Yet A Little Life's most graphic passages relate to the injuries Jude inflicts on himself. "Most people are easy: their unhappinesses are our unhappinesses, their sorrows are understandable, their bouts of self-loathing are fast-moving and negotiable." This sentence appears roughly halfway through A Little Life, at which stage Yanagihara has allowed the most straightforward of the four men, Malcolm and JB, to fade into the scenery, and drawn the uneasiest of them all, Jude, into piercing focus. And once each man has achieved success she deftly describes the particulars of their professions, how the architectural models Malcolm builds are upgraded from vellum and cardboard to glassine and wood, as well as the weighty silences between fanfares, such as Willem on a film set between shoots, experiencing “the strange sensation that he is gone, and that his very life is an imagining”. Characters shower and bake and polish they fix broken objects, send cards, pick up dropped shirts. No detail that might make a fictitious life seem whole and believable is excluded. Each comes with insecurities, convictions, expectations, but they are alike in their kindness and cleverness their futures seem filled with promise. Jude is a lawyer with a passion for pure mathematics, JB a gifted artist who makes paintings that “chronicle in pictures the drip of all their lives”. Willem aspires to be a serious actor, Malcolm a respected architect. In New York four industrious young men, close friends since college, are setting out on their career paths.
A Little Life, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize last week, begins on an upbeat note.
In her second that subject takes longer to loom into sight, although it casts a shadow from early on. Sexual abuse is mentioned on the very first page of Hanya Yanagihara's 2013 debut novel, The People in the Trees.
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