Rat pack for an enlightened age
Story of four Manhattan friends explores themes of love and loss
Hanya Yanagihara’s 2013 debut novel, The People in the Trees, conjured a fictional Pacific island as the setting for a tragedy that simultaneously revealed the horror and beauty of the human condition. It marked the arrival of a writer who seemingly came out of nowhere — she was and remains an editor at Condé Nast Traveler — to pen a novel whose scope and language evokes shades of Nabokov.
Her follow-up effort, A Little Life, trades the exoticism of the South Pacific for the well-trodden realm of SoHo and TriBeCa in Manhattan, where the postcollege lives of four friends unfold over several decades. JB is a caustic painter whose cinematic portraits of his friends vault him to MoMA and Whitney levels of fame, Malcolm is an architect who founds his own firm and attains global recognition, Willem is a struggling actor who becomes a world-famous Hollywood icon and Jude is a talented litigator with an enigmatic past.
The four friends originally meet as college freshmen in an unnamed college in Boston that seems to be a mash-up of Harvard and Amherst. There, despite their vastly different backgrounds, they forge a fraternal bond light on the stereotypical trappings of masculinity and heavy on earnest “I love yous” — a rat pack for the age of the enlightened male.
The novel’s centre of gravity spools more tightly as the story progresses and it becomes clear this is really the story of Willem and Jude. The portrayal of their relationship in particular forms the core of the novel’s ambition, as it is propelled forward not by plot per se, but by the ebbs and flows of friendship, of how small moments of mutual trust can accumulate into boundless devotion. “Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs,” thinks Willem about Jude. “It was feeling honoured by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
There is a fatalistic thread that is anchored at the very beginning of the novel, an elegant foreshadowing that tinges everything with a sense of dread. While this is a triumphant story of four young friends who grow up to conquer New York City, moments of elation are always short-lived, especially as the novel progresses and the points of view — which shift around and are told in the first, second and third person — focus increasingly on Jude.
An orphan named for the patron saint of lost causes perhaps “as a mockery; as a diagnosis; as a prediction,” Jude hides a pre-college past that has scarred him literally and figuratively.
He is physically broken, but his nimble mind and his deep affection for his friends have bestowed upon him a new life.
His dilemma, though, is to never speak of his past while growing closer to his coterie of friends — especially Willem.
His, he realizes, is a second chance, and there is an expectation that all the happiness and success he achieves will wash away his tragic past, or at least balance it out.
As the novel delves more deeply into his extraordinarily bleak back story, though, the prose takes on a confessional quality, and it becomes clear that everything is mired in such hopelessness that no matter what bright turns Jude’s life takes, no matter who loves him and how much, his downfall of long ago knows no rescue.
ALittle Life is an extraordinary novel, an exploration of how love can restore and renew but never repair.
In haunting language that both reflects the beauty of devotion and disguises the horror of total betrayal, Yanagihara has written an American tragedy for our time, a haunting plea for redemption. Jason Beerman lives and writes in Amsterdam.