"A Little Life" review

"A Little Life" is a big book, and it demands more than one review. So here we go.

1. The Gut Review:

OH MY GODDDD WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY (long loud messy sobbing ensues)

2. The Analytical Critic Guy Review:

The effects of "A Little Life" are well known, but what of the causes? Just how does Hanya Yanagihara get us there... How us she get us to keep reading, despite all the horrible things that keep happening, despite our knowledge that things are only going to keep getting worse? The answer is that she's crafty. This is an emotionally punishing read, but it's also a gripping page turner. The mystery at its center is, of course, Jude, and Yanigihara lets his backstory out in varying dribs and drabs: sometimes an odd word choice offers a clue; sometimes we're hit over the head with 50-page-long flashbacks of pure horror. Sometimes we hear his story in a limited third-person perspective, other times we see it through the first person eyes of a friend. The variety of Yanigihara's writing allows us to endure the utter torture that is watching her characters age, fight, decay, and endure all kinds of simply abominable treatment.

3. The Bitter Socialist Review:

How can we live in a country where four friends are allowed to accrue such astronomical wealth and fame, even as millions of others live in poverty?

4. The Ardent Fan Review:

There's just so much to love here. I mean, the characters, first of all. Jude, Willem, JB, Malcolm, Harold, Andy... These are names that are gonna stick with me for a long time. I've never seen male friendship described in such detail, and it's absolutely invigorating. (I've also never seen pain described in such detail... which was a harder thing to outright love.) I love how the book can be both super intense about emotional matters and loose and freewheeling when it comes to plot and structure: characters drop in and out, as Yanagihara decides (in a way that resembles real life, I think) to take the story in a wholly different direction. I love most of all how valiantly Yanagihara resists pat, reassuring conclusions. There were several points in "A Little Life" when I felt "there... this is where most books would end"... And this book just kept... on... going. The book never suggests that "oh, things will get better" or "you'll get over your problems" or "people change" or "people are inherently good" or "love conquers all"... often one of the narrators explicitly renounces such cliches. This novel is, in short, a book that takes mental health incredibly seriously. It's so refreshing to see a work of art that treats, umm, life with the complexity that it deserves.

5. The Literary Allusion Review:

"A Little Life" makes "Middlemarch" look like Beverly Cleary. It spends page after page talking about responses to responses... It's like the dessicated corpse of the Henry James corpus after soaking in blood for a week. If you took all the Nicholas Sparks book, rolled them together, and asked a writer more talented than Nicholas Sparks to re-do the results, you might have the first chapter of "A Little Life." It's like a fictionalized "Up" series, only they all wanna be artists and shit, not jockeys, when they grow up.

6. The Heart Review:

Okay what makes this book really great-- one of the best I've ever read-- is how its depictions of love are as vivid and convincing and meaningful as its depictions of hate and violence. I said before that book resists pat conclusions, and I stand by that... But the most arresting moments of "A Little Life" are when one character tells another "I love you." The torture scenes here are profound, disturbing, unforgettable. But the book wouldn't be this good and unique-- it wouldn't be "A Little Life"-- without its myriad scenes of beauty.

I'm a blubbering wreck just thinking about it...