history puts him in a mental universe that his friends — and readers — must work to enter. Not that this is impossible, mind you. He's no alien. Jude's guardedness makes him the heightened embodiment of the secret private self we all have, with our own calming rituals, mental hideaways and escape hatches.

While A Little Life is shot through with pain, it's far from being all dark. Jude's suffering finds its equipoise in the decency and compassion of those who love him; the book is a wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff. In A Little Life , it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you.

A Little Life is the best novel of the year. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

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by Jeff Chu

"Be quiet! Don't cry! Shhh. "

I cried my way through Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life. Critics have called it "exquisite," "a masterwork," and "a tour de force" ; Garth Greenwell describes it as "the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years." The novel — Yanagihara's second, after The People in the Trees —chronicles the relationships of four college buddies over three decades: JB, an artist; Malcolm, an architect; Willem, an actor; and Jude, a lawyer. Yanagihara records their peaks — all four achieve professional success — but dwells longer in their emotional and psychological valleys.

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I'd give A Little Life all of the awards. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (it lost to Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings ) and has been longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction. Yanagihara's prose is occasionally so stunning that it would stop me, pushing me back to the beginning of a paragraph for a second read. It's particularly dazzling when she visits the complicated mind and spirit of Jude, who becomes the axis on which the book's world turns. Indeed, A Little Life may be the most beautiful, profoundly moving novel I've ever read. But I would never recommend it to anyone.

Jude suffers childhood abuse, the details of which Yanagihara slowly reveals via flashback. It seems at first extensive, then almost endless. Some reviewers have questioned how realistic Yanagihara's depictions of the abuse and its aftereffects could be. But no book I've read has captured as perfectly the inner life of someone hoarding the unwanted souvenirs of early trauma — the silence, the self-loathing, the chronic and aching pain.

"For many years," Yanagihara writes, Jude "had envisioned (unimaginatively) a vault, and at the end of the day, he would gather the images and sequences and words that he didn't want to think about again and open the heavy steel door only enough to hurry them inside, closing it quickly and tightly."

When I read that passage, I thought: I know that feeling.

"Be quiet! Don't cry! Shhh."

My grandmother, whom I loved more than anyone in the world, would whisper-shout this to me in Cantonese when I was a kid. This was the only thing that she, a retired Bible teacher, ever said to me in her corrective, classroom voice. When I was 4, 5, 6, I was a crier, so she repeated this lesson over and over and over.

Who was I to argue? I was reared on stories of her suffering. As the Japanese army swept through China in the early 1940s, she, my seminary professor grandfather, and their two young kids sprinted ahead of the soldiers. She also had to care for about 20 of my grandfather's students, who accompanied them. During those refugee years, my grandmother gave birth to three more children. Two lived.

More than 10 million Chinese civilians were killed during the war. My grandparents survived, but not without cost.

Mostly I saw it in Grandma's behavioral quirks — the milk jugs of pennies banked under the bathroom sink, just in case; $20 bills at the bottom of her yarn box, just in case; the molding food in the fridge that she couldn't throw away, just in case. But I also felt it in her tense silence whenever arguments erupted in our family. And I heard it in her admonitions whenever she sensed my oncoming tears.

I learned well. So: I was quiet and didn't cry when Mac, my fifth-grade bully, repeatedly mocked my slitty eyes and my coarse hair and told others that if they spent time with me, they'd get eyes and hair like that too. I was quiet and didn't cry when an HR guy outed me to colleagues while recruiting donors for an office blood drive. "Well," he said, "obviously Jeff can't do it." I am quiet and don't cry when the brothers of one of my dearest friends joke that I eat dog, as they have every time they've seen me for more than 15 years.

I most regret being quiet and not crying the summer I turned 15. We were living in Miami then, for my dad's job, but when school let out I'd return to my native California to stay with my grandparents in Berkeley. Some afternoons, I'd spend hours nesting amid the stacks of its used bookstores. Others, I'd sneak a movie, hoping Grandma wouldn't ask where I'd been, because she'd remind me films were "of the devil." (Why couldn't I be quiet when she asked that? Why didn't I just invoke my teenager status and not answer? I don't know.)

Occasionally, when I was feeling especially rebellious, I'd bum cigarettes from strangers.

I know that memories do more than just seep out. They morph, and they turn, and sometimes they turn on you. One day I saw a guy smoking in the courtyard of a small shopping center. He worked at the photo store. We made awkward small talk while we smoked.

I needed to pee, so I asked if he could unlock the shopping center's bathroom. He did. Then he followed me in and began to touch—

Then he walked me to his store and into the back room, where he—

I remember shivering — Fuck. I'm shivering now.

And then he pushed me down on my—

The only thing I remember him saying was, "Doesn't it feel good?"

Why didn't I say no? Why did I bum that cigarette? It was only five blocks away — why didn't I just go home to pee? Why didn't I shout? Why didn't I run?

"Be quiet. Don't cry. Shhh."

I didn't tell anyone what had happened, not for 12 years. When, finally, I began to tell the tiniest bit of the story, I called it molestation —an ugly word, but not the ugliest. Is it strange to say that Jude's story gave me new vocabulary — or permission? After A Little Life, I named it honestly for the first time: rape.

The best novels point us back to something real — sometimes physical, but more often intellectual or emotional or even visceral. As I've read reviews of A Little Life, I've been puzzled by the clinical way in which some critics address the trauma Jude suffers as a child and its echoes in his adulthood. Don't they have their own memory vaults? Or are they just more secure?

Sarah Churchwell, in an exasperated, empathy-deficient review in the Guardian , questions Yanagihara's decision to write about Jude in the third, not first, person: "This is not thought: it is voiceover," Churchwell writes, "Such narration is distancing: it leaves us watching what Jude feels, rather than actively sharing in his confusion, pain, suffering." But first person or third, narration is still narration. It isn't "actively sharing" in trauma or its consequences. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Watching Jude, not being Jude, reflects wise editing, because Jude is a spectator too. He cannot control his memories — they control him. His vault is porous. His strategy for containing the past "wasn't effective," Yanagihara writes. No matter his efforts, "the memories seeped out."

I know that memories do more than just seep out. They morph, and they turn, and sometimes they turn on you. Absent the original perpetrator (Jude's dies, mine disappears), you assume that role. You play both parts — attacker and attacked, punisher and punished — in a twisted drama of substitutionary atonement. You seek but never find absolution for something you didn't do, for something that was done to you. Sin is sin. Someone has to pay, right?

Jude bleeds all over A Little Life — he's a cutter. It makes for difficult reading, but I bristled when Stephanie Hayes, writing in the Atlantic , describes Jude as "an alien other, haunting readers with his ordeals." Yanagihara illustrates the internal processes that inspire Jude's self-harm by creating a menagerie: His self-loathing is an uncaged "beast," his memories prowling "hyenas." Hayes dismisses this as "surreal and relentless imagery, almost as if to deflect humanizing sympathy for his struggles."

Alien? Surreal? No. Yanagihara's descriptions embodied my feelings — and reactions like Hayes's eye-rolling and her "don't be so dramatic" condescension are what I fear. Because this is my daily litany: I pierce myself with self-criticism until I reach numbness. I surgically examine my friendships to see what others could possibly want of me, and then drain them of their lifeblood: love. If my friends knew what's been done to me, and what I've done since, these relationships would never last anyway. If I shared my story, you'd walk away. If you knew the truth, you'd disappear —or worse, you'd stay to mock me.

"At night," Yanagihara writes, "he prayed to a god he didn't believe in — and hadn't for years: Help me, help me, help me " So I've sought extra locks for my vaults. Yet the memories still seep out, especially when other people are around. At parties, I escape repeatedly to the bathroom to splash water on my face. I preemptively try to run away from reincarnations of Mac, my fifth-grade bully, who returns to comment on my eyes, still slitty, or my hair, still coarse. I imagine men chewing over the best joke about what pets I may or may not eat. Summer can be the worst. I almost never wear shorts in public because the photo shop guy did that day, and when I see a particular stocky build and muscular calf—

The relationship that matters most in A Little Life isn't between Jude and Willem, or Jude and Malcolm, or Jude and JB — it's between Jude and Jude. This book is about internal warfare: Does he live alone with his festering hurt, or does he risk trusting others with his secrets? This book is about love: If perfect love casts out fear, perfect fear must block both the giving and receiving of love, and Jude's inability to love himself prevents him from feeling the embrace of the patient, kind love of those around him.

"At night," Yanagihara writes, "he prayed to a god he didn't believe in — and hadn't for years: Help me, help me, help me, he pleaded. He was losing himself; this had to stop."

I've prayed that same prayer many times, more vigorously in recent months than ever. I'm not quite Jude; I guess I do believe in God. I want to believe that my prayer is being answered. Last winter, inexplicably, I started to cry again with some regularity. And though I rarely read fiction, along came A Little Life, which I picked up though I had no idea what it was about.

At its best, storytelling is communion. Human experiences converge, and isolation withers at the intersection. I read A Little Life when I wasn't ready to talk about trauma or even to hear about it. But Jude's inability to address his wounds compelled me to begin to address mine. His struggle to find his peace emboldened me to try to find mine.

I don't know what healing might look like. But admitting to my husband that I believe I'm damaged goods — that's something. To let my closest friends see some of my deepest wounds — that's something. Acknowledging and apologizing for the ways in which I have, in my silence and fear, rejected others' kindness and dishonored their friendship — that's something. I've still never told anyone the whole story — not my husband, nor my therapist — and maybe I never will. But being able to say that I'm not a lost cause, and to believe it (mostly) — that's something too.

My grandmother has been dead 20 years, but sometimes she still whisper-shouts in my head. At last, I am ready to whisper-shout something back: "Be quiet, Grandma. Shhh. "

Jeff Chu is a contributing writer at Fast Company and the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America . He lives in Brooklyn.

First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines , and pitch us at [email protected] .

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In defence of reading the whole book

With the rise of BookTok and BookTwitter, Dion Everett argues that we should think twice before trusting online book critics

by Dion Everett

Wednesday May 24 2023, 5:09pm

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Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life has, since publication, been a topic of great contention throughout the literary world. A Guardian review sums up the novel in three words which really encompass its effect, both for those who enjoyed it and those who did not: ‘unusual, uneven, unrelenting’. The book’s divisive reputation lies not in its storytelling, but in its subject matter: Jude St Francis, the eventual protagonist, was the victim of sexual abuse from a young age, and these experiences have left him with unhealing trauma. The trauma has impacted not only his lifestyle and personal relationships but also his relationship with himself. Jude’s self is, by all means, broken, and he has a long-term habit of self-harm which no one, not even the man closest to him, can turn him away from. That being said, A Little Life is also a book of hope. For all his troubling life experiences, Jude perseveres, because his friends are good people who care for him deeply. He sees his adult years, marked by trauma but ultimately good and worth living.

This isn’t intended to be a defence of A Little Life . Many of those have already been written, and many more will, especially with the novel’s surge in popularity following the recent stage adaptation. What I would like to argue is that a great portion of the discourse surrounding A Little Life relies on clickbait and is written by those who don’t read the novel, rather than those who do.

A great portion of the discourse surrounding A Little Life relies on clickbait

Thanks to platforms like TikTok and Twitter, much recent book criticism has consisted of dramatic, discursive diatribes against works whose subject matter is in some way divisive or controversial. This trend, which may be familiar to those on ‘BookTok’ or ‘BookTwitter’, relies heavily on dramatic phrasing, reducing works to a single facet of their identity: ‘trauma porn’ in the case of A Little Life or ‘paedophile apologism’ in the case of  Lolita or My Dark Vanessa . The trouble with these discourses is their reductionism – they assume that specific scenes or events are reflective of the whole book. If you had only read 49 pages of a book and the Wikipedia summary, you would be hard-pressed to express in any convincing way the honest essence of the book. That is not to say that anyone who read these books and disliked them is in the wrong – art is subjective, and arguments are what keep the literary tradition alive and moving. Anyone can refuse to engage with art once their enjoyment of it runs out, but to make a public judgement about the content of a book you’ve not actually read (beyond a simple ‘I didn’t finish this, it wasn’t for me’) is dishonest. It suggests that a complex understanding of literature can come without knowing the work at all. Wikipedia will not replace reading a book, just as it will not replace watching a film, and the trendsetters who seem to believe it will are leading the way toward a reductionist consumption of literature.

Art is subjective, and arguments are what keep the literary tradition alive and moving

The most active parts of novels tend to be plot points – the driving forces of character decisions. But to neglect everything that comes in-between is to neglect everything that gives books their nuance and depth. What a summary cannot replace is character development, the reasoning behind plot choices and the effect of narrative voice on the reader’s reception of the work. It is not right to condemn a book purely based on its trigger warnings, nor is to right to suggest a book can be digested purely based on its synopsis. The trend of avoiding comprehensive reading in favour of clickbait captions and easy likes is a worrying indictment on the state of literary analysis.

Why do we love miserable books so much?

A Little Life is not the only victim of this trend. Popular discourses on BookTok and Twitter tend to be divisive for the simple reason that conveying long-form discussions about literature is impossible in a short-form, fast-consumption medium. To condense a complex book into a thirty-second soundbite is to do the book an injustice. Is A Little Life ‘trauma porn’, as so many TikTokers say? Is Lolita ‘paedophile apologism’? Only those who have read to the end can tell.

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Musical theatre, backstage & technical, obituaries & archive, training & drama schools, broadway & international, edinburgh fringe, jobs & auditions, acting & performance, shakespeare, a little life starring james norton – review round-up.

