A little Life

By Hania Yanagihara

This is supposed to be a book essay, but please do forgive me if instead, this becomes a rant. Spoilers galore.

Our story begins with humble origins, with four friends in college. The characters are JB aka Jean Baptiste a talented artist; Willem an aspiring actor; Malcolm an architect; and finally Jude the lawyer.

The kind of college friendship that wouldn’t be amiss on the cover of a university prospectus both for their ethnic and career diversity.

Regardless, our story starts here and Hanya takes us through the gruelling decades of the characters’ lives. Hanya’s book touches on many themes including those about friendship, ambition and suffering.

Despite being a story of 4 friends, it might be more accurate to say that Jude is the protagonist and the others’ story weaves in and out to provide a foil to his trauma.

Jude turns out to have been orphaned at a young age- growing up in a monastery. He then runs away with one of the fathers of the monastery, later revealed to be a wanted paedophile. Brother Luke panders to Jude’s craving for a father figure and makes him prostitute himself so that they can finally afford their own patch of paradise.

After 4 years shuttling around different motels and servicing several hundred clients, Jude’s captor is finally cornered by the police. Choosing to hang himself rather than face prison, Jude is freed from his first demon.

He is then institutionalised into an orphanage. His past catches up with him and he continues to be abused by the teachers. He runs away and eventually is taken up by a psychiatrist. Initially seeming caring, treating Jude’s STIs and feeding him. He eventually shows off his true colours imprisoning and sexually abusing Jude.  When he bores of Jude, he releases Jude onto a field and promptly runs him over with a car resulting in spinal injuries that results in his life long disability and chronic pain.

Jude’s traumatic story is told progressively in chunks through this monstrosity of a novel. Albeit this does nothing to ease the shock, awe and disgust for the reader.

One may call it completely unrealistic for a child to suffer as much as Jude has. However, from my experiences in the Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services, it is not all together uncommon for children to have harrowing stories that latch onto them, never leaving them. Albeit nothing to the scale of what Hanya creates.

If you hoped this would be a tale of redemption and transformation of a troubled and emotionally mutilated soul, then you’d be dead wrong. In adulthood Hanya subjects him to horrific domestic abuse; even towards the end of the book instead of a happily ever after Hanya decimates Jude’s life even further murdering off characters.

There are glimpses of hope in the story. The friendship that Jude forms with Willem, JB, Malcolm and Harold are multi- dimensional and contain all the complexities that adult friendships have. I will give it to Hanya that she made interesting and inspiring bonds between these characters.

I always felt that writers must sometimes feel like gods- creating a world and populating it with lives at their whimsy. If we follow this analogy, Hanya is a grotesque and evil god, one who creates 4 adolescent lives, walking them through hellfire and subjugating them through wicked trials. I almost forgave Hanya thinking that perhaps she was drawing from her childhood experiences, however, no it seems almost a morbid curiosity into how much torture a single person can endure. She makes Jude don this poisoned plot armour and fires a volley of poisoned arrows at him through these 832 pages.

Read at your own pointless emotional peril.