What's book club without cocktails?
(Photo taken at Hotel Delmano)
“A Little
Life”, Hanya Yanagihara's latest work of fiction, begins under false pretenses. The opening chapter takes place in a dingy Chinatown
restaurant as four seemingly carefree boys discuss banal topics such as the
difficulty of securing decent real estate in New York City. The first 400 pages of the novel ricochet
between the perspectives of the main characters: Malcolm, the mixed-race
aspiring architect from a well-to-do family; JB (Jean-Baptiste), the Haitian
stunted artist struggling with addiction; Willem, the handsome, charismatic
leader of the group who dreams of becoming a great actor; and Jude, the
disfigured, brilliant legal mind with a mysterious past.
The second half of the novel focuses
all attention on the evolving relationship between Willem and Jude, as we gradually
get more details on Jude’s horrifying backstory. At times the book really tests
the reader’s limits. I found myself unable to control my squirming during the scenes
that relentlessly recalled Jude’s long-term sexual abuse in vivid detail. At
times I felt Jude’s loneliness so profoundly that I thought my own organs were
collapsing in on themselves. In one particular instance, after Jude has
attempted suicide for the first time, I had to force myself to put the book
down and take a break for the sake of my own mental health.
Yet, in spite (or perhaps because)
of all the pain that these characters, and we as readers, are forced to endure,
I can’t help but think of A Little Life as
an optimistic story. True, it does not have a conventionally happy ending, but
watching each of the boys experience life in both big and small ways reminds me
that even on the worst days, there is eternal hope.
(Photo taken from my new room!)
For whatever reason, sexual abuse-
both the actual deed and the various stages of recovery- has become a dominant
theme on the bestseller list in recent years. While every survivor’s struggle
is unique, Yanagihara’s depiction of the horrendous reality of what it’s like
to feel worthless, used and unlovable as a result of what has been done to you
will not leave you unaffected. Over the course of the month that I spent
reading A Little Life, I felt my mind
returning to the lives of the main characters again and again. When I finally
finished it, I mourned. I mourned not only for the tragic endings that both
Jude and Willem eventually met, but I mounded my own loss. I mourned for the
hole that I felt in the pit of my stomach knowing that I could never return to
that little respite I had found within these beautiful minds.
Eventually emerging from my
narrative-induced haze, I was startled to find that the world around me had
remained jut as I’d left it. ‘How could this be?’ I’d asked myself. How can
ordinary life go on when such an extraordinary, inexplicable loss has been
incurred (pardon the hyperbole) upon my soul? But that is exactly the magic of
this book: you cannot go out the way you came in.