Here goes. Belgian auteur Ivo Van Hove ’s stage adaptation of American author Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 doorstop novel A Little Life has generated hype bordering on hysteria. It has already run in Amsterdam and New York and now arrives in the West End, having already been extended into August.

Van Hove needs no introduction anymore. His epic productions of Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge , Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and the musical West Side Story , plus his avant-garde adaptations of the films Obsession , Network and All About Eve, and of Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead have made him one of the biggest names in international theatre.

The real reason behind the outrageous excitement for A Little Life, though, is the casting of Happy Valley’s James Norton in the central role. Rumours of spectators fainting at the grim, graphic abuse his character suffers and leaked photos of his nude performance have only elevated the anticipation.

Was A Little Life worth the wait? Does Norton live up to his billing? Are the critics riveted or repulsed by Van Hove’s three-and-a-half-hour version of Yanagihara’s story?

Fergus Morgan rounds up the reviews...

A Little Life – gruelling and grim

Yanagihara’s A Little Life is a controversial book. More than 700-plus pages, it tells the tale of Jude St Francis, a New York lawyer who suffers an unrelenting torrent of sexual and psychological abuse from childhood onwards. Some think it a masterpiece, others manipulative misery porn. What do the critics think of it on stage, as adapted by Van Hove, Koen Tachelet, and Yanagihara herself?

Some critics find it gruelling but great. It is “unrelenting but magnificent” for Fiona Mountford ( iNews, ★★★★ ), while Nick Curtis ( Evening Standard, ★★★★ ) calls it “a superb piece of theatre” and Dominic Cavendish ( Telegraph, ★★★★ ) thinks its “grim vision” of “ineradicable despair hits home”. It is “utterly compelling”, adds Neil Norman ( Express, ★★★★★ ). It is “industrial strength theatre”.

Most, though, have reservations, variously labelling the show shallow, humourless, boring, loveless, compassionless and so awful it is almost amusing. Alice Saville ( Independent, ★★ ) finds it “psychologically incurious” and “hugely irresponsible”. Andrzej Lukowski ( TimeOut, ★★★ ) calls it “an experiment in terror” that is “essentially meaningless” and “unserious". And Katherine Cowles ( New Statesman ) thinks it is so “absurdly, tediously, pointlessly bleak” it is “almost cartoonish”.

One thing is for sure: love it or hate it, A Little Life is not for the faint of heart. It is “unbearable and upsetting” for Sarah Crompton ( WhatsOnStage, ★★★★ ), “utterly grim” for Clive Davis ( Times, ★★ ), “near unbearable” for Sarah Hemming ( Financial Times, ★★★ ),and “surpassingly bleak” for Matt Wolf ( New York Times ). Agreed, it is “a veritable atrocity exhibition”, concludes Lukowski.

A Little Life – a punishing performance

Norton is best known for his television roles in McMafia, Grantchester, War and Peace and, of course, Sally Wainwright’s acclaimed Happy Valley, in which he plays villain Tommy Lee Royce. He has made occasional forays into theatre, though – in the original production of Laura Wade’s Posh in 2010, in Tracy Letts’ Bug in 2016, and in Amy Herzog’s Belleville in 2017. How does he do here?

He is excellent, according to almost everyone. His performance as Jude is “towering” for Mountford, “astonishing” for Hemming, “truly titanic” for Lukowski and so “courageous” it is “almost Biblical” for Norman. It is “career-defining”, writes Luke Jones ( Daily Mail, ★★★★ ), “a contender for the Olivier Awards” adds Wolf, and a performance from “the top rank” for Curtis.

“Norton is extraordinary” as “a man pushed to the limits of endurance and beyond, groping for meaning in an existence of pulverising brutality,” says Sam Marlowe ( The Stage, ★★★★ ). Only Saville and Arifa Akbar ( Guardian, ★★★ ) disagree. For Saville, Norton is “impressive” but “doesn’t convey Jude’s inner life.” For Akbar, he is stuck with a “cipher” of a character, a “patron saint of pain”.

Norton is one of an eight-strong ensemble that includes Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson and It’s a Sin’s Omari Douglas. All are admired, although several critics echo Akbar in pointing out how Van Hove’s version reduces them to “marginal, superficial, schmaltzy” characters, compared to their portrayal in the novel. Elliot Cowan is particularly acclaimed for multi-roling as three of Jude’s tormentors – a paedophilic monk, a sadistic doctor and an abusive lover. He is “monstrous”, writes Marlowe.

Continues.. .

A Little Life – an upsetting staging

Van Hove and his regular partner-designer Jan Versweyveld have become known for their expansive and expressionist productions, in which open spaces, eerie music, live-streamed video and bodily fluids feature heavily. What have they come up with here and what do the critics think of it?

It is “a narrow strip of stage with a kitchen counter and hospital bed on one side” and an “art studio on the other, with the visuals dominated by two huge screens showing dreamy, slowed-down camera footage of a journey through Manhattan,” describes Lukowski. And it “is underscored by a live string quartet playing Eric Sleichim’s doomy or neurotic score,” adds David Benedict ( Variety ).

Some praise this production. It is a staging of “utmost intelligence” for Akbar, of “ferocious, propulsive power” for Crompton and of “consummate skill” for Curtis, while Marlowe calls its design “visually indelible”, and Cowles labels them “brilliantly minimalist”. Others are less convinced, though. It is “overstated” for Cavendish, “insistent” for Benedict and “sleek but empty” for Davis.

Van Hove’s depictions of the story’s more violent episodes also splits the critics, with the scenes of self-harm proving particularly divisive. Some find it upsetting but powerful, others struggle to see the point of it. “If you want to be immersed in other people’s pain, go and spend four hours in A&E,” concludes Saville. “It’s cheaper, just as agonising, and you can have a wee whenever you want.”

A Little Life – the verdict

Van Hove’s adaptation of Yanagihara’s novel is strong stuff – its story of one man’s unrelenting experiences of sexual abuse, psychological torment and self-harm comes with a content warning in capital letters – but the critics are divided as to whether it actually amounts to anything.

Most concur that James Norton’s performance is something truly special – award nominations seem likely – but they disagree as to whether the show that surrounds him is a potent portrait of abuse and its aftermath, or a gratuitously graphic slice of misery-porn as meaningless as it is manipulative.

Reviews range from five stars from Norman in the Express, to two stars from Saville in the Independent and Davis in the Times. One thing is certain: there is a lot to say about A Little Life.

More on this topic

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The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life”

By Jon Michaud

At the beginning of Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, “A Little Life,” four young men, all graduates of the same prestigious New England university, set about establishing adult lives for themselves in New York City. They are a pleasingly diverse crew, tightly bound to each other: Willem Ragnarsson, the handsome son of a Wyoming ranch hand, who works as a waiter but aspires to be an actor; Malcolm Irvine, the biracial scion of a wealthy Upper East Side family, who has landed an associate position with a European starchitect; Jean-Baptiste (JB) Marion, the child of Haitian immigrants, who works as a receptionist at a downtown art magazine in whose pages he expects, one day soon, to be featured; and Jude St. Francis, a lawyer and mathematician, whose provenance and ethnic origins are largely unknown, even by his trio of friends. Jude, we later learn, was a foundling, deposited in a bag by a dumpster and raised by monks.

For the first fifty or so pages, as the characters attend parties, find apartments, go on dates, gossip, and squabble with each other, it is easy for the reader to think he knows what he’s getting into: the latest example of the postgraduate New York ensemble novel, a genre with many distinguished forbears, Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children” among them. At one point, after his acting career takes off, Willem thinks, “New York City … had simply been an extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn.” Yanagihara is a capable chronicler of the struggle for success among the young who flock to New York every autumn, sending up the pretensions of the art world and the restaurant where Willem works, which is predictably staffed by would-be thespians. “New York was populated by the ambitious,” JB observes. “It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common…. Ambition and atheism.”

Yet it becomes evident soon enough that the author has more on her mind than a conventional big-city bildungsroman. For one thing, there’s the huge hunk of paper in the reader’s right hand: more than seven hundred pages, suggesting grander ambitions than a tale of successful careers. There are also curious absences in the text. Yanagihara scrubs her prose of references to significant historical events. The September 11th attacks are never mentioned, nor are the names of the Mayor, the President, or any recognizable cultural figures who might peg the narrative to a particular year. The effect of this is to place the novel in an eternal present day, in which the characters’ emotional lives are foregrounded and the political and cultural Zeitgeist is rendered into vague scenery.

But the clearest sign that “A Little Life” will not be what we expect is the gradual focus of the text on Jude’s mysterious and traumatic past. As the pages turn, the ensemble recedes and Jude comes to the fore. And with Jude at its center, “A Little Life” becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery. And having upset our expectations once, Yanagihara does it again, by refusing us the consolations we have come to expect from stories that take such a dark turn.

The first real hint of what we’re in for comes on page 67, when Jude wakes Willem, his roommate, saying, “There’s been an accident, Willem; I’m sorry.” Jude is bleeding profusely from his arm, which is wrapped in a towel. He is evasive about the cause of the wound and insists that he doesn’t want to go to a hospital, asking instead that Willem take him to a mutual friend named Andy, who is a doctor. At the end of the visit, having sewn up Jude’s wound, Andy says to Willem, “You know he cuts himself, don’t you?”

The cutting becomes a leitmotif. Every fifty pages or so, we get a scene in which Jude mutilates his own flesh with a razor blade. It is described with a directness that might make some readers queasy: “He has long ago run out of blank skin on his forearms, and he now recuts over old cuts, using the edge of the razor to saw through the tough, webby scar tissue: when the new cuts heal, they do so in warty furrows, and he is disgusted and dismayed and fascinated all at once by how severely he has deformed himself.”

The cutting is both a symptom of and a control mechanism for the profound abuse Jude suffered during the years before he arrived at the university. The precise nature of that suffering is carefully doled out by Yanagihara in a series of flashbacks, each more gruesome than its predecessors. Jude was taught to cut himself by Brother Luke, the monk who abducted him from the monastery. Initially, Brother Luke appeared to be Jude’s savior, spiriting him away from an institution where he was regularly beaten and sexually assaulted. Brother Luke promises Jude that they will go and live together as father and son in a house in the woods, but the reality of their years on the road is much, much grimmer. Eventually, Jude is liberated from Brother Luke, but by then he appears to be marked for sexual violation. “You were born for this,” Brother Luke tells him. And, for a long time, Jude believes him.

The graphic depictions of abuse and physical suffering that one finds in “A Little Life” are rare in mainstream literary fiction. Novels that deal with these matters often fade out when the violence begins. The abuse in “Lolita,” for instance, is largely off camera, so to speak, or wrapped complexly in Nabokov’s lyrical prose. In Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” the child narrator is banished to the closet while his mother is raped by their captor. You are more likely to find sustained and explicit depictions of depravity in genre fiction, where authors seem freer to be less decorous. Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story,” Steig Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and the torture of Theon Greyjoy in “A Game of Thrones” all came to mind when I was reading “A Little Life” (though the torture of Theon is more explicit in the HBO series than in George R. R. Martin’s books). Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character.

One of the few recent novels that’s comparable to “A Little Life” in this respect is Merritt Tierce’s “Love Me Back,” a fierce book about a self-destructive Texas waitress who cuts and burns herself, abuses drugs, and submits herself to debasing sexual encounters. But that novel, at a mere two hundred pages, is a slim silver dagger, not the broadsword that Yanagihara wields. And unlike Tierce’s book, in which there is little reprieve for the reader, Yanagihara balances the chapters about Jude’s suffering with extended sections portraying his friendships and his successful career as a corporate litigator. One of the reasons the book is so long is that it draws on these lighter stretches to make the darker ones bearable. Martin Amis once asked, “Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?” And the surprising answer is that Hanya Yanagihara has: counterintuitively, the most moving parts of “A Little Life” are not its most brutal but its tenderest ones, moments when Jude receives kindness and support from his friends.

What makes the book’s treatment of abuse and suffering subversive is that it does not offer any possibility of redemption and deliverance beyond these tender moments. It gives us a moral universe in which spiritual salvation of this sort does not exist. None of Jude’s tormentors are ever termed “evil” by him or anyone else. During his years of suffering, only once are we told that Jude prays “to a god he didn’t believe in” (note the lowercase “g_”_). Though he is named after the patron saint of lost causes—the name given to him by the monks who raised him—what’s most obviously lost here is the promise of spiritual absolution or even psychological healing. In this godless world, friendship is the only solace available to any of us.

Of course, atheism is not uncommon in contemporary literary novels; with notable exceptions, such as the works of Marilynne Robinson, few such books these days have any religious cast. But perhaps that is why they rarely depict extreme suffering—because it is a nearly impossible subject to engage with directly if you are not going to offer some kind of spiritual solution. “God whispers to us in our pleasures … but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” C. S. Lewis wrote, in “The Problem of Pain.” In “A Little Life,” pain is not a message from God, or a path to enlightenment, and yet Yanigihara listens to it anyway.

In addition to his law degree, Jude pursues a master’s in pure mathematics. At one point, he explains to his friends that he is drawn to math because it offers the possibility of “a wholly provable, unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable absolutes.” For Jude, then, mathematics takes the place of religion, in a sense. Later, during one of his worst episodes of suffering, Jude turns to a concept known as the axiom of equality, which states that x always equals x .

It assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality … but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life. Like the axiom of equality, “A Little Life” feels elemental, irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it.

