A Little Life

The novel follows the lives of four friends in New York City from college through to middle-age. It focuses particularly on Jude, a lawyer with a mysterious past, ambiguous ethnicity, and unexplained health issues. Jude walks with a limp and suffers from severe nerve damage in his spine that causes him great pain, which he blames on a car injury he sustained as a child. Unbeknownst to the rest of the group, he also habitually self-harms. The rest of the group includes Malcolm, a struggling architect from a wealthy biracial family who still lives at home; JB, a painter of Haitian descent; and Willem, an aspiring actor whom Jude is closest with due to them both being orphans. After graduation, Jude and Willem share a one-bedroom apartment due to their relative poverty compared to their friends.

Despite this apparent closeness with his friends, Jude finds himself unable to divulge either details of his past or current state of mind to his roommate. Nonetheless, he thrives in his law practice and develops a close parent-child relationship with his former professor, Harold, and his wife Julia, which results in the pair adopting him when Jude turns thirty. While thankful, the time before the adoption is filled with further bouts of self-harm as Jude believes he is inherently unworthy of affection. Meanwhile, the rest of the group finds success in their respective fields, with Willem becoming a star of theater and then film. JB finds success as an artist but also becomes addicted to crystal meth. The group stages an intervention, where JB mocks Jude by doing a crude imitation of his limp. In spite of successful treatment and a great deal of apologizing, Jude finds it impossible to forgive JB. Willem refuses to forgive him too, causing the group to fragment, with only Malcolm remaining friends with all four members.

It becomes clear that Jude was sexually traumatized at a very young age, making it difficult for him to engage in romantic relationships. His friends and loved ones begin questioning this isolation as he enters his forties, with Willem especially being baffled with regards to Jude's sexuality. As his loneliness grows more intense, he enters an abusive relationship with fashion executive Caleb, who is disgusted by Jude's limp and his increasing use of a wheelchair. Jude finally breaks off the relationship after Caleb rapes him, and they meet a final time when Caleb follows him to a dinner with Harold, humiliates him, and then follows Jude to his apartment where he brutally beats and rapes him, leaving him for dead. Jude nonetheless refuses to report the incident to the police, believing he deserved it. Only Harold and Andy, Jude's doctor and ongoing confidante, know the truth of the failed relationship.

Although Jude's body manages to heal, the rapes cause him to flashback to his childhood wherein he was raised in a monastery and repeatedly sexually abused by the brothers. He recalls a period when one of the brothers, Brother Luke, ran away with him, forcing him into years of child prostitution. After he was rescued by the police, Jude was placed in state care, where the abuse continued at the hands of the counselors there. After the break-up with Caleb brings back this childhood trauma, Jude finally decides to kill himself, but he survives the attempt. In the aftermath, Willem comes back home and begins to live with him. Jude continues to refuse therapy but begins to tell Willem the least traumatic stories about his childhood, which Willem finds disturbing and horrifying. The two soon begin a relationship, but Jude continues to struggle with opening up, and does not enjoy having sex with him.

In an attempt to curb his cutting, Jude decides to instead burn himself as a form of self-harm, but accidentally inflicts third degree burns that requires a skin graft. The wound is so severe that Andy tells him he has to tell Willem what happened, or else he will do it for him. Before Jude can tell Willem, Andy accidentally divulges the information. Willem is horrified, but after a difficult fight, Jude finally confesses that he does not enjoy sex and tells Willem about the years of sexual and physical abuse he endured. He also reveals that the damage to his legs was caused by a man called Dr. Traylor, who picked him up after he ran away from state care at age 15 and held him captive, eventually running him over with his car.

The relationship continues, with Willem sleeping with women and not with Jude. The two settle into a comfortable life together, which is shaken when Jude's legs become worse, and he must reluctantly amputate. He manages to learn to walk again with his new prosthetics, and the pair enter a period of their life which Willem dubs "The Happy Years". However, while picking up Malcolm and his wife from the train station for a visit, Willem is involved in a car accident with a drunk driver which kills all three occupants. With his two closest friends dead, Jude descends once again into self-destructive habits, losing such an excessive amount of weight that his remaining loved ones stage another intervention. Though they are able to get him to gain weight and to attend therapy, years of depression and despair finally overtake Jude and he takes his own life.

A Little Life is divided into seven separate parts, and follows a chronological narrative with flashbacks frequently interspersed throughout. The novel's narrative perspectives shift throughout the story's progression. During the beginning of the novel, a third person omniscient perspective privileging one of Jude's, Willem's, JB's, or Malcolm's thoughts is utilized. As the story gradually shifts its focus towards Jude, its perspective progressively molds entirely around each character's interactions with Jude and the experiences of Jude himself. This literary perspective is punctuated by first person narratives told from an unspecified future by an older Harold.

Review aggregator website Book Marks reported three negative and three mixed reviews among 22 total, signifying positive critical response. On the site, 11 critics gave the book a rave review, whilst the remaining 5 expressed positive impressions.[5] The novel received positive reviews from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.[6][7][8][9][10]

In The Atlantic, Garth Greenwell suggested that A Little Life is "the long-awaited gay novel": "It engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera. By violating the canons of current literary taste, by embracing melodrama and exaggeration and sentiment, it can access emotional truth denied more modest means of expression."[11]

In the London Review of Books, Christian Lorentzen referred to the main character's "gothic inverted fairytale origins" and "ghastly litany of childhood sexual abuse." The characters, he wrote, "seem like stereotypical middle-class strivers plucked out of 1950s cinema." He asked in regard to a minor character who became a crystal meth addict, "What real person trapped in this novel wouldn't become a drug addict?"[12]

Yanagihara appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers to discuss the book.[13] In July 2015, the book was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize[14] and made the shortlist of six books in September 2015.[15] In 2019, A Little Life was ranked 96th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.[16]

Awards

• 2015 Man Booker Prize, shortlist[17]
• 2015 National Book Award for Fiction, finalist[18]
• 2015 Kirkus Prize in Fiction, won[19]
• 2016 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, shortlist[20]
• 2016 Women's Prize for Fiction, shortlist[21]
• 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, shortlist[22]

The theatre company Toneelgroep Amsterdam debuted an adaptation of A Little Life on September 23, 2018 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Ivo van Hove directed the adaptation, which had a run time of over four hours.[23] Van Hove collaborated with Yanagihara on the script after being given copies of the novel by two friends.[24] Ramsey Nasr plays the lead, Jude St. Francis, in the adaptation which received positive reviews. Theatre critic Matt Trueman wrote that, despite the play's sometime suffocating trauma and violence, it "is van Hove at his best, theatre that leaves an ineradicble mark."[25]