A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, published in 2015 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is one of the most divisive literary novels of the past decade-praised as a masterwork of empathy and condemned as a torture exercise masquerading as literary fiction. Both assessments contain truth, and the tension between them is part of what makes the novel so difficult to dismiss.

The novel follows four friends from their college years in an unnamed American city through the following decades: Willem, a kind and eventually famous actor; JB, a talented and self-destructive painter; Malcolm, an architect; and Jude St. Francis, a legal prodigy whose past is slowly, horrifyingly revealed. Jude’s story is the novel’s core-he is a survivor of childhood abuse so systematic and prolonged that its disclosure occupies hundreds of pages and constitutes one of the most harrowing reading experiences in contemporary fiction.

Yanagihara’s prose is elegant and controlled, and the novel’s emotional intelligence-its rendering of male friendship, of chosen family, of the particular love between people who have witnessed each other’s worst selves-is remarkable. The world she creates has a quality of timelessness: the characters seem to exist outside of contemporary social reality in a way that is simultaneously unrealistic and artistically deliberate.

The criticisms are not without force. The novel’s accumulation of trauma sometimes feels less like literary necessity than sensationalism; the redemptive architecture of male friendship can seem too neatly offered against the suffering. But Yanagihara has written something that refuses easy comfort, insisting on the irreversibility of certain wounds, and that insistence-unfashionable, uncomfortable-may be its lasting contribution.