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By Thomas Mallon

By Inkoo Kang

A Little Life is not for the fainthearted – but, if you can hack it, James Norton performs a theatrical miracle

By Annabel Sampson

A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre: Luke Thompson (Willem) and James Norton (Jude)

Hanya Yanagihara’s 700-page novel became a word of mouth, tearaway success in 2015. Many, on reading, will have considered it, frankly, unadaptable – what with its sheer length and the grim,  unrelenting  abuse (spanning self-mutilation to child rape). But Ivo van Hove, the Belgian theatre director, hardly one to skirt the heavy stuff, has done the impossible. He landed James Bond frontrunner, James Norton, in the lead role of Jude St. Francis and brought it to the London stage.

Following a run last year at the Edinburgh Festival (where it was performed in Dutch with English subtitles) it has now arrived at the Harold Pinter Theatre – to much fanfare.

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A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre:  Luke Thompson (Willem), James Norton (Jude)

By Isaac Bickerstaff

Seldom have I been interrogated so keenly about a play – the West End has been buzzing since the cast was announced (James Norton, but also, gasp,  Bridgerton ’s Luke Thompson and Omari Douglas). Rumours and gossip whirring about the nudity, the graphic rape scenes, the self-harm and the sell-out run. Was it the James Norton effect? Or the lure of what has become known, rather hideously, as ‘torture porn’? Why was Norton, who could have any role (stage  or  screen), going for this one?

Certainly, it’s a helluva ordeal Norton has to put himself through every night (and occasionally a matinée as well). An unyielding, agonising torrent of abuse. If the test of every screen idol is to tread the boards in order to prove their ‘acting chops’ – Norton has done well (and could have chosen a play which is considerably milder). Why put himself through such misery?

Sam Mendes’s take on the birth and decline of a financial powerhouse reaps dividends – and it is a must-see this year, says Annabel Sampson

While the play is really Jude’s story, it also follows the lives of his three great friends in New York City, all recent graduates from a prestigious university. In an opening gambit, artist JB (played by Omari Douglas) introduces the gang: we have Malcolm (the architect – with ambitious parents – played by Zach Wyatt), Willem (the good-looking, aspiring actor, played by Luke Thompson) and the ever-elusive Jude St. Francis who, while being a successful white-collar attorney, JB claims has ‘no discernable race, sexuality or past’. ‘Jude the Postman’ he calls him in a joke that thankfully doesn’t stick.

A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre: James Norton (Jude) and  Elliot Cowan (Brother Luke)

The compact set is divvied up into rooms: a pristine, almost modern kitchen counter where actual cooking takes place; a hospital bed (all-too-frequently in use); a sink and sofas. The front stall seats of the Harold Pinter Theatre have been removed to accommodate violins and a cello (to really heighten the jingle-jangle of nerves) and seating has been moved on to the stage (for an all-the-more visceral watch). The versatile space transitions into a nightclub (complete with flashing lights, garish music), a forest and a modern, suburban home at times. Video projections of NYC light up either side of the stage which fuzz up – like a broken TV set – when Norton self-harms.

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It’s a story about abuse and its legacy: can wounds ever be healed or is it forever inscribed in your DNA? Time is fluid: we meet Norton in the present (as a successful attorney, his monstrous past temporarily dormant – or at least ‘managed’) and gradually the truth – or versions of the truth – reveal itself. Time moves backwards to his childhood at the monastery, when he was repeatedly sexually abused by the brothers, and then forced into years of child prostitution. His whip-scarred back is revealed to audiences, his perennial limp and scarred legs explained (what he truthfully puts down to a ‘car injury’). The depiction of pain and self-loathing, while being a lot to swallow, is also believable. Jude’s tormentors are played in a relay of characters by a deeply creepy Elliot Cowan: a catholic priest (Brother Luke), a terrifying doctor (Dr. Traylor) and an abusive lover (Caleb). It’s difficult to decide who is the worst.

A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre: Luke Thompson (Willem), James Norton (Jude), Zubin Varla (Harold), Emilio Doorgasingh (Andy), Zach Wyatt (Malcolm) and Omari Douglas (JB)

Blood cascades across the stage. The scenes of self-harm are graphically realistic; so is another involving fire. And yet there are moments of lightness – when Jude is adopted and when he reveals he is in a relationship with a significant friend. And you sense palpable relief across the theatre (knowing the moment is fleeting and to be enjoyed). At one point, Jude says his life is filled with ‘an embarrassment of riches’ – and readers of the book grit their teeth, knowing what is round the corner (plus, he is still in a blood-stained shirt, which becomes a perennial, overlooked fixture).

A Little Life at the Harold Pinter Theatre: Zubin Varla (Harold), James Norton (Jude), Elliot Cowan (Brother Luke), Nathalie Armin (Ana)

Norton – over the course of just under four hours – showcases his vulnerability so palpably. Somehow, despite being a strapping man, he manages to make himself tiny and defenceless. At one point, celebrating his birthday, he is wolfing down slabs of chocolate cake; at another, he is skipping round the stage with Brother Luke, in his believable portrayal of childishness. At the latter stages, he is withered and weak, fixed up to a machine, in the bleak midwinter of his life.

His friends, while perplexed by him, adore him; Harold (poignantly played by Zubin Varla) loves him as his son; the doctor (Emilio Doorgasingh) cares for him deeply – all in spite of the ‘hyenas’ that haunt him.  A Little Life is harrowing, heavy-going and utterly miserable – but it’s also a miracle of theatre; and well worth going to see if you can bear it. James Norton’s performance will be indelibly marked in your memory.

A Little Life is on at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 18 June;   haroldpintertheatre.co.uk

21 years on from the last production, London is primed and ready for a fresh take on the Lerner and Loewe classic. What would Cecil Beaton think?

By Ben Jureidini

By Eilidh Hargreaves

By Mary Killen

The week in theatre: A Little Life; Sea Creatures – review

Harold Pinter; Hampstead, London James Norton elevates Ivo van Hove’s knotty adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s bestseller. And to the sea as Cordelia Lynn’s breezy new play sets a family adrift

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At its best it is transfixing. At its worst it is like a blind date between several episodes of Friends and the Oberammergau passion play. A Little Life : a host of questions. I have rarely been quizzed with such intensity about a play. James Norton ’s starring role, as Jude, is one of the reasons. Well: he is excellent. Yet curiosity is also driven by people’s ardent attachment to Hanya Yanagihara’s bestselling novel , published in 2015. Is Ivo van Hove ’s production a betrayal?

The answer to that is no. The demonstration of how early damage can stamp itself into someone’s DNA – how someone abused as a child is likely to turn on himself, unable to trust, unable to talk – is forcefully dramatised. Violence inflicted by monks and others is remorselessly displayed: burning, lashings with a belt, rapes. The emotional fervour of Jude’s college friends, doctor, analyst and adoptive father is abundantly evident, as it was in Edinburgh last summer , where the play was performed, in Dutch, with a different cast. The largeness (700 pages translates to nearly four hours) of the undertaking is extraordinary; the acting is terrific. Still, this leaves room for scepticism about the essence of book and adaptation; about the reverence with which both friendship and pain are treated – as if neither could be susceptible to inquiry.

The evening begins by seeming to wander out of, and tighten up, daily life. Before the lights go down, the four main actors are on stage chatting. Jan Versweyveld – who designs set, lighting and video – creates separate hyperrealistic zones around the stage: a chic kitchen counter at which real food is prepared; a hospital bed; a line of canvases in the process of being painted. Behind run videos of New York – yellow cabs, traffic lights, figures moving sometimes in slow motion, sometimes scudding; the screens occasionally fuzz over as if in sympathetic electric collapse.

Life outside barely permeates the action. The more engaged with the world of work, the more absent the personality. Luke Thompson is a finely subtle Willem, Zach Wyatt a calmly present but vestigially written Malcolm. Omari Douglas puts in a magnetic performance as the artist JB – twisting between charm and destructiveness – but JB fades from the plot, and his profile is undermined by showing his pictures. They are described as works of genius, and they are not; what is an audience to make of that? You would be hard put to know how Jude, made the main focus of the action, makes a living.

That, of course, is not his point. In a world largely shorn of competitiveness and imbued with an unusual degree of male empathy, Jude (despite his name) becomes Christlike. Suffering is a badge of superiority. The wounded, semi-clothed Norton, his body scored with the red lines of self-inflicted cuts and old scars, is lifted by sorrowing figures – as if in a painting of the Deposition. A group of string players close to the actors finely underline crucial moments, unleashing whining, whispering, stabbing, scraping. Two or three rows of spectators seated on stage become witnesses who heighten the effect of the action as they flinch, wince or dab their eyes.

Norton easily carries off the moments a lesser actor would ham up: the whimperings, convulsions of pain, the terror as he is pursued naked by a demonic driver. Yet what makes him truly impressive is the way he lets a strange sweetness glimmer through his difficulties; without that, his interest to his friends would be a mystery, and the production not so much drama as rite.

Adventurous, witty and given wings by wonderful sights and sounds, Sea Creatures is a marvellous example of a director and writer together expanding an idea. Cordelia Lynn’s new play, directed by James Macdonald, is a story of “slipping, sliding days”, of melting horizons and borders that shimmer between human and not human, sea and sky and land. When one character sings: “I do like to be beside the seaside”, it has to be a joke: this is the opposite of kiss me quick.

Max Pappenheim’s soundscape rolls around the audience, who are surrounded by the crash and suck of waves, the thud of birds hitting a glass wall, the hoot of a foghorn. The light, too, is transporting. Zoë Hurwitz’s design – well-equipped kitchen and dining space – is washed by Jack Knowles’s all-engulfing illumination, swept by marine shades, passing from purple to pale pink, always moving on.

Here, an all-female family drift uneasily: one sister has gone missing, not for the first time; her academic mother seems to be wandering mentally, though Geraldine Alexander shows her convincingly flashing into astuteness. A male visitor – played to furrowed perfection by Tom Mothersdale – is a lovely creation: a practical person who thinks it important to do as well as feel things, who wants to knock the fancifulness of all these women on the head (the audience are grateful for that) yet who is buckled with sadness.

Too much is crammed in – too many selkies, time blips and wise sayings – but there is a real pulse of adventure. Lynn meanders into archness, yet who would miss seeing the great June Watson as a kind of oracle. Or discovering the radiant talent of Grace Saif, in the comic though potentially irritating part of an idiot savant: told to learn how to iron, she wonders why people “want flat clothes”. Artless and exquisitely alert, she opens up the heart of the play. She also joins that group of female actors who casually display their character through veg-wrangling: Eileen Atkins peeling mushrooms in The Height of the Storm ; Linda Bassett eviscerating runner beans in Roots . Given a potato to peel, Saif stabs at it fiercely and sadly, as if reluctantly skewering a small animal.

Star ratings (out of five) A Little Life ★★★★ Sea Creatures ★★★★

A Little Life is at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 18 June, then at the Savoy theatre, London, 4 July to 5 August

Sea Creatures is at Hampstead theatre, London, until 29 April

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A Website for Five People

A Little Life: The Best Book, or the Worst?

https://twitter.com/silkspectres/status/1101936274754162688

Illustration by Fiona Ostby . 

This debate contains spoilers for “A Little Life,” as well as discussion of suicide, sexual abuse, pedophilia, domestic violence, disordered eating, and self-harm, which may be triggering to some readers. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity, and to get rid of all our little verbal tics, because we uh, um, like, I think, used a lot of them, you know what I mean?

Frankie:  Hello, Niche readers. My name is Frankie Thomas. I am a writer currently in my second year at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I will graduate in a few months, and I actually just wrote extensively about  A Little Life  in my MFA thesis essay exam, so it’s fresh in my memory. My critical credentials are that I am a regular contributor to the Paris Review Daily, and most recently, I have been writing a monthly column for them where I critique YA fiction of the 90s.

Peyton:  My name is Peyton Thomas, not to be confused with Frankie Thomas —

Frankie:  Oh, yeah, no relation.

Peyton:  — who is also a slacker andro waif with brown hair and glasses who writes things and gets passionate about gay shit. You can see why people would mix us up. But anyway, I am a young adult novelist, and I write scripts for video games, and I’ve contributed writing to Vanity Fair, Billboard, Pitchfork, and The Atavist. My credentials for reviewing  A Little Life  are not that I’ve written an academic paper about it, or that I write columns about books. I just love it a whole lot. I re-read it annually. I’ve given it away as a gift to multiple people. I’m as passionate about loving this book as Frankie is about hating it.

So we are here today to debate a simple question, in the tradition of Jordan Peterson versus Slavoj… Ziz…

Frankie Thomas:  Slavoj Zizek.

Peyton:  There you go. You pronounced it.

Frankie:  I object to your casting of me as Jordan Peterson. Really, it should be you, because you’re Canadian, right?

Peyton:  Don’t you  ever  compare me to…

Frankie:  But I’m not eager to be Zizek or Peterson, so, whichever you need me to be.

Peyton:  Capitalism versus Marxism is one of the most contentious debates of our age, as is, “Is A Little Life good or bad? Is it the best book, or the worst book?”

Frankie:  It actually does feel like those are the only two options. One reason I am so excited to have this debate with you is that this novel is so polarizing. I’m not sure anyone has ever had a really spirited critical discussion about it before.

Peyton: No, because everyone who’s ever written about it is either really hardcore in one camp or the other. No one’s ambivalent about it.

