Sipped Ink vol 3 issue 1

A Little Life — Week 1

The first 10% of a long novel must be extraordinarily difficult to construct. At what pace is it proper to move? What should (and should not) be revealed about one’s characters? And in what order? One week, and a little over 80 pages into Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life my impression is that these opening chapters are primarily exercises in scene-setting and the introduction of characters. This seems particularly challenging in a novel with four protagonists that are all male, and all of a similar age. Yanagihara can’t rely on simple gender-specific pronouns to distinguish her dramatis personae, and with age also a constant in the equation she has to rely on the characters’ distinguishing characteristics to begin to differentiate them in the reader’s mind. But, importantly, this has to be done without reducing characters to caricatures; we’re about to spend more than 700 pages getting to know these people, and the author has to be careful not to introduce them simply as ‘the pretty one’, ‘the one with the bad legs’, ‘the black architect’, and ‘the gay Haitian artist’. Still, there’s a use for this kind of shorthand early on, and in places the introduction of these elements seemed to me to sideline grace in favour of expediency. For example, this at p.5:

“It’s blacks versus whites,” JB would say. “Jude’s not white,” Willem would respond. “And I’m not black,” Malcolm would add

(Side note: you may find it useful — or you may find it completely distracting — to have some actors in mind to populate your reading of the novel. If you think that might be useful, here’s a site you could check out.)

I’m enjoying the world Yanagihara is building in the present day of the novel, and whilst I’ve also enjoyed the dips into characters’ pasts, they read to me a little like diversions. This balance between world-building and character-building is deftly handled by Yanagihara for the most part though, and I’m fully aware that another reader may well wish to spend more time in the characters’ pasts before engaging with their present. For me however, the most vital insights to the protagonists’ characters have come via small things. Jude’s propensity for locking anything that he can (doors, windows, cupboards) is revealing, as is the manner in which Malcolm modulates his speech depending on audience:

[Malcolm] hailed a taxi. “Seventy-first and Lex,” he instructed the driver. When the driver was black, he always said Lexington. When the driver wasn’t, he was more honest: “Between Lex and Park, closer to Park.” JB thought this was ridiculous at best, offensive at worst. “You think they’re gonna think you’re any more gangster because they think you live at Lex and not Park?” he’d ask. “Malcolm, you’re a dumbass.” — 58

These little insights into the characters’ true natures and inner lives are what, I’m sure, will come to truly differentiate them from each other in the long run of the book, in ways that broad-stroke descriptions of their complexions and occupations fail to touch on.

I’ve also found myself looking for themes. Let’s start with the obvious: family & friends. Willem’s statement that “We don’t get the families we deserve” (p.15) is a large enough assertion that it could easily form a kind of thesis statement underpinning an entire novel. Positioned as it is so early in the book, the chances seem very high that this is something Yanagihara intends to return to and interrogate. Since the concept of friendship is obviously also central to the novel, we might expect that the relationship between family & friendship might be examined, perhaps via the relative importance of each in the lives of these characters.

Another theme that has stood out to me in a couple of sections is that of light. We are used to thinking of light as something which reveals truths, and its opposite — darkness — as a method of concealment. In a memorable moment on the subway, Yanagihara turns this cliché on its head:

[JB would] watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine. And then the sun would drift, the car rattling uncaringly away from it, and the world would return to its normal sad shapes and colors, the people to their normal sad state, a shift as cruel and abrupt as if it had been made by a sorcerer’s wand. — 26

It’s excess light here that allows JB to see beauty where, perhaps, there is none. It’s a quality of light that reappears at his studio space:

At five thirty, the light was perfect: buttery and dense and fat somehow, swelling the room as it had the train into something expansive and hopeful. — 27

And it’s also a quality that he seems to seek in some of his work:

[JB] tried to make each painting capture that gently fuzzed quality the camera gave everything, as if someone had patted away the top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see. — 34

What does this way of viewing the world, and JB’s obvious preference for it, say about him?

Thirdly, in terms of thematics, we see several instances of the characters struggling with their maturation into adults. Perhaps the first of these that stood out to me was Willem’s internal struggle with whether or not the life of a poor actor is all that he needs, or whether he longs for something less fraught with complexity:

Still — [Willem] was not an anxious person, he was not inclined toward self-pity. Indeed, there were moments when, returning from Ortolan or from a rehearsal for a play in which he would be paid almost nothing for a week’s work, so little that he wouldn’t have been able to afford the prix fixe at the restaurant, he would enter the apartment with a feeling of accomplishment. Only to him and Jude would Lispenard Street be considered an achievement — for as much work as he had done to it, and as much as Jude had cleaned it, it was still sad, somehow, and furtive, as if the place was embarrassed to call itself a real apartment — but in those moments he would at times find himself thinking, This is enough. This is more than I hoped. To be in New York, to be an adult, to stand on a raised platform of wood and say other people’s words! — it was an absurd life, a not-life, a life his parents and his brother would never have dreamed for themselves, and yet he got to dream it for himself every day.

But then the feeling would dissipate, and he would be left alone to scan the arts section of the paper, and read about other people who were doing the kinds of things he didn’t even have the expansiveness, the arrogance of imagination to dream of, and in those hours the world would feel very large, and the lake very empty, and the night very black, and he would wish he were back in Wyoming, waiting at the end of the road for Hemming, where the only path he had to navigate was the one back to his parents’ house, where the porch light washed the night with honey.’ — 54–5

Malcolm also has a moment in which he explicitly conceives of his identity confusion as a failing on his own part — his desire for simplicity just as plain as Willem’s:

Sex; sexuality: these too were things he should have sorted out in college, the last place where such insecurity was not just tolerated but encouraged. […][Malcolm] often thought that being gay (as much as he also couldn’t stand the thought of it; somehow it, like race, seemed the province of college, an identity to inhabit for a period before maturing to more proper and practical realms) was attractive mostly for its accompanying accessories, its collection of political opinions and causes and its embrace of aesthetics. — 63

‘Friends’, ‘family’, and ‘growing up’ are a pretty broad base on which to build a novel, and I don’t yet feel as though we’ve been let into the secret of what the novel has to say on these topics. Plus, as we progress with the book its other central concerns will, no doubt, reveal themselves.

Jude’s suicide attempt, Willem’s having to stop ignoring his cutting (from p.67), and the subsequent incident of the four of them getting locked out on the roof, is perhaps the novel’s first true dramatic chain of events. Coming at the end of the first section it also feels like Yanagihara is making a statement. Perhaps we are now equipped with the baseline knowledge of our four protagonists that is required in order to start exploring their world(s) more fully. I guess we’ll find out during the week’s reading.

If you feel like a bit of extra activity around the novel I’ll try and drop in some links each week. To start with:

NB: the book also has its own Instagram account (but beware spoilers!)

• • •

And, finally, it’s time to announce the prize I teased in the sign-up email: and it’s nothing less book club cliché than… a tote bag!

I have exactly one of these, and at the end of June I’ll be sending it to the person who makes the best single contribution throughout this year’s read-along. That could be a comment you leave on one of the posts, a photo of you enjoying the book somewhere unusual, or anything else that you can come up with. I’m deliberately leaving this a bit vague to encourage some inventiveness. (Simon’s already set the bar with that gougère recipe!) Good luck.

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