Many will tell you that A Little Life is a tough read. I've read reviews that go so far as to call it 'torture porn', even. They made me balk when I wish I hadn't. I asked myself, 'Is now, during quarantine, and this globalized malaise a time to read a book with so much difficult subject matter?' It turned out that, at least for me, I could not have chosen a better book to tackle. Here's why.

'"I'm lonely," he says aloud, and the silence of the apartment absorbs the words like blood soaking into cotton.'

The book, which follows four friends with big dreams that find one another while attending a small college in Massachusetts. Each is introduced to the reader individually through their own lens at first, then it shifts to that of the other friends and how they view the others; the result of which paints each of them well and thoroughly. Their friendship solidifies as their character and defining elements are fleshed out. Then, just as you think you understand them all, the narrative shifts to primarily center Jude; the bedrock of the boys' friendship, whether each of them realizes this at the time, or not. 

"…he was worried because to be alive was to worry. Life was scary; it was unknowable. Even Malcolm's money wouldn't immunize him completely. Life would happen to him, and he wold have to try to answer it, just like the rest of them. They all - Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors - sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days."

From there, the text rations out the details of Jude's past life, sometimes sparingly, sometimes not, before his school years and his friends, or his ember of ambition ignited, enabling him to become a fierce and successful litigator. We learn of the unconscionable, tremendous forms of abuse Jude suffers as the narrative jumps from past to present with the quintessential ephemeralness of remembering memories. As a reader, you may never be able to fully predict when these shifts happen (I usually couldn't) but once this process begins in earnest, the rhythm of the narrative becomes something resembling a pendulum swinging. I felt it I became somewhat adept at bracing myself for the inevitable, even though I did not know when it would happen, precisely. 

But what I had not anticipated was that unlike others, apparently, I did not find the book draining. 

"The hardest thing about being a parent is recalibration. The better you are at it, the better you will be."

In fact, from the first few pages, I knew I was reading something rare, something that pulled me immediately into the lives of these characters that seemed to be familiar friends I'd known throughout my own life. Something to be savored and read slowly, and to be consumed with a kind of respect because it was clearly about something more than was immediately presented. 

A Little Life is the story of Jude and J.B, and Malcolm, and Willem, and their friendship changing throughout the years. But it also, as much of the literature that has meant something to me endeavors to do, contain vulnerable, incredibly insightful - yet still accessible -thoughts and feelings about many other things. I would go so far as to say this may be the most earnest, honest book I've read. It is artfully crafted into the innermost thoughts of the characters and their interactions. I have found that I usually connect with a book and end up enjoying it because I understand the characters and their arcs. There's a dependable satisfaction that comes from the arrangement of genres, tropes, and devices. 

"People always spoke of healing as if it were predictable and progressive, a decisive diagonal line pointing from the lower left-hand corner of a graph to the upper right. But…theirs was a mountain range of peaks and trenches…"

What I have come to love about A Little Life is that it instead endeavors to make the reader feel seen through the characters in a manner divorced from these typical expectations. I have seen aspects of these characters in my life. They feel almost as though they are fleshed out classic archetypes of people everyone has interacted with at school: The boy who peaked socially in college/high school; the rich kid who was out to prove something, despite a safety net; the one for whom most things just seem to work out; the quiet one; the funny one; the narcissistic one. The beats of the various friendships are rooted in so many things I've personally experienced over the course of my own history. 

And, most powerfully for me, through the learning of Jude and the arranging of his insular life, I have come to understand and see myself more clearly. An experience I don't think I've had since I started reading as a child or perhaps books I picked up as a young adult. Formative experiences that made me decide what kind of person I wanted to be. And now, this. 

Every night I stopped reading I reflected on my own life choices. Examining them and turning them around in my mind. Finding a bit more peace or a bit more unease with some of the decisions I've struggled with internally, never having voiced them to one, single other person. 

"Lately, he had been wondering if independence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and he didn't hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and know that you could be dismal around him in return."

And I think this provocation has come from the way in which Yanagihara crafts moments. 
So much of this book and the character interactions serve to buttress thoughtful, introspective moments that I never saw coming. It is so well written, it was a pleasure to read these characters doing just about anything. And 'anything', as I learned, meant everything. As it goes on, inconsequential details of their lives become transformative experiences, when viewed from other perspectives. And these moments feel as if they apparate out of nowhere, just as they do in real life. The things I remember from twenty-odd years ago feel so random and perhaps event pointless; until I rehash them and figure out why that moment has stuck. Which I almost never do. 

My favorite such moment is one in which the boys take a quiet walk in the woods, and a character introduced somewhat later - Harold, a surrogate father figure for more than one of the boys -is brought along. It is a flowery and autumnal and sweet thing to read. Later, however, it serves as perhaps the most important, defining moment for one of them. There is an almost throwaway moment within this walk in the wood, where Willem leans down to tie Jude's shoe as they are walking, never stopping in conversation as he does, simply a reflex. Jude turns to Harold with a look of joy; signaling to him that this small gesture of kindness means so much to him. That he realizes he is cared for. Even further along in the story, I came to understand that this walk and this moment encapsulates the dynamics of every character in the scene when it is expounded upon. 

A hidden note left in a bookcase is discovered at a meaningful time though it was secreted away for decades. A misplacement and disappointment are transformed into a revelation. 

There are many examples of scenes that are left hanging, some of which are meaningful at the time but become more so as their contours and additional context are realized later, even if they become a butt of a joke when finally intimated.

"Willem's face and neck dominate the canvas…he has the sense that if he says Willem's name, then the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas, he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem's hair, his fringe of eyelashes."

The reader becomes prepared for a strange or a dissimilar story from such prose. Rather than the traditional character arc, it's warned that there is an ebb and flow more akin to the natural life events. Forget what the rules of literature convey ought to have happened. This makes even the difficult parts of Jude's life have a sort of equilibrium. My expectations were managed deftly, the terrible events never managed to diminish or surpass the numerous small, yet powerfully wholesome and good moments that so obviously mean the world to Jude, enabling him to continue living his life under his own terms; accruing happiness where and how he manages to. Often times without consciously attempting to grasp it at all. 

The ways in which one typically tends to measure the quality of a person's life by way of the standards of western culture are heavily examined and critiqued throughout. Even when incredibly sad events transpire, there is a conspiracy of hope that surrounds them. These events don't feel placed there to be emotionally manipulative, as some reviews have suggested. But I also freely admit, that if someone didn't read into the many moments as I had, it would feel like a much more 'heavy' and bleak book. 

A Little Life is about so many things though, not purely the hardships of Jude. It presents views on complex issues through the boys. Insights on privilege, mental health, gender, sexuality, addiction, self-harm, all kinds of abuse - and much, much more. But central to all of these things is friendship. There is no reliance on typical drama or the thrill of death and sex. The story is instead about trust, reliance, the general dynamics of people, and the kinds of friendship one experiences throughout a life lived; especially when examined across decades of time. Experiences prove to be more malleable and convey far more than initially realized, under Yanagihara's masterful pen. A little life is unlike anything I've read, and well worth reading. 

"It was precisely these scenes he missed the most from his own life…the forgettable, in-between moments in which nothing seemed to be happening but whose absence was singularly unfillable."