Frankie:  And if you hate it, it’s so easy to make fun of it. I’m not sure anyone’s ever seriously discussed their problems with it, because you can just lapse into parody so quickly.

Oh, wait, one more thing, before we start this debate. I only remembered after agreeing to do this debate that you were a debate champion in high school. I went to a Quaker school where we didn’t believe in competition or being adversarial, so I’ve never done a debate before and I’m gonna get fucking creamed by you, I’m sure. So, this is not to say, “Go easy on me,” but, uh… be warned that I’m soft. I’m very soft.

Peyton: Well, I  am  out of practice. That’s the one thing. I was a debate champion in high school, which was… a  minute  ago.

Frankie:  It wasn’t  that  long ago.

Peyton:  It was a few years. Now, do you want to give us your opening statement?

Frankie:  I should open by saying what I do love about  A Little Life , because I am coming to this in good faith. I can see why someone might love this book, even though I hate it. I read it in 2016 and hated every minute of it and literally have not stopped thinking about it since. Not a day has gone by since then that I have not thought about it.

What I admire about it is that it has this incredibly immersive quality. Even if you hate it, it’s very difficult to put it down. Its universe, even though it bears very little resemblance to our universe, is quite self-contained and feels like a real place, though not one that you could visit. It makes such bold choices. It is so bonkers. And whether you like that or not, it’s hard to deny just how much Hanya Yanagihara  goes there . She does nothing halfway. She will never do something slightly if she can do it maximally. That’s a large part of what makes it so memorable to people.

And then, finally, it is shockingly well-attuned to a certain fantasy that a lot of us have, including me. When I want to see this fantasy gratified in fiction, I usually turn to fanfiction.  A Little Life  is very unusual in its similarity to fanfiction, in terms of the pleasures that it offers and the fantasies that it gratifies. That said, I do not think that it transcends fanfiction in its use of fanfic tropes. Its critical success is largely due to the mainstream publishing world’s utter ignorance of fanfiction as a genre. If you are as well-versed in fanfiction as many of us are,  A Little Life  will seem very familiar, and even cliché, instead of groundbreaking. But I’m excited to discuss this with you, because I know that you, too, are a connoisseur of fanfiction, and you clearly don’t experience it the same way.

Peyton: Yeah, that’s another thing we have in common: we’ve read just an absurd amount of fanfiction, and that informs the way we approach literature in general. I mean, you’ve written for the Paris Review about the Sirius/Remus fanfiction phenomenon . This is very much in your wheelhouse.

Now, my opening statement. I should begin, in good faith, by listing the things I  don’t  like about  A Little Life . Here we go!

So, clearly, the one caveat I have is that this isn’t a book I can universally recommend to anyone. There are books that I can unreservedly recommend to any reader —  The Idiot  by Elif Batuman is one example,  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay  — but  A Little Life  covers really difficult subject matter, and it does so in a really graphic and uncompromising way, and it doesn’t end happily. It could be massively triggering, and it’s not an easy read or a lighthearted read by any means.

The one thing I always say to people is, “You’ll either love it or hate it, but whatever you do, just don’t look up the Wikipedia plot summary.” Because if you do, it just looks like a litany of terrible, terrible things happening, and a person getting worse and worse and worse, until it all ends miserably. Which is not inaccurate. But it misses what, for me, is just this transcendent experience: seeing a lifelong history of trauma met every step of the way with love and care and tenderness.

Now, my next point: what Frankie said is right. It borrows a lot from fanfiction. We’ve speculated that it may have originated as fanfiction. We don’t know what fandom, but Hanya, at one point, was writing some serious AO3 hurt/comfort fic. The fanfic aesthetic, for me, is something that has been missing from contemporary fiction. A Little Life  is not alone in heaping terrible things upon its protagonist, but it is unique in that every low is met with a high of equal strength. This awful, traumatic childhood that Jude undergoes is matched with so many blessings and committed relationships and connections in adulthood. And these good things don’t magically resolve his childhood trauma, which I think is a very honest way to approach the subject matter.

Hanya has spoken a lot about how she wrote it like a fairy tale. I know, Frankie, you said you didn’t really understand that.

Frankie:  Yeah, we’ll talk about this, I’m sure.

Peyton:  A lot of foundational stories for children, fairy tales, are grounded in really traumatic things happening, and then being completely resolved and swept away. Every Disney movie begins with the death of a parent, which is an awful, horrible, traumatic, life-altering thing. And inevitably, by the end, the character has gone on a journey and completely healed, and the trauma’s been forgotten and all is well.

In A Little Life , the character begins with an awful, traumatic childhood, this horrible origin myth, and is delivered into this kind of salvation. But the residue of the trauma is still lingering, and he still has to figure out what to do with it, day by day by day. That’s an interesting combination of the tropes of fairy tales and the style and diction of contemporary fiction. So, that’s my opening statement.

Frankie:  Oh my gosh, that’s a hell of an opening statement. Okay! You brought up a lot of interesting defenses of the novel. I’d actually like to frame many of my complaints in the form of questions to you, because I’d like to hear your defense of these things before I go to town on them.

Peyton: Sure!

Frankie:  So, we could begin so many places, but let’s just begin with Jude’s trauma, because you brought that up a lot.

I would never judge a novel for being triggering. Like, that we will just set aside. But it is worth pointing out that what makes the novel triggering to many readers is not just the fact that it contains such trauma, but the way it revels in the excess of the description of the trauma. You and I can both agree that, aesthetically,  A Little Life  is defined by its excess. It is approximately 90,000 pages long. It is 800 pages long. It is really, really long. And even to read the Wikipedia plot summary — which, uh, don’t do, I suppose, if you want to read it for yourself — which does look like a litany of horror, does not even begin to capture the amount of horror and violence that is visited upon Jude. It’s not even that he cuts himself, it’s that we get the suppuration and the sick, fishy scent of his rotting flesh and the, oh, God, “looks like a side of fatted bacon,” and, what is it, “a crusty cap of pus forms…” There’s a lot.

And to me, this can feel exploitative at best, and at worst — and I’m only talking about the cutting here, but this is also true of the sexual violence and the relationship violence and getting run over by a car, lots of violence occurs in this novel, all of it visited upon Jude — at worst, to me, it seems pornographic. I use the word “pornographic” only in the sense that the violence seems to have no purpose except as an end in itself. I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember when Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was released?

Peyton:  Oh, yeah.

Frankie:  I remember the word “pornographic” getting thrown around a lot in discussion of The Passion , too, in the sense of, “Is this just violence for violence’s sake?”, as pornography is sex for sex’s sake. So I’m very curious to hear your defense of the unbelievable amount of graphic violence that is described in  A Little Life .

Peyton:  Well, Hanya is graphic about everything. She is so descriptive of every tiny little detail. You know the colour of every surface in Jude’s apartment. She’ll spend pages describing the texture of a fabric or the smell of sandalwood that lingers on an old shirt. She doesn’t blink or look away or ignore any kind of sensory detail. And that is what makes the scenes of trauma so, so difficult to read.

Like you, I would never judge a novel for depicting triggering content. There are sensitive ways to do it and insensitive ways to do it, good taste and bad taste. I can also understand someone choosing not to read a novel because it contains subject matter that is a no-go for them.

But while  A Little Life  is graphically violent, we’re also given these very in-depth looks at how Jude thinks, and how he feels, and how he responds to the world around him. The violence in the book is never separated from emotional impact. We not only get descriptions of the violence, but we deeply feel how the violence is affecting Jude, how it affects every thought pattern, how he sees himself, how he sees his connections to others. The difference between this and something like “The Passion” — because, you know, I was raised in a very hardline Anglican denomination and I watched it a lot —

Frankie:  Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry.

Peyton:  You don’t get to see the interior life of Christ. Mel Gibson is not concerned with Jesus’s spiritual journey, which is, ironically, what the movie should be about. His aim there was to depict this horrifying thing that happened to Jesus, put it in three dimensions, make the smell of blood radiate from the screen. This is a story that we know, but maybe haven’t conceived in material, bloody terms. We haven’t had that viscera before.

But in  A Little Life , the graphic detail is not just there to shock. It’s not just there to illustrate the extent of Jude’s suffering, although that is one function of it. It is deeply connected to his mental illness and to his history of trauma. It really is bringing readers into this world and making them understand that mindset.

As much as this is a book that, spoiler alert, ends in the main character’s suicide, it is ultimately one of the strongest cases against suicide that I’ve ever seen in literature. When we reach the end of the book, we have been given every single excuse for why Jude’s life is miserable and unbearable. And it still ends with his adoptive father saying, “I wish he hadn’t ended his life, I wish he’d died believing that he was loved and connected.” That’s my overall takeaway from it, but you might feel differently, Frankie.

Frankie:  Wow, thank you for that detailed answer. I want to begin by agreeing with something you said, and move from that into a larger critique.

I definitely agree with you that the book really skillfully gets into Jude’s psychology and, by extension, the psychology of someone who has been a victim of abuse and trauma. The novel is really, really well-attuned to how someone in Jude’s position would manipulate himself, and this would affect his self-esteem and his ability to form bonds with others. Hanya Yanagihara is very sophisticated on that psychological front.

But what I find disturbing about  A Little Life  is that even though it has a very large cast of characters and even though it’s narrated from the point of view of multiple characters, somehow, the entire universe, the entire fictional universe of the novel, is structured around Jude. Jude is literally the centre of his universe. All the violence that occurs in the novel is visited upon Jude. The emotional arc of every single chapter is that something terrible happens to Jude, and then everybody else tells Jude how wonderful he is. The reassurance of Jude, and the adulation of Jude, and the celebration of Jude, is pretty much the emotional rhythm of the entire thing from beginning to end. Even after his suicide, we just get constant celebration of Jude and lifting up of Jude.

I do believe in building up and praising people who are going through a hard time, but there’s something very disturbing to me about the moral narcissism of the novel. Everything is so much about Jude that none of the other characters, none of the other people in the novel’s universe, seem as important as Jude.

This sort of goes to the fairy tale thing, and we can talk about it more later. But a major choice that Hanya Yanagihara made is to set the novel unstuck in time. One critic described it as “a perpetual 2007.” It spans twenty or thirty years, and the technology never changes, and there’s no sense of historical progress. The effect of this is both claustrophobic and self-indulgent, because Jude is the only person who seems to matter in the universe of this novel. I find that, as I said, narcissistic, and a kind of unexamined fantasy. I’m curious what your response is to that.

Peyton:  I would strongly disagree that Jude is only ever told how perfect he is. That’s certainly not true in his childhood, ever.

Frankie:  This is true.

Peyton:  Right, he begins abandoned in garbage, and then is raised in a monastery where the monks abuse him in every way possibly — verbally, physically, sexually. He’s taken on the road by the one monk who ever showed him kindness, who turns out to be a pedophile who is exploiting and warping Jude’s conception of what love can be and introducing Jude to the concept of self-harm, putting Jude through hell.

Then he’s sent to a foster home, where he is abused within that system. At one point in his childhood, he has a weekend preview with a potential adoptive family, and he gets all excited about the possibility of finally having a family, and they ultimately decide not to adopt him. And that’s just a huge blow to his spirit. Then he’s kidnapped and locked in a basement by another psychopath.

And it’s only when he’s finally on the cusp of adulthood that he winds up in the care of a capable social worker who is willing to put in the work and tell him he’s not broken, and he’s not dirty, and he’s not diseased. In his early life, no one is in his corner. No one is telling him that he’s good. He has no reason to think well of himself. It’s just this one social worker who is the first glimpse of genuine kindness that he has. And then she passes away because, again, lots of difficult things happen to Jude here.

When he becomes an adult, he has friends, for the first time, who don’t know anything of his past. He really puts up a wall around his entire childhood and does not give away anything. He’s constantly in service to these people, trying to go above and beyond for them, never inconvenience them in any way. He just wants to be told he’s perfect all the time. That much is true.

But as his relationships deepen, and they become more complex, there are moments of real cruelty, moments where people who love him fail him, or don’t anticipate his needs, or grow frustrated with just how entrenched his psychological trauma is, and how difficult it is for him to trust anybody. I’m thinking of the moment where JB — one of their friends from college, and one of the core four at the beginning of the book — he’s dealing with a crystal meth addiction, and he’s going through withdrawal. Jude attends an intervention for him, and JB mocks Jude’s disability by speaking in a slurred voice and imitating his limp. And that is just crushing to Jude. It destroys their friendship for several years.

And there’s another incident where Jude self-harms by burning himself. When Willem, — his life partner, at this point — finds out about it, it sparks a major, major fight between them that ends in Willem self-harming, almost out of sheer frustration with Jude. And that is almost a breaking point for their relationship. It really is a depiction of Willem pushed to the brink. Jude is someone he loves very deeply, and wants to continue caring for, but the duty of caring for Jude is very intense. The emotional impact of the sheer difficult of caring for Jude is never more present than in that moment.

Fundamentally, I wouldn’t agree that Jude is only ever surrounded by yes-men who cater to his every whim. The ways in which his loved ones interact with him and respond to his psychology and his trauma are very realistic. Hanya shows these people being tested and frustrated and baffled by Jude’s choices, upset by his inability to move on. But their love for him is just unconditional, and these incidents makes that stand out all the more. We do see the extent to which those relationships and connections are tested, and the extent to which these people are just unwilling to let go because they love Jude so much. There may be something fantastical about it, but it’s also a huge comfort to anyone who’s ever been through trauma and thinks they’re too much or too needy.

