I don’t know if you ever fully recover from this book. From the very first pages, you’re thrown into the lives of four friends—Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm—but it’s Jude who anchors you in a way that’s gutting and inescapable. Yanagihara doesn’t pull punches; she doesn’t let you observe from a safe distance. You’re in the middle of every quiet despair, every towering joy, every shame and every secret that weighs the characters down like physical chains.
It is Jude who gets hold of your heart at the very beginning. You can sense right away that there is trauma lurking behind his level-headed bright face and it unfolds as the narrative proceeds, like a dark, invasive vine. The story does not simply describe the events, but makes you experience it, physically. You are not the witness of his abuse, his self-hate, the atrocities that he experienced as a child and a teenager but as something that trickles down into the present that is the shape of his next breath, his next touch, his next relationship. You experience the pain of his loneliness, his ability to conceal pain with a smile and the vulnerability of trust. It is unmerciful and it breaks your heart, in a number of ways that you never anticipate.
The presence of Willem is a blessing as well as a curse. They are in love, it is a delicate, dangerous and heartbreaking affair. You experience all the stolen glances, all the indecisive confessions, all the lust. Yanagihara helps to make intimacy a danger and a safe haven, simultaneously. When love finally comes to Jude in her fullest, most human manifestation, it is nearly unbearable since you understand the vulnerability behind it. Each embrace, each mutual silence bears the burden of history, of pain, of the unspoken. You breathe it, and you throb with it, and you live it.
Even the supporting characters are bright and crude. The ego of JB, the ambition of Malcolm, the complex friendship, they become whole human beings with their own problems and flaws and collide with the misery of Jude. Yanagihara is giving the friendships a worn-out look, full of tensions and affections of decades together. You know their happiness, their anger, their blindness and the fact that these small, human, moments can make or break. There is emotional stratum on every dinner, on every party, on every low-level argument, on every sub-textual note you take.
It is the unflinching approach to trauma the narrative takes that gets you spinning. You experience Jude and her past as being a thing that cannot ever be entirely forgotten; it is a shadow in every relationship, every choice. Yanagihara does not idealize pain: she exposes it and it is sometimes just too much to take. Poverty of images of maltreatment, of self-injury, of hopelessness, these scenes stay in your mind long after the page is closed. You are able to experience the sense of claustrophobia of his pain, the struggle to overcome his feelings of guilt and self-distrust, and the heart-wrenching truth of attempting to live a normal life with invisible wounds.
And yet, there are some truly beautiful moments, when it is a ray of sunlight going through the storm. The achievements, the festivities, the silent domestic happiness with Willem--they strike at various levels since they are so dangerous. You get hope, and it is brief and frail, and the dark moments all the more cutting. Yanagihara realizes that the burden of suffering is best compared to the moments of contact and love that are hard to come by and are bright. You rejoice with them through the characters and are terrified to lose them with each beat of your heart.
The novel itself is an ordeal. You spend years with these characters, closely, sufferingly and happily. You watch careers rise and those fall, friendships grow and bend, bodies grow old and wear out, and hearts are broken and tried to be mended. Every new step, every day, every birthday, every anniversary is burdened with meaning. You experience the build up of life, time, love, loss. Yanagihara does not simply tell you that life is complex and cruel, she shows you, puts you, shoulder to shoulder with people that you love, and at times would wish you could be out of the world altogether.
The emotional intensity is almost too much to bear by the time you get to the last chapters. You are grieved without abstraction, you feel it, it is some kind of stuff in your chest, a caniness in your stomach. The tragic and warm endings leave you vulnerable and spent, emotionally and spiritually. You know how big human suffering can be, how strong and weak love can be, how impossible it is to completely get out of the past, but you also experience the bright possibilities of care, bonding and beauty in human experience.
A Little Life is not a book that you read, it is a book that you can experience as if you were there in the heart and mind of someone and lived decades of their life, pain and love with them. Yanagihara does not allow you to turn your head away, and she is not supposed to. You experience all of it- the heartbreak, the joy, the tension, the tenderness, the horror and the hope. It is pervasive, relentless and memorable. You put the book aside, and something of Jude, something of that great, frail world, stays with you.