If there is one thing A Little Life , Hanya Yanagihara's behemoth of a novel (Doubleday) is not, it is little. Authors don't always get to pick their own titles, but if there's an explanation of "a little life" in the 700-page text, it went by me. "Life" in the singular does �" eventually �" reflect the book's fixation with its main character, Jude St. James; the other named characters are mere moons orbiting around him. His heavily freighted name is not his fault, Yanagihara thereby suggesting that it's not hers, either. It's the name he was given when, as a foundling, he was taken in by a community of sadistic American Christian monks.
It's definitely not Yanagihara's fault that The Atlantic deemed her novel "a book fundamentally about gay male experience," setting off the predictable media storm about whether it's the Great American Gay Novel. Early on, then, the discussion changed from "Is it any good?" to the tired old "Is it or isn't it?" In both cases, it isn't. The sensibility isn't gay; it's fag-hag. The book isn't just heteronormative; it's creepy.
For starters, hardly anyone in it is gay. Four college friends go on to make tightly interconnected lives (of fortune and, frequently, fame) in a featureless Manhattan and their pricey getaways (Yanagihara can describe living spaces, but there's little to distinguish Wall Street from the Via Compostelo, which is also one of the locales). They suspiciously resemble the cast of Looking grafted onto Sex in the City.
But looks are deceiving. Only one of the guys, the Haitian artist JB, is categorically gay, and he's a bitch. Mixed-race architect Malcolm might "squeak bi" if he hadn't fled to the safe haven of heterosexual matrimony for familial and financial reasons. And then there's stage and screen star Willem Ragnarsson, a poster-handsome skirt-chaser whose one retreat from unbridled promiscuity is an implausible, decades-long committed relationship with Jude, believably his best friend if without benefits. When it becomes clear that one of the ways he can respect Jude is to seek (undisclosed) sex elsewhere, Willem's back in the arms, and presumably nether regions, of the ladies.
But what of ? Sexually a lost cause? Yanagihara doesn't clarify. He's also handsome, of course, if horribly disfigured from the neck down. The victim of grave physical and sexual abuse �" all of it with men �" from long before his sexual self-identity could have evolved naturally, Jude knows only the attentions of men while recoiling from all of them. If ever there were a man to whom the word "gay" did not apply, it would be Jude. He survives by dint of his genius for advanced math and his skills as a litigator, where his capacity to go cold makes him a barracuda barrister.
If he's perilously close to a stereotype �" but not �" that's where Yanagihara's characterization succeeds. In real life, young people with his experiences are scoured of personality, emotionally shut down (apart from multidirectional rage) and functionally stuck in place. Not dead yet. Their attractiveness �" if seldom quite attraction �" to men who will reenact the abuse plays out in Jude's case with a rogue psychiatrist (of course) and a sadistic CEO with the sinister name Caleb. Yanagihara understands all that, making Jude a sympathetic character from the beginning, one you never stop rooting for. In the Robin Williams Good Will Hunting therapist sense, it's not his fault, and neither is it yours for getting involved. It's a made-for-TV weepie.
The thing about adult sex with children and powerless adolescents that's often overlooked �" because who wants to look? �" is that it's frequently, if not always, focused on inflicting pain. Yanagihara doesn't overlook. Jude's primary escape from his pain of all sorts is inflicting more by cutting himself, a life skill he learned from Brother Luke, the monk who ushered him out of the monastery and into a life of forced prostitution on the lam with pedophiles (who bring their own sheets) in motel rooms, rewarding him with a complete set of often untreated STDs.
The most understanding of observers, and Jude has plenty, is unable to tolerate the cutting for long, and Yanagihara drives the point home with countless episodes of it, rendered in grisly detail. The author's biggest slip with the blade comes when Willem, at his wits' end, tries to show Jude what it feels like to watch such grim doings by slashing his own chest a half-dozen times. This is a man who makes his living with his beautiful body, but we hear nothing more of that in a novel that otherwise leaves nothing out.
That's the thing. Yanagihara has a great subject, one that merits more attention, and she talks it to death. The novel reads like Infinite Oprah, with Yanagihara not about to be stuck on the fiction writer's putative choice: do you show or do you tell? She shows and tells and explains and psychologizes, driving the reader over a course of comma clauses that can go on for a page, finally exhausting even themselves. It feels like reading braille aloud. It's something Michael Chabon can do with cumulative power and Salman Rushdie with driving intensity, both of them (usually) knowing when to stop. Yanagihara traps the reader into an overlong gossipy phone call you'd hang up on if you could. It ends up trivializing its subject.