Frankie:  That’s a good response. I’m very glad that you brought up that scene where JB mocks Jude with an ableist voice, which is a fascinating scene. I keep returning to it when I read the novel, because it seems indicative of a double standard that exists within the narrative. A Little Life  holds JB extremely accountable for being cruel to Jude in that moment, and certainly I am not disputing that JB is terribly cruel to Jude in that moment. But the novel never stops punishing JB for it. We are shown over and over again how hurt Jude is by JB’s actions and how appalled the other characters are when they find out what JB did. It takes Jude a very long time to even consider forgiving JB. And JB himself is very, very sorry.

Contrast this with one thing that I find sort of fascinating about Jude: he works an evil job. And the novel is actually very open about this. He hurts people with his work. He’s a lawyer for a pharmaceutical company, is that it?

Peyton:  Yeah, for a pharmaceutical company and a banking company.

Frankie:  She occasionally highlights the fact that Jude works an evil job and his work actively harms defenseless people and causes them to suffer greatly so he can line his pockets. But the novel never does anything more with this than jokingly refer to it and then swiftly move on. It’s related to the fact that the novel is unstuck in time. I wonder, too, if this is anything more than an excuse to make the character of Jude phenomenally wealthy so he can have such nice stuff and a nice apartment. It doesn’t sit well with me that when someone hurts Jude, the characters call in the cavalry, but when Jude hurts others, this is just hand-waved away with, “Oh, well, he had such a terrible childhood, and he is really little more than a poor victimized child.” That’s how I experience Jude, reading the novel, as a poor, victimized child who can’t be held responsible for what he does.

Peyton:  I’ll respond to that point first, about Jude being a “poor, victimized child.” The ending of the novel — the good ending, before the epilogue — it hinges on Jude having this moment of actually being treated like a child. He’s tried to kill himself by starving himself to death, and now he’s in the care of his adoptive parents, and they’re trying to bring him food. And he’s being incredibly rude to his parents. He’s saying, “This food is disgusting, it tastes like dog food, it’s inedible, I’m not eating this.” And his adoptive mother makes him a sandwich instead, and when she brings him the sandwich, he flings it at the wall. And he has this monologue, where he says, “Maybe this will finally be the last straw, they’ll realize that I’m a terrible person, they’ll kick me out of their lives, they’ll leave me to die.” He really wants to be kicked out in that moment.

And instead, they just envelop him in a hug and they say, “Poor Jude, my sweetheart, my baby.” And something breaks in him, and he just starts crying, and he has this vision of what it might have been like if he’d been raised by them as a child, scampering through the grass in Cambridge. And that epiphany is what leads him to choose therapy and decide that he wants to stay for a little bit longer.

As much as you may object to that, it is a really important moment for Jude — that he can see himself as an innocent child who is deserving of love even when he behaves like a brat, even when he throws his plate, even when he’s unspeakably rude and he breaks his parents’ china. That’s an important point.

Now, moving on to your point about Jude’s evil job. Early in the book, some chapters are narrated by Jude’s adoptive father, who’s a law school professor, and he’s saying, “I wish I had been more intentional about pushing Jude toward creative fields, instead of him becoming a litigator, because I really brought him into a dark, bleak space there, by not encouraging him to expand his horizons more.” For Jude, that evil job becomes a point of control in a life where he feels he doesn’t have much control.

You said his evil job is never really acknowledged beyond the occasional joke, but there’s a really potent illustration of what the job means to Jude after Willem is killed by the driver of a semi-trailer. It’s mentioned that Jude sues everyone who could possibly be implicated in the accident. He sues the truck’s manufacturer. He sues the trucking company. He sues the truck driver, who fell asleep at the wheel at the end of a long shift, who has a sick little daughter. He wants to ruin these people’s lives. He’s using every arm of the law to go after anyone. He’s out for retribution. He does not want to forgive. He is not letting go. He has no sympathy for the truck driver, who’s been out on the road for 20 hours with a sick little kid at home. He’s like, “You are going down, I am going to take you for everything you have.”

There’s this facet of Jude’s personality where he feels really powerless against the things that harm him. Being a litigator gives him the power to control other people and seize retribution, in that one instance. It allows him to become part of a hierarchy of power, which he’s never had before. If there are other aspects of Jude’s life that are about him opening himself up to love and connection, the professional element of it is absolutely about keeping those walls up and making sure that no one can ever hurt him. I don’t think he realizes that going ham on the truck driver after the accident is not going to repair the harm in any way that matters. It’s just the one thing that he has access to.

Frankie:  Man, I want to say, I’m really enjoying your description of this plotline where he sues everybody in sight. I have to admit, despite having re-read the book twice recently, I had zero memory of that. You’re making me wish it were a bigger part of the novel. I’m thinking now about how even though there are multiple points of view in the narration, we only ever inhabit the point of view of someone who adores Jude, or Jude himself. You’re making me wish we had the point of view of the truck driver —

Peyton:  Oh, wouldn’t that have been great?

Frankie:  — Or that he’d had a name! I wish that we could see Jude through the eyes of someone who feels something other than pure admiration for him. I wish we could see him through the eyes of someone who was harmed by him. That’s the kind of complexity that I feel is not only missing from the novel, but also, it seems to me, that Hanya Yanagihara is intentionally avoiding.

Peyton:  Maybe. But we also don’t see Jude through the eyes of anyone who hates him. We never get narration from Brother Luke or Caleb, for instance.

Frankie:  Who are such cartoon villains that it’s hard to imagine they could even have points of view.

Peyton:  You can call them cartoon villains, but everything that happens to Jude in this book is also something that has happened to a real human being. Maybe not all of those things at once.

Frankie:  Probably not all of those things at once. I’m not certain anyone has ever been so unlucky.

Peyton:  Being abandoned at birth. Being abused by members of the priesthood. Sex trafficking.

Frankie:  Being run over by a car on purpose.

Peyton:  Being hidden in a basement is probably somewhat rarer, but it happens.

Frankie:  Being abused in a relationship.

Peyton:  Being disabled and dealing with chronic pain and dealing with mental illness.

Frankie:  And cutting.

Peyton:  And cutting. Everything that happens to Jude is something that happens to real people. And the cartoon villains of Jude’s life exist in real life, too. There are real people who really do abuse children and who really do beat their partners. Now, Hanya’s not especially concerned with making Brother Luke sympathetic, but we do see that Jude has genuine affection for Brother Luke and is devastated when he dies, despite having been ritually abused by him. And with Caleb, Jude takes Caleb’s treatment of him as a referendum on him. He can’t see why Caleb is the one who has done the wrong thing, which is a mindset common to abuse victims. So it’s not as simple as these people being cartoon villains, I don’t think. There is some shading in the way Jude perceives them, even if the people who love Jude see them as cartoon villains. And that’s their job!

Frankie:  You’re bringing this back to the subject of excess, and maybe we should return to that. I do agree with you that Jude’s relationship to his first abuser, Brother Luke, is pretty finely shaded, and a pretty good portrayal of the complicated love that a child might have for his abuser. But what I don’t understand is what justifies not just the pedophilic abuse, but also everything you just listed. The cutting and the basement entrapment and the run over by a car and the amputation and the Caleb and the everything. This is the major thing that haters of A Little Life run up against. They can accept one thing, but so many things start to feel artificial and, well, excessive, to use that word again. How do you respond to that very common critique?

Peyton:  There is a tremendous amount of very difficult things that happen to Jude. But something you just said there was, “You can maybe justify one thing, like the pedophilia, but what about the cutting?” And to that, I’d say: how many survivors of childhood sexual abuse do grow up with cutting as a coping mechanism? One thing does follow from the other. How many victims of childhood sexual abuse fall into similar patterns when they’re older, and they’re in adult relationships, and they’re abused by their partners? There are threads between those things. They’re not completely disconnected.

If a person’s been through severe bodily trauma as a child, they’re going to have chronic illness later in life. And even if we are trying to bring the novel back into realism, it’s not at all outlandish to think that there could be a real person out there who was a victim of childhood sexual abuse and fell into abusive patterns later in their adulthood and took up cutting to deal with it, and also, in their youth, got into a car accident which left them with chronic pain. That sounds like a reasonable portrait of a real person. When I say that everything that happens to Jude in this book could happen to a real person, it includes the intersection of a lot of those different traumas, and a lot of the ways the residue of that trauma manifests later in life. Even though the novel is so excessive and over the top in its description, I don’t think it’s  that  far off from something that could be a real event.

Frankie : Yeah, and you used the word “realism.” This is actually a good transition to talk about the fairy tale question, because the defense that you’re making, of the excess of what happens to Jude, would be more compelling if it were clear from genre terms that this entire novel is built to be excessive and over-the-top. The writer Garth Greenwell is the one who argued that A Little Life engaged with queer-coded modes of expression, like grand opera and the melodrama. And if you read a description of the plot, this is a compelling argument. But re-reading the novel today to prepare for this debate, I was so struck by how the early chapters signal forcefully that this is going to be a realist novel set in very real contemporary New York. Not just New York, not just a fairy tale version of New York, but literally Lispenard Street, literally SoHo. Another thing that many haters of this novel take issue with is the way it sort of careens from realism to something very, very not realism —

Peyton:  But that’s by design!

Frankie:  — without any warning, really. I mean, we start out on Lispenard Street and suddenly we are in a rape monastery in, where is it, Montana? The evil monastery? Do we know what state it’s in, the evil monastery where Jude is found in the trash and raised?

Peyton:  The foster home was in Montana. I don’t know if we know where the monastery is.

Frankie:  It’s such a fairy tale idea, this evil monastery where Jude is raised as an orphan. And I personally cannot reconcile the evil monastery with Lispenard Street, do you know what I mean?

Peyton:  No, yeah. Yeah. But again, that’s by design. She is setting readers up for one thing and pulling a twist on them and giving them another. You’re bringing up another important point, which is that the novel becomes more and more disconnected from realism as it goes on. But as much as the descriptions of Jude’s abuse and his childhood are excessive, the descriptions of the positive plot elements are excessive and outlandish in the opposite direction, too. Like, Jude and every single person he knows becomes absurdly, world-historically wealthy and successful over the course of the novel. He becomes the top litigator in New York. Willem wins an Oscar — well, it doesn’t say an Oscar, it just says “a major award,” but —

Frankie:  But it’s clearly an Oscar, I agree.

Peyton:  Malcolm becomes the world’s pre-eminent architect and JB has a four-floor retrospective at MOMA. You could argue that it’s unrealistic for one person to suffer that much abuse, but it’s much more unrealistic for all of that to happen to a single group of friends.

Frankie:  I definitely agree with that, too.

Peyton:  But I don’t hear that complained about as much.

Frankie:  Really? It’s been complained about, too. It’s just not as flashy as the other problems.

Peyton:  As I said, every abuse visited upon Jude is something that has happened to a real person. But not that many people are millionaire litigators who live in fancy apartments or win Oscars or take over the MOMA.

Frankie:  They’re two sides of the same coin. What you’re describing is yet another manifestation of Jude being the centre of the universe. All the bad things happen to him, but all the good things happen to him and his friends. There’s nobody else in the world who is working in the film industry or architecture.

Peyton:  I mean, Jude is the protagonist. So, naturally, we are going to have the greatest sense of the tragedies unfolding around him. But I don’t think it’s true that he’s the only character to whom bad things happen.

Early on in the novel, there’s a gorgeous chapter where Willem is talking about growing up with his intellectually disabled little brother, and the bond that they have, and the lack of regard that his parents have for his little brother, and how crushing it is when his little brother passes away when he’s at college and he’s not there to go home to him.

There’s JB’s meth addiction. There’s the death of Harold’s first son, from wasting disease, when he’s still just a baby. All of these other characters have their own suffering, and that affects how they respond to Jude. That’s an important point. It’s not like he’s surrounded by trauma-free blank slates who can’t understand what he’s going through at all. Although his experiences are pretty far removed from anything they’ve dealt with, they do have points of connection with him. They can relate to him and understand him. They suffer in realistic ways as well.

Frankie:  It’s interesting that you argue that his friends are  not  trauma-free blank slates, because that is actually the phrase I would use to describe them. Maybe “blank slate” is going too far, but the scale of the misfortune that is heaped upon Jude kind of just by necessity makes everyone else seem incredible fortunate. You and I can agree to disagree on this particular point.

Peyton:  But you could write a novel just about Willem and his little brother that would be wrenching and devastating. You could write a novel just about Harold losing his first child and it would be horrifying. You could write a novel about JB’s meth addiction and it would be harrowing. Any of these characters could carry a book all on their own.

Frankie:  That actually brings up another question I wanted to ask you about the novel. You just illustrated for yourself that so much happens in this book. It’s an enormous book. And that’s part of its charm, for people who love it. But, to me, there’s a first draft quality to it.

It’s one of the many ways in which this novel reminds me of fanfiction — this really long, juicy, delicious fanfiction that gets updated one chapter at a time for years and years and ends up being hundreds of thousands of words long. I find this much more forgivable when I am reading something self-published and written for free, and I’m following along in real-time.

There are structural elements of clumsiness in  A Little Life  that really take me out of it in a published work, and I’m curious if you think some of them are a feature rather than a bug. It has many characters and storylines that are just briefly touched on and dropped. You can agree that Malcolm is a character who initially seems like a major character and then kind of disappears from the narrative.

Peyton:  Oh, yeah, she’s setting it up to make it seem like it’s going to be narrated by all four of them.

