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Oh “A Little Life,” you gave me life even as you took so brutally from your characters. This is one of the books that I carved out 2 months in my head to read because it clocks in at 812 pages, and somehow finished in a week (with the last 400 pages in a day, blurry eyes, forgive me). Not only that, it gifted me with three days of insomnia (thus far) and a sense that my actual life is a story and that the novel’s trauma is what’s real (as if I’m in that one Taoist fable). And I’m left with so many thoughts to jot down before they fade.

The novel is written by Hanya Yanagihara, and it’s about four college friends who go to New York with their big dreams and it chronicles the way trauma and the past and can affect the course of their ensuing decades. That’s more or less how Amazon would describe it, but it’s more like a story of how a traumatic past can impact one specific person’s present and the relationships that help to nurture and sustain. 

SPOILERS BELOW. 

This book is definitely not for everyone, and I feel like trigger warnings should be stamped onto every other page. People have praised it as being the great gay novel and rebuked it for being torture porn. I don’t think either is correct. While this is a story of queer relationships and has a few gay characters in the background, the relationship between Willem and Jude is centered and neither character identifies as gay. I also don’t think its depiction of trauma is purely voyeuristic either, because each traumatic encounter or memory is linked to some form of meaningful interaction between Jude and his friends that further builds their relationships and who they are as characters.

These two points are why I find the book so brilliant and casually subversive of how we’re taught to understand a white collar life arc and our relationship to relationships. The heteronormative script is to eventually find a monogamous and sexually romantic relationship that atomizes us and relegates all other relationships to the periphery. What’s emerged as a mainstream alternative in the LGBTQ world takes this same script and allows a wider range of characters, but the plot is usually equally constricting. In “A Little Life,” however, Willem and Jude’s relationship morphs from roommates to friends to romantic partners to romantic partners who don’t have sex. 

Their changing relationship to each other drives the story, but it’s never something that’s named and made to reduce their whole selves to the general parameters of identities they may or may not hold. The context of their surrounding world is removed, which allowed me to indulge in their reality and imagine one in which what they have is normalized the way it felt in the book. I think Hanya Yanagihara gave an interview somewhere about how she wanted the book to involve sleight of hand and feel like a magic trick. She was talking about subverting our expectations of how the novel would just be a coming-of-age story about college kids in New York. However, I think the far greater sleight of hand is how she’s writing page after page about normalcy through the lens of trauma and support while normalizing queer relationships (read: modes of being, and not just preferences and identities) without a word. That is one of the most amazing feats of this novel, and one that I will never fail to appreciate and find restorative.

As complex as Willem’s views of Jude became, I found myself facing challenging introspections about my own perspective of Jude. The Internet’s responses to Jude mostly align with its responses to the novel as a whole (based on a very scientific 3 minute Twitter skim). A lot of people who enjoyed the book loved Jude and wanted to give him a hug, and a lot of people frustrated with all the torture and trauma couldn’t fathom one person experiencing that much. I fell in the former category, and it’s uncomfortable. I wondered if in Hanya Yanagihara’s mind, Willem was subconsciously seeing parts of Hemming in Jude all along, even as he denies it. I wondered that about myself, and whether wanting to hug it out with Jude was an act of infantilizing him, marking him as broken, and not seeing him for the whole person he wants people to see. It’s in moments like this that I forget the characters are just that, characters in a novel.

I feel like I have more thoughts, but I just read the book yesterday, and these are the ones that resonate the most and writing these out feel the most healing. As someone who can only aspire to write at the level that Hanya Yanagihara does, I am in awe of how this all took her only 18 months, and of how easily I was caught in her spell and felt all the things that she (probably) wanted the reader to feel at specific moments (feeling a loss so strong that I wondered about the afterlife when Willem died, feeling a sense of resignation when the hyenas chased Jude to the house, feeling a cold foreboding at Caleb’s first invalidating comment, etc.). I was in awe of how powerfully resonant even specific sentences can be (“no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully”...time to ugly cry). Never did a emotionally charged moment in this novel feel unearned or melodramatic, and never had I read a novel that affected me so viscerally. This was not just one of the best books I’ve ever read, it’s easily also one of the greatest experiences I’ve had. 

What I wouldn’t give to ask in a conversation with Hanya Yanagihara (the author):

Was the “icy, vicious” Jude at Rosen Pritchard only a persona he embodied as a result of his conversation with Mr. Irvine, or is this aggressive litigator personality also linked to his trauma?

What is the reader meant to take away from Willem’s final recollection of Hemming and of how it was couched in the fact that his “final thoughts are not of Jude?”

What did Jude’s displays of anger represent in the very end?

What did JB’s kiss mean at the end? Jude’s reaction was very much to fight, while in the rest of the novel he would have been catatonic or resigned if something like that happened (case in point, Caleb). Why did he respond so differently now? Did his perspective of kissing and intimacy change subconsciously over the course of his time with Willem?

Was Jude’s racial ambiguity intentional? If so, what is it meant to communicate to the reader?

What were the intentions behind the racial demographics of the JB/Jude/Willem/Malcolm  (that t-shirt can’t come fast enough) quartet? What did Hanya Yanagihara want to communicate in racializing her characters while erasing racial structures from the context of their lives?

Jude’s friends sometimes call him Judy, and he is described as appearing androgynous. In erasing his sociopolitical context, what was the intention in providing him with subtle ambiguity in how his gender is perceived and marked (along with the racial ambiguity in one of my earlier questions)?

Jude often makes note of when a conversation or experience resulted in a “good time” or a “good day.” Is this subconscious tally of good days a suggestion that he’s always had an active will to find reasons for being and happiness, even as his thoughts seem so resigned to self-hatred and the belief that “happiness isn’t for [him]?”

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Red Bean smoothie from The Emperor's Hotel bar in Beijing!

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Cow Tendon Skewer from Dong Zhi Men!

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Lamb Skewer from Dong Zhi Men!

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Newspaper front pages on Obama’s new immigration policy to stop deporting DREAM-eligible youth.

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Homecooked Kimchi Fried Rice!

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AA Limelight Interview with Decipher

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Photo of Far East Movement in concert

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Been a while since I've heard a new track from this dude. 

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And the fight still isn't over.