Frankie:  Do you think that’s an intentional choice, that she introduces it as a story of four people and then just forgets about half of them?

Peyton:  I don’t think she’s forgetting. It’s very deliberate. I don’t think she set out to write a book about four friends and then, along the way, was like, “Oh, wait, this one friend is so much more fascinating to me, fuck everybody else.” It was very deliberately always about Jude.

I don’t think Jude actually starts narrating until a little later in the story. The beginning of the book consists of his friends’ chapters, talking about their lives and their backgrounds, and Jude is on the periphery. His friends might be confused by his behaviour, and they might wonder about his history, but those early chapters don’t probe too deeply on that. And when Jude begins to come to the fore, you don’t really realize what’s happening just yet. I do think that’s by design. It’s unusual, so I can see why people are pissed off by it. But for me, that’s a feature, not a bug. I can see not liking it, because it’s  unconventional, but it works for me.

Frankie:  That is a compelling defense of that aspect of the novel, and that’s a good response. One other thing that I would be much more forgiving of in a self-published fanfic, which seems very amateur hour to me in a published novel — this is kind of petty, but it is important to me: the verb tenses are all over the place. It is, in terms of verb tenses, perhaps one of the strangest novels I’ve ever read.

Someone in my workshop the other day asked, because we were talking about verb tenses in novels, “What tense is  A Little Life in?” And everyone at the table who had read this book said, at the same time, “All of them.” The frame narrative of each chapter is in the present tense, but then it will flash back into a scene that will be narrated in the past tense, and then they’ll have a flashback within the flashback so that an entire scene will be narrated in the past perfect, like, “Jude had done this, Willem had said this, and then Jude had cut himself again.” Which I find terribly distracting to read. I believe it was Garth Greenwell who defended this by saying that it structurally mimics the way Jude is constantly besieged by intrusive memories of his trauma. That sounds really impressive when you say it, but it doesn’t make the past perfect scenes any more fun for me to read.

Peyton:  I’m so glad you brought up the verb tenses, because that is a highlight of the novel for me, the effortless way she slips in and out. There’s one passage, one passage and one passage alone, which I bookmarked and wanted to read at some point, and it is this one, right after or while Jude is disclosing his trauma to Willem. So, it goes:

They are quiet once more, and this time, their quiet turns to sleep, and the two of them fit into each other and sleep and sleep until Willem hears Jude’s voice speaking to him, and then he wakes and listens to Jude talk.

So that’s all present tense.

Frankie:  Yeah.

Peyton:  And then she goes:

It will take hours, because Jude is sometimes unable to continue, and Willem will wait and hold him so tightly that Jude won’t be able to breathe. Twice, he will try to wrench himself away, and Willem will pin him to the ground and hold him there until he calms himself. Because they’re in the closet, they won’t know what time it is, only that there has been a day that has arrived and departed, because they will have seen flat carpets of sun unroll themselves into the closet’s doorway from the bedroom, from the bathroom. He will listen to stories that are unimaginable, that are abominable. He will excuse himself three times to go to the bathroom and study his face in the mirror and remind himself that he has only to find the courage to listen, although he will want to cover his ears and cover Jude’s mouth to make the stories cease. He will study the back of Jude’s head, because Jude can’t face him, and imagine the person he knows collapsing into rubble, clouds of dust gusting around him, as nearby, teams of artisans try to rebuild him in another material and another shape, as a different person from the person who has stood for years and years. On and on the stories will go, and in their path will lie squalor, blood and bones and dirt and disease and misery. They will sleep again, and this time the dreams will be terrible. He will dream he is one of the men in the motel rooms. He will realize he has behaved like one of them. He will wake with nightmares and it will be Jude who has to calm him. Finally, they will heave themselves from the floor. It will be Saturday afternoon and they will have been lying in the closet since Thursday night. They will shower, and eat something, something hot and comforting, and then they will go directly from the kitchen into the study, where he will listen as Jude leaves a message for Dr. Loehmann, whose card Willem has kept in his wallet all these years and produces, magician-like, within seconds, and from there to bed, and they will lie there, looking at each other, each afraid to ask the other: he to ask Jude to finish his story, Jude to ask him when he’s leaving, because his leaving now seems an inevitability, a matter of logistics.

And then it’s back to present tense.

Frankie:  So that was all in  future  tense.

Peyton:  That was all in future tense.

Frankie:  Which is bananas!

Peyton:  It’s bananas in a good way! There’s just this sense of propulsion that pushes it forward, and it feels like this breathless race through this day and a half of lying on the floor of the closet, going through this unbelievably traumatic thing. And it’s “he will, they will,” but it’s —

Frankie:  It’s incantatory, I agree. That’s the word I would use.

Peyton:  It’s such a brilliant technique, because it grabs you by the hand and pulls you along for the ride. This is one of the roughest patches in the novel, because it’s the one place where Jude and Willem’s relationship is really tested. At the end of that passage, Jude thinks Willem must be leaving now, because it seems inevitable. But using the future tense indicates that there’s a future coming after this dark moment.

I love that she is not hardbound to any one tense or any one point of view, that she is just painting with all the colours, and that’s the most effective passage where that’s illustrated.

Frankie:  It is an effective passage. It’s also a really good example of the type of passage in the novel that reminds me of fanfic. And I will explain why. It’s the wallowing. The quality of wallowing in emotion is one of the greatest pleasure of fanfic for me, and I rarely get it from literary fiction. And the love between fictional men — it’s always between fictional men for me. Usually, sex is secondary to what is really just a sustained exploration of every possible facet of these two men’s love for each other.

The feeling that you clearly have, reading that passage, is a feeling I get all the time reading my favourite fanfiction. So this returns us to the question of — I guess it’s a two-part question: does  A Little Life  transcend fanfiction, and if so, why, and if not, does it matter? Is the lesson of  A Little Life  just that the tropes of fanfiction are so wonderful that maybe they should just be treated with literary seriousness?

Peyton:  I would agree that fanfiction does deserve literary consideration. It’s not a lesser form. Yes, there’s silly, amateur hour fanfiction, but there’s also silly, amateur hour literature. At some point in the future, there will be canonical fanfiction. There will be a canon of excellent fanfiction.

But anyway, there are specific tropes and words and genres that were created in fanfiction and that belong to fanfiction, and I agree that, structurally,  A Little Life  has a lot in common with something that updates over the course of years and goes into excruciating depths on the progression of the characters’ life and selfhood.

Frankie: And suffering.

Peyton:  And suffering. And for me, it succeeds.

Frankie:  I just want to cut in briefly and say that if I had to categorize what kind of fanfiction  A Little Life  would be, we can all agree it’s whump, right?

Peyton:  Right.

Frankie:  Whump is that genre where horrors are visited upon the main male character over and over and over.

Peyton:  Hurt/comfort fic.

Frankie:  Yes, that too.

Peyton:  We’ve talked a little bit about fairy tales, and I’ve mentioned that trauma is foundational to fairy tales. An important characteristic of fanfiction is the opportunity to actually take that trauma seriously and go deep on it.

I was thinking about “Star Wars,” for whatever reason, when I was preparing for this. The first “Star Wars” movie is about a little boy whose mother dies in childbirth. He’s ripped away from his sister by bureaucrats. He’s sent to live with uncaring relatives who belittle and abuse him. His country is invaded, and foreign soldiers burn his home to the ground and murder his relatives, the only parents he’s ever known. He befriends a man who once knew his parents, and then he has to watch as that man is murdered. He decides to risk his life and join a terrorist insurgency for a suicide mission to attack a government facility. Like, that plot could belong to a very serious realist contemporary novel.

Frankie:  That’s an interesting idea.

Peyton:  There are really traumatic things happening to Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars,” but the narrative is a sci-fi fairy tale, so it’s not going to give Luke PTSD nightmares and really go into the psychological residue of his trauma. But fanfiction is an opportunity to do that. Fans can seize on aspects of characters’ traumatic pasts and go, “How would this realistically affect them?” and blow it up and expand it and add detail and shade. Ideally, pair them up with another character who can help them heal from that trauma.

Frankie: That’s actually a really good definition of what fanfiction often is. So, well done. It’s the in-depth exploration of what is only the emotional subtext or implication of canonical work.

Peyton:  Where  A Little Life  breaks from fanfiction in an important way, though, is that it doesn’t give Jude and Willem a happy ending. If this were fanfiction, Jude and Willem would walk off into the sunset together as silver-haired old men.

Frankie:  Or they would at least have good sex.

Peyton: You’re right, that is another thing. If this were fanfiction, no matter what amount of trauma Jude has suffered, he and Willem would hop in the sack and just like —

Frankie:  Yes, have healing, delicious, meaningful, intense, passionate sex.

Peyton:  Yeah, sex is not a healing thing for Jude, and he’s adamant about that, and uncompromising. It takes him a while to understand that, but when he does get there, it’s an important moment.

Again, where it breaks from fanfiction, he doesn’t end up having successful sexual relationships. He suffers the loss of his partner. And ultimately, he commits suicide.

I’ve definitely seen arguments in fandom along the lines of, “Did this fic go too far in abusing a character?” That’s an interesting debate in fandom. Fanfiction, a lot of the time, is about remedying homophobic media. So there’s an expectation that you’re going to make these characters canonically gay  and  give them the happy ending that the narrative won’t give them. In certain corners of fandom, it’s considered unethical to give these characters negative endings at all.

Frankie:  That’s true, yeah. That’s very true.

Peyton:  So, that’s where it breaks from fanfiction. There’s certainly a lot that A Little Life  has in common with fanfiction, but the conclusion and everything that happens in the end, the tropes of fanfiction aren’t present there.

Frankie:  It’s interesting, though, because I do feel that I’ve encountered fanfic that is as dark and as unhappy in the end as A Little Life , and when I see fanfic like that, I find it just as self-indulgent as the really happy, fluffy stuff. I guess you and I differ on this point, but there comes a point where heaping so much trauma onto one character is, in a way, singling them out as your favourite, just as much as if you only heaped good things on them.

Peyton:  Yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. That’s another thing about self-identification. You brought that up, how you think there’s a self-indulgent fantasy in so much abuse being visited upon one character and, at the same time, so much love and connection and unconditional acceptance. That is pure fantasy, as you said. But it’s an important fantasy to have. It’s tempered by the fact that Jude’s mental illness doesn’t leave him, that he deals with this until the day he dies. And, also, that he is actively engaging with his mental illness, and in conflict with it, every step of the way. It’s treated with a lot of seriousness, in my view.

Frankie:  I really like what you said about how it’s an important fantasy to have, ’cause that’s something you and I definitely agree on. The fantasy we see in  A Little Life  is echoed in a lot of other books that I love.

The one last question I want to ask you is: be honest, do you find the cover as hard to look at as I do?

Peyton:  I think the cover is so clever.

Frankie:  I can’t look at it! It’s his nut face! It’s so embarrassing!

Peyton:  That’s the point! It’s so great! I mean, I’m not gonna stare at it and just look at it all day.

Frankie:  I’m staring at it right now.

Peyton:  Me too.

Frankie:  I have it on my kitchen table and I’m just looking at this nutting guy just, like, jizzing all over me in my kitchen.

Peyton:  It looks like, is he crying? Is he nutting?

Frankie:  It is a sublime troll move of Hanya Yanagihara to demand this photo as her cover.

Peyton:  The UK cover is just, like, a cityscape. They were not having it.

Actually, there’s one more thing I want to say in closing.

Frankie:  Oh, yes, please! Go on.

Peyton:  I alluded to it earlier, which is that, for all its depiction of abuse, and despite the fact that it does end in suicide, I think it is an important argument against suicide, and one of the strongest arguments I’ve ever seen in literature.

It’s ultimately because, as I said, we understand Jude’s psychology so thoroughly. We know everything that has happened to him. We know exactly how much it’s affected him. On one level, the book is laying out the case for Jude to commit suicide, and saying, “Look at everything that has happened to this poor person, look at how difficult life is for him, surely it would be a mercy, it would be the right thing to do.” But ultimately, the last glimpse we have of Jude himself on the page, in his own narration, in his own voice, is him going to the therapist and saying, “I’ve decided to stay.”

Time and again, whether his friends are pulling him back or he himself is choosing to stay, he fights, and the people who love him fight, to keep him alive. And ultimately, when he does commit suicide, there’s an acknowledgement from the story that even him surviving this far was a real accomplishment, and he did important things and touched people in important ways, and that his internal belief system was a flawed one, and that his parents wish he was still with them, that he hadn’t ended his life.

Frankie:  I’m genuinely curious, based on what you’re saying: would you prefer a version of the novel where Jude does not commit suicide at the end? Is this maybe one issue you take with it?

Peyton:  I gave it to a friend once, and I included a note with it, and I said, “This is one of my favourite books, but you might hate it, and that’s completely understandable, and also, if you just want to stop reading on, like, this page number, before the epilogue, that’s perfectly fine.”

Frankie:  The necessary disclaimer.

Peyton:  I would accept a version of the novel where it ends without the epilogue. That would be fine by me. But that epilogue, narrated by Harold looking back on his time with Jude, talking how much he wishes Jude was still with him, that is an important piece of the novel. The spectre of suicide has been hanging over the book from its very beginning. And to actually have it happen and engage seriously with it, and to have this one character, Harold, who’s seen firsthand and knows probably better than anybody else just how much Jude has suffered, really engage with the question of, “Was that the right thing to do? Was he releasing himself from his suffering when he committed suicide?” And his answer is no. There’s one quote, he says, “It’s not that he died, it’s what he died believing, and so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.” Which is just such a powerful statement of rejecting the attitude that suicide is a mercy, or a remedy to Jude’s problems, or that the world would be a better place without Jude in it.

Frankie:  One of the most interesting readings of  A Little Life  I’ve ever encountered was from an anonymous person on an anonymous forum. They said, I’m just going to paraphrase from memory, that when they first read  A Little Life, they were in a deep depressive episode. They were very mentally ill at the time. And they loved  A Little Life  when they read it, because they found it to be such a tempting fantasy for a mentally ill person. They said, “I wish that my pain were so justified, and so visible to others, and so clearly linked to external forces, that no one could possibly blame me for wanting to die. I wish that my reasons for wanting to die were so fully justified that even though people will miss me and want me to not do it, at least they won’t wonder why I wanted to do it.” And this person said this is not something they feel anymore, but they felt that  A Little Life  really played into that wish of the depressed person to have their pain written on their body so that people wouldn’t think that they were lazy or feeling sorry for themselves, or any of those stereotypes about depressed people.

Peyton:  That’s a very insightful comment. And that’s, again, one of the reasons why this isn’t a book I would universally recommend to everybody. I don’t know how helpful it would be if you’re in a certain mindset. But, by the same token, there was a word you used there, which was, “No one could  blame me  for it.”

And what A Little Life does is it just removes the issue of blame. It treats Jude’s suicide as the product of a lifelong chronic illness, much like the infection of his legs or his chronic pain. It is just something he deals with every single day. And every day that passes is a victory. I don’t think A Little Life  is championing suicide; it’s reframing the way we look at it. It’s not saying this was an individual failure of Jude, that he was weak and bad.

Frankie:  Wow, this is so intellectually rigorous! I hope I’ve been putting up a good fight against you.

Peyton: You have.

Frankie: Even though you are a champion debater and I cannot possibly win against you.

Peyton:  Is there anything you want to say in the way of a closing statement?

Frankie:  I really enjoy hearing such an intelligent defense of  A Little Life , because even though I hate it, I hate it in a very obsessive way.

Peyton:  I know you do.

Frankie:  And it’s hard to find criticism of  A Little Life  that, as I said earlier, doesn’t just lapse into parody and jokes, which are a lot of fun, because even you can agree this book is so parody-able, right?

Peyton:  It is.

Frankie:  It’s just so very much itself.

Peyton:  I parodied it for The Niche . I did.

Frankie:  You did. There you go. I remember that. I had just started reading your work at the time.

I do think that it’s such a fascinating book. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s worth this kind of critical discussion.

I guess my final thought is that the public critical discussion of  A Little Life  has been dominated by men, and by gay men who instinctively see it as something of theirs and something for them, in a way that, I think, really erases a lot of what makes the novel so interesting, whether you love it or hate it. A Little Life  owes such a debt to this very female tradition of writing. I’ve never seen it talked about deeply, and I’m glad that you and I got to touch on it here, and I hope that more people do, going forward.

Peyton:  I’m familiar with the Garth Greenwell essay that you mentioned a few times, for example.

Frankie:  Do you agree with it, by the way?

Peyton:  Mostly, yeah, for the most part. And I’ve read Antoni’s interview , going deep on  A Little Life . But my favourite piece of writing about it is actually by Elif Batuman , who wrote  The Idiot , which I plugged at the beginning of this call.

I don’t know if this is universally true of modern literature, but certainly in the young adult community, which is where I operate, the trend now is “own voices,” which essentially means marginalized people writing about their own marginalized identities. And Hanya is writing about a marginalized identity to which she doesn’t belong, that of a queer man — I mean, I assume.

Frankie:  I love how un-forthcoming she is about her personal life, just as a side note.

Peyton:  I know. I love it. I love that her entire bio is just, “Hanya lives in New York City.” You don’t get anything more than that.

Frankie:  I sense people really wanting to critique it by saying, “Oh, a straight woman shouldn’t write about gay men,” but as far as I know, she’s never spoken about her personal life. And some of the haters wish that they could call her straight, because it would bolster their argument, but she won’t let us do that. And I do admire that about her.

Peyton:  I was on her Instagram a little while ago, and she was saying how, when she was growing up, she was really pleased to discover whenever she learned that one of the authors of her favourite books were queer. And she commissioned a feature about it for T Magazine, which she edits, about queer authors of children’s literature and how their worldviews shaped young children’s worldviews.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Hanya Yanagihara (@hanyayanagihara)

Frankie:  The way I would put it, this just came to me: I would never guess that  A Little Life  was written by a cis gay man, but I would also never guess it was written by a cis straight person.

Peyton:  Yeah, exactly. I love that she does not give any of her identity away. I love that her entire Instagram is just gorgeous, exotic world travel and delicious food and her sumptuous ridiculous apartment with the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the ladder that slides along on a rail. I just — I want your life.

Frankie:  That’s her real sexuality: beautiful apartments.

Peyton:  It really might be. She might be, what is it called — object-sexual? Like that woman who married the Eiffel Tower.

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Published by Peyton

Peyton is an author and journalist based in Toronto. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, Billboard, Pitchfork, and lots of other places. His debut novel "Both Sides Now" was published by Penguin Teen in 2021. Twitter: @peytonology View all posts by Peyton

23 thoughts on “ A Little Life: The Best Book, or the Worst? ”

Thank you so much for sharing this!!! My work is not very intellectually stimulating and while I appreciate that in general the mundanity of office conversations really got to me today. It was so refreshing to come home and read a really insightful debate about A Little Life. It has reassured me that people think about things as much as I do and just. Really satisfying. Thank you!!

despite being slightly afraid of reading this, as I have been with so much of The Discourse surrounding this book, I found this debate really enjoyable and enlightening. as seems to be the case with so many, I read a little life in 3 days on a holiday that was probably far too sunny to sully with, as you aptly described, ‘whump’. even as you say that its very much a love/hate kinda deal, for a long time i’ve been sitting with a muddy ambivalence, that is less ambivalence that very very quick oscillation between the two extremes. i’m still not sure where i sit with it, but so many of my feelings are expressed here, i find myself agreeing with two completely contradictory points. if nothing else, i can’t see a point where ALL isn’t going to cause debate a controversy, which is a rather exciting thing to have in such a contemporary text. if nothing else, it’ll stick.

the debate club kid within is adoring this format btw, bringing me great fulfillment on that front!!

Very interesting! I feel like this conversation could only exist at The Niche, and I mean that in a good way.

One of my very favorite books. This from a poet whose life would read as a soap opera. Some of us are just born into it. Going against the flow gets very tiresome.

Little Lives Judith Borenin The eyes in the dark – the hands that cling to steering wheels like scarves wound around throats caught in the spokes of speeding tires.

Each little life passing – cumulous – snug as a tourniquet. Multitudes of voices – a choir of laments sung in secret.

The groaning globe strains to stay afloat on its axis.

It’s for the wounded I weep – the cuts – the bruises running deep – the pain that won’t relent – the cruel voices that won’t still or repent – the lies that were invented to keep us all afloat while we watch the honeycombed procession of holes buzzing in the bottom of the boat.

Every expectation slices knife like within – the blood let rejoices singing hymns with such sweet acceptance as it blooms – luminous and resigned across our howling skins.

We were spewed into this world – clawed out way out of pits a spade could never comprehend. Paced empty rooms – reclined and rose up again – turned in twisted sheets waiting for long and ravenous nights to end.

With grifter hands the wind rakes by – its stiff fingers slapping tree trunks – an old jazz man strumming on fence posts. What it shakes falls – what it takes crawls the tattered skies – shuffles down like blue notes on all the little lives.

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Thank you for having published this, this is exactly the content I was looking for. I’ve just finished reading the book and I can’t make up my mind about it. It really made me feel all kinds of way and it resonated unpleasantly with my life at times, as someone with a friend who used to be severely depressed. I found it quite infuriating at some times – I was angry at the characters, and also at the author for having written it, but I could not stop reading it. I found your reference to fanfic particularly enlightening – I knew that this type of writing felt familiar to me without managing to pinpoint where the feeling came from. Thank you again.

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This debate was enlightening, but I have a question. When I read it for the first time, I completely understood Jude and what he did and how he felt, but I couldn’t help but feel bad and uncontrollably sad for the ones that worked hard to keep him alive and safe, and very briefly, happy. I wondered if those Happy Years, the unconditional love and support weren’t redemptive enough. The book definitely DOES NOT champion suicide, and you say that it makes a statement against it, but I am having trouble understanding how it is making a statement against it? I know when Harold writes in the end it seems like a statement against it saying that Jude mattered deeply. It made me completely understand Jude’s actions on one hand, but I am having trouble with one concept I learned in psychology: you cannot save someone that doesn’t want to be saved and it is deeply, utterly disturbing.

When I read it for the first time, I completely understood Jude and what he did and how he felt, but I couldn’t help but feel bad and uncontrollably sad for the ones that worked hard to keep him alive and safe, and very briefly, happy. I wondered if those Happy Years weren’t redemptive enough. The book definitely DOES NOT champion suicide, and many have said that it makes a statement against it, but I am having trouble understanding how it is making a statement against it? I know when Harold writes in the end it seems like a statement against it saying that Jude mattered deeply, but it also makes me feel bad that it made Harold wonder if Jude was ever happy. It made me completely understand Jude’s actions on one hand, but I am having trouble with one concept I learned in psychology: you cannot save someone that doesn’t want to be saved and it is deeply, utterly disturbing.

i havent read the whole debate yet but i just wanted to share that i couldnt sleep two nights ago and as i lay awake in my bed i started to google random shit, including “i hate a little life”. i do this once in a while, same with “i hate the circle” by eggers. hate is a strong word so i guess i am simply looking for community. and as i scanned the search results i began wondering if “a little life” started out as fanfiction because i recently started writing my own and yeah once you know the tropes you cant unsee them. imagine the author pulling that shit straight from her ao3 account and then ctrl+fing all the names hahaha this is so hilarous to me. for some reason i think it could have been a kpop fanfic. and then you discussing this idea makes me feel seen and heard so thank you very much for that. brb reading the whole debate

I’m late to this conversation, but I just finished the book and was finally able to google “a little life fan fiction” because I was POSITIVE it started as fan fiction – good fanfic! – and read so familiar because of that (well, to me). I was actually hoping to find what fandom it came from. This conversation made me feel very seen, haha.

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A Little Life review: a ‘grisly spectacle’ starring James Norton

Norton excels in this accurate and ‘chilling’ depiction of the long-term effects of abuse

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It’s “rare for a play to be a phenomenon before it even opens”, but A Little Life has managed that, said Sarah Crompton on What’s On Stage . The 2015 novel by Hanya Yanagihara on which it is based – about a New York lawyer whose life has been destroyed by physical and sexual abuse – is regarded with quasi-religious reverence by some (but as “trauma porn” by its detractors). And theatregoers have leapt at the chance to see Happy Valley ’s James Norton on stage. Although not belonging to either fanbase, I was impressed by this long, gruelling adaptation from the acclaimed Belgian director Ivo van Hove. It is “as involving and accurate a depiction of the long-term effects of abuse as you could expect to see” – but I was left wondering “why I would want to delve so deep”.

Agreement review: ‘compelling political thriller’ with a first-rate cast Guys and Dolls review: a ‘solid-gold’ revival at the Bridge Theatre

The plot follows Jude (played by Norton), an orphaned child who is taken in by Christian monks, then groomed and raped over several years, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian . He escapes at 15 only to fall into the clutches of a sadistic doctor (all the abusers are played by one actor, Elliot Cowan, in a series of “chilling” performances). The play, which shuttles between Jude’s present and his “monstrous past”, has a “ruthless integrity to it”, showing the effects of abuse across a lifetime, with “horrifying repetition” and “plenty of spurting blood” as Jude self-harms. Yet for all the production’s excellent qualities, it is unsatisfying as drama: it seems merely to “wallow” in the horror of “bearing witness” to Jude’s story.

The core problem, said Sarah Hemming in the FT , is that without the “slow evolution of the 720-page narrative, the story becomes just a “grisly spectacle”: a relentless pile-up of suffering that fails to draw you in emotionally. Jude’s friends, so crucial in providing warmth and balance in the novel, remain sketchy despite the best efforts of fine actors. And notwithstanding Norton’s “exemplary” performance of “honesty and vulnerability”, it feels as if we are not meeting Jude as a person, “just watching him being obliterated”.

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Harold Pinter Theatre until 18 June, then Savoy Theatre 4 July-5 August ( alittlelifeplay.com ). Rating ***

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Review: ‘A Little Life’ Is Quite a Lot

Self-harm, lashings, child prostitution, rape: Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of the 2015 novel tests the audience’s trauma threshold.

By Matt Wolf

Matt Wolf is a critic in London.

How much is too much? The question recurs a lot during “A Little Life,” the theatrical pileup of suffering and woe that opened on Wednesday at the Harold Pinter Theater in London. The play is beautifully acted but surpassingly bleak, and spectators may find their own threshold for trauma tested more than once. I know mine was.

Telling of a New York City lawyer who seems to know very little but pain, this is the English-language debut of a much-traveled Dutch-language production, directed by Ivo van Hove, that reached New York last year . That version was first seen in 2018 at the International Theater Amsterdam, where van Hove is the artistic director. To create the English adaptation, he has joined forces with the Dutch dramaturge Koen Tachelet and Hanya Yanagihara, the American writer on whose 2015 novel the show is based. (Yanagihara is also the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.)

This latest iteration — which runs at the Harold Pinter through June 18, then transfers to the Savoy Theater until Aug. 5 — has been selling out and generating tabloid headlines , not least because the show’s fast-rising leading man, James Norton, appears naked for extended sequences.

But far more noteworthy is the grievous state in which we find Norton’s character, Jude, whether clothed or unclothed, pretty much throughout. “You’re so damaged,” Jude’s longtime friend-turned-lover Willem (a sweet-faced Luke Thompson) tells him, in the understatement of the night. When Jude does undress, we see a body disfigured by scars. Self-harm, rape, lashings, child prostitution, attempted murder: Jude has known it all. No wonder the play’s website comes with an elaborate content warning and the offer of “post-show support resources.”

Yanigahara takes 720 pages to tell the story of four college friends whom we follow through their precarious lives — though Jude’s is the most awful: Willem, a womanizing actor, is his best buddy; then there are J.B. (Omari Douglas), a prickly painter; and Malcolm (Zach Wyatt), an architect who comes from family money.

It’s not the fault of Douglas or Wyatt, both fine actors, that J.B. and Malcolm seem to fade from view as the play proceeds. A feisty J.B. drives the opening scene, set at his 30th birthday party in Lower Manhattan, but is soon relegated to painting in silence on the periphery of the designer Jan Versweyveld’s multipurpose set, which manages to accommodate a kitchen, a hospital room and an art studio in one tall space.

Video footage of New York on either side of the stage provides a sense of place lacking from the script. And although the play’s events span decades, there’s hardly a mention of politics or culture, as if these topics might detract from the misery unfolding across nearly four hours. (This version is a half-hour shorter than the Dutch one.) An exception is Jude’s fondness for one of Mahler’s “Rückert-Lieder,” which begins with the line, “O garish world, long since thou hast lost me.”

Yes, Jude does experience kindness: He is adopted as an adult by his former professor, Harold (an elegant Zubin Varla), whose wife, Julia, has been excised from the stage adaptation.

And he finds a companion and ally in Ana (the expert Nathalie Armin, the play’s lone female role), a social worker who helps him push through his concealed trauma.

Mostly, though, you just watch as Jude rolls up his sleeves and takes a razor to himself yet again. The production owes an enormous amount to Norton, a likable and attractive stage-trained TV star in a role that playgoers might otherwise recoil from, and this performance is sure to be a contender for the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.

But I couldn’t help nodding in agreement when Willem remarks in the second act that he is “sometimes surprised” that Jude’s still alive. You emerge stunned at the sheer mercilessness of it all, but moved? By the acting, yes. But not the play.

A Little Life

Through June 18 at the Harold Pinter Theater, then July 4 to Aug. 5 at the Savoy Theater, in London; alittlelifeplay.com .

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A Little Life review: A naive and psychologically incurious narrative of abuse

Ivo van hove’s adaptation starring james norton is cold, surgical and humourless, article bookmarked.

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Just as medieval peasants sought escape from their humdrum lives by gawping at lurid paintings of bleeding saints, so modern audiences are flocking to A Little Life , a gruelling, blood-soaked narrative of one man’s suffering. Ivo Van Hove ’s epic, bladder-testing, nearly four-hour adaptation takes all the pain in Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel and re-enacts it in graphic detail. Its star James Norton is pretty much constantly drenched in blood, often naked, and always being either psychologically or physically tortured. I could feel the people around me sobbing and covering their eyes and sometimes I did too. But I also felt manipulated by its naive and psychologically incurious narrative of abuse.

It centres on Jude, who’s got a full house of traumas: repeatedly raped and tortured by monks as a child, emotionally and physically abused as an adult. As he goes through adult life, he tries to form a normal life as a New York lawyer, going to hip parties with his mostly gay group of friends: Willem (Luke Thompson, who develops beautifully from coolness to warmth), JB (Omari Douglas) and Malcolm (Zach Wyatt), as well as his adoptive father Harold (Zubin Varla). Still, his self-destructive impulses constantly drag him back down into misery.

There’s something borderline pornographic to the intensity with which Van Hove’s production both describes and depicts this novel’s events. Screens display rolling footage of New York’s streets, creating a mundane backdrop to the emotional gladiatorial arena on the centre of the stage. When Jude has the urge to self-harm, the screens grow white and fuzzy; after he’s cut himself, their colours shine brighter. This is pretty much Van Hove’s only directorial attempt to evoke the emotions behind Jude’s painful experiences, rather than just baldly depict them.

Much will be made of Norton’s bravery in spending so much of this play naked, cutting himself, or being part of harrowing scenes of child abuse. And yes, it’s impressive. But somehow Norton doesn’t convey Jude’s inner life, or do enough to make you desperately root for him.

That’s partly the fault of Van Hove’s cold, surgical, humourless adaptation, but it’s more so the fault of Yanagihara’s book itself. There’s a child-like naivety to Yanagihara’s sense of how the world works. Here, it’s perfectly possible to be dealing with life-altering physical and mental disabilities while simultaneously having an unimpeded career as a top New York corporate lawyer, and also volunteering at a soup kitchen at weekends. The same doctor who treats Jude for every self-harm injury is personally responsible for sawing his legs off when they need amputating – yet this walking insult to the Hippocratic Oath never once gets Jude hospitalised or even medicated for his mental health struggles.

Yanagihara’s perspective seems to be that abuse messes you up for life, making emotional intimacy almost impossible and suicide the only way out. Van Hove’s production reinforces that, creating a production that’s so painful to watch that, like Jude, you wish it would all just stop. But it’s both a hugely irresponsible message, and a false one. Real-life suffering is more complex, interspersed with moments of joy, care and healing – and recovery is too precious to give up on.

There’s a kind of confirmation bias that makes people assume that when they see a very long play or read a very long book, they’re engaging with a great work. In the case of A Little Life , I don’t think they are. If you want to be immersed in other peoples’ pain, go and spend four hours in A&E: it’s cheaper, just as agonising, and you can have a wee whenever you want.

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A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara

Normally, when you set about tackling an 800+ page epic study of humanity, trauma, and relationships, you’re talking about one of the classics, a book written back in the day before publishers cared about “readability”. Not so with A Little Life : I have no idea how this book made it through the vetting process, but here we are. This 2015 novel by Hanya Yanagihara became a best-seller, despite its length and… shall we say, challenging content.

A Little Life begins with four graduates who have moved to New York. There’s Willem (the kind, handsome one), JB (the quick-witted, artistic one), Malcom (the frustrated, upwardly-mobile one), and Jude (the brilliant, enigmatic one). They all exist on a wide spectrum of identities (racial, sexual, familial, and otherwise), a pleasingly diverse crew with deep and abiding love for one another, even as life scatters them across different courses. One of the really interesting aspects of this book – which you might not realise until much later – is that it’s not anchored in any particular time period. It’s just vaguely contemporary, with no reference to September 11 or any other cultural landmarks that would anchor it in our minds, giving it a timeless quality right from the outset.

For the first fifty or so pages (a drop in the bucket of this epic), they all go to parties, move apartments, hook up, squabble, gossip, all as you’d expect. There are all the usual schisms that threaten friendships – money, politics, miscommunication – but also a deep respect that seems capable of withstanding it all. The story focuses largely on JB, Malcolm, and Willem; Jude’s story is only partly revealed, as background. He exists on the periphery, of the friendship and the narrative. Then, so gradually you might not notice at first, the story of A Little Life morphs into something different, something more than your bog-standard New York bildungsroman.

The friendship ensemble slowly recedes, leaving Jude in the spotlight. Yanagihara drip-feeds his back story to the reader – how he was found abandoned as an infant, near a garbage can, adopted by monks who mistreat him in horrifying ways, only to jump from the frying pan into the fire, and so forth. The story of Jude’s present is chronological, and his past is revealed through seamlessly chronological flashbacks too, making for smooth parallel narratives.

I’ll stop beating around the bush, because if you’ve not read A Little Life and you’re reading this review to work out whether or not to pick it up, you need to know: Jude was sexually abused, repeatedly, in all manner of ways, from a very young age. A Little Life is the story of how this trauma reverberates throughout his life. There’s graphic detail – a lot of it – and very little, if any, justice or redemption.

A Little Life is an UNDERTAKING. It’s not slow moving, by any means, but it is LONG. You need to be ready to really immerse yourself in the lives and relationships of these characters, including Jude’s (though he has it the worst, the others’ aren’t a picnic, either). Yanagihara seems determined to make the reader work for it. She reveals things by surprise, mentions facets of the back-story in passing that cast all-new light on everything that has come before – that’s why A Little Life is NOT skimmable, despite its imposing length. If you let your eyes skip down half a page, you’re liable to miss something crucial and you’ll be forced to circle back, re-live it all over again (the way that Jude has to).

It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why A Little Life felt so much more overwhelming and devastating than other books I’ve read (and I’ve read some real downers ). It’s the damn MAGNITUDE of the thing. It’s both incredibly long and incredibly intimate, which means its punches land much harder. The content isn’t necessarily more traumatic or triggering than you’d find in other books, but there’s SO MUCH of it, and it requires such a HUGE investment on the part of the reader…

Reading A Little Life actually forced me to confront a really uncomfortable question: at what point does literature become tragedy porn? The Sisyphean nature of Jude’s traumas – he comes so close to contentment, time and again, only for the boulder to roll back down the hill and absolutely crush him – gave me pause. Every time he reaches out, makes any headway at all in reckoning with his past, it manifests in another cycle of abuse. Yanagihara renders it in such a way that it is never titillating or sensationalist; this isn’t schlocky horror or crime fiction, and yet… the sheer magnitude of the protagonist’s suffering is enough to make bile rise in the back of your throat. The only thing that makes it bearable is the intervening chapters where she portrays Jude’s life as a successful corporate lawyer, with fulfilling friendships and a found family worth their weight in gold.

You need to know there are no happy endings here. In an article for New York Magazine, Yanagihara said that she wanted to “create a protagonist who never got better”. His relationships with his friends and his adoptive father evolve, but they never “heal” him. Anyone who recommends this book to you without a major trigger warning is a psychopath and a bum, and you should cut them out of your life ASAP. Any time anyone brings up the “debate” about whether and why trigger warnings should be used, A Little Life is the book that proves the affirmative.

One more important thing to note (just a sec, let me drag out my soap box): I’m once again calling your attention to the fact that if the central characters of this novel had been women, rather than men, A Little Life would have been relegated to the category of “women’s fiction” and probably published with a flower on the front cover or some shit (if it were published at all). As it stands, the relationships between these men, and their emotional lives over the course of decades, are the soul of this story. It is, thus, lauded as epic literary fiction. I’m just saying.

Let’s not end on a bum note. Yay for Yanagihara, who shot to international literary stardom with this novel. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2015, and later ranked in The Guardian’s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. I’m not sure what she’s written lately, but – as good as A Little Life was – I’m not sure I’m all that eager to find out. I need to lick the wounds this novel inflicted for a bit, before I go begging for more.

My favourite Amazon reviews of A Little Life:

• “Masterpiece, but stay away from it, it will make you cry like the time your first dog died, be warned.” – Sharon
• “great book if you want to torture yourself. i loved every second.” – Victoria A.
• “Had to seek out and read every single one-star review as an antidote to the damage caused by this book. No, not complaining about the darkness and pain, but how painfully bad and ill-conceived it is. Never knew a book could make you annoyed to the extent of losing sleep. The one-star reviews restored for me a sense of normalcy, humanity, reason, and general good taste.” – Amazon Customer
• “I cringe every time this book pops up in my book searches. I haven’t read this book nor do I know anything about it except that the cover is hideous and makes me want to punch my Kindle each time I have to look at it.” – Kindle Customer

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March 23, 2021 at 8:51 AM

Fantastic review and putting into words exactly why this book packs such a punch. Also, what a great point about how differently this book would be read and marketed if the friends were women.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but a few years ago I did a “behind the story” look into A Little Life. It’s still one of my most popular posts–I added the link in the website field. I think the book just sticks with people and then they take to Google…

March 26, 2021 at 12:25 PM

Oooh, yes! Thank you for the reminder Allison – I remember looking at it ages ago and making a mental note to come back and read it again once I’d promoted A Little Life from the to-be-read shelf.

March 24, 2021 at 1:56 PM

I HATE spoilers but I am also firmly in the PRO-trigger warning camp. This book would make me physically ill so THANK YOU for the heads up. (And kudos to you for slogging your way through this one…it truly sounds like a miserable experience.) Also, those amazon reviewers always come through. Haha! That’s one of my favorite parts of your reviews!

March 26, 2021 at 12:23 PM

Honestly, scrolling through the Amazon comments is my favourite part of WRITING these reviews! Especially if I’ve got a glass of wine in hand. I’ve laughed ’til I cried! Glad I could save you from a book that would cause you pain, happy to take one for the team x

April 8, 2021 at 3:46 AM

I like your very fair review of this. I am one of the readers for whom this finally got too much – ultimately, it felt repetitive and maybe even gratuitous, all that suffering and violence. The friendships also seemed a little unrealistic to me. Of course it stayed with me, but I don’t think I’d ever want to read it again. Here’s my review, thanks for reminding me of it: https://findingtimetowrite.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/diverse-december-a-little-life/

April 8, 2021 at 6:16 PM

Ooooh, thank you Marina! ❤️

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