Sipped Ink vol 3 issue 2

A Little Life — Week 2

I left off last week’s letter guessing that we had, to that point, been reading a prolonged exercise in scene-setting. Things took a turn this week, and it felt as though the second section — The Postman — is revealing the novel’s true intentions.

Before, we start looking at some of those themes, however, let me address the couple of conversations I’ve overheard about when the book is set, the conclusions of which seem to be that that fact is something Yanagihara is deliberately obscuring. In his piece for The New Yorker, Jon Michaud puts it thus:

Yanagihara scrubs her prose of references to significant historical events. The September 11th attacks are never mentioned, nor are the names of the Mayor, the President, or any recognizable cultural figures who might peg the narrative to a particular year. The effect of this is to place the novel in an eternal present day, in which the characters’ emotional lives are foregrounded and the political and cultural Zeitgeist is rendered into vague scenery.

Even at 20% through it’s obvious to us that this is a novel about people rather than about time and place, but it’s interesting the lengths that Yanagihara has gone to to achieve this out-of-time quality.

What felt particularly pronounced for me in the week’s reading was the exploration of Jude’s psychological make-up, and the continuation of the theme of friendship & family.

The novel’s focus shifting away from the quartet of friends and towards Jude has allowed for a far greater understanding of his character, even where elements of his past remain unknown to this point. We learn of his inclination to habit: both his self-destructive cutting, and his (arguably also self-destructive) walking. We see more of his perpetual hiding of his true self, and his self-loathing for same — what Jude considers ‘his fundamental and irreparable inability to be the sort of person he tried to make people believe he was’ (p.88). He feels keenly his ‘extreme otherness’ (p.92), and amongst his methods for coping with it we find his attempted channelling of his friend:

He pretended he was Willem, who would have known exactly what to do and what to say without even thinking about it. — 91

We learn also of Jude’s continual expectation of rejection, for instance in his friendship with Harold:

It will end this month, he would tell himself. And then, at the end of the month: Next month. He won’t want to talk to me next month. He tried to keep himself in a constant state of readiness; he tried to prepare himself for disappointment, even as he yearned to be proven wrong. — 131

And, coupled with that, his fear of his friends’ pity:

If he appeared one day magically whole, with a stride as easy as Willem’s and JB’s complete lack of self-consciousness, the way he could lean back in his chair and let his shirt hoist itself from his hips without any fear, or with Malcolm’s long arms, the skin on their insides as smooth as frosting, what would he be to Andy? What would he be to any of them? Would they like him less? More? Or would he discover — as he often feared — that what he understood as friendship was really motivated by their pity of him? — 143

It is in the early, obscured references to what he suffers in the monastery that we see the roots of many of Jude’s tendencies: towards habitual actions (eg. his burgeoning kleptomania), towards secrecy, and towards corporal punishment. So brilliantly is he being built by Yanagihara, it is hard to believe now that within the opening chapters I found Jude so indistinct from the other three. It is possible, of course, that the author intends to give JB, Malcolm, & Willem the same attention she gives Jude in the second section. However, that would likely make for too unwieldy a narrative with too unclear a through-line. The more we learn of Jude the more we want to know, and it feels increasingly as though this will be his story.

The novel’s conception of both ‘friendship’ and ‘family’ are complicated in the second section by the introduction of relationships that fit neither category neatly. We see, in turn, Jude’s relatively short relationship with Ana, then his enduring ones with both Harold and Andy. In all three cases there are professional ties at work as well as forces of compassion, and the reader is asked to adjudge how these relationships are properly categorised.

(There is also the matter of Jude’s relationships with the brothers and fathers at the monastery. I’m deciding to leave discussion of this to a later point, when Yanagihara reveals more detail of what happened to Jude, but — even beginning with those familial honourifics — there is doubtless plenty at work here in confusing and undermining Jude’s understanding of family in particular.)

With Harold especially — by virtue of the relationship’s length, the apparent depth of affection (at least in one direction), the difference in age, and Harold’s own background as father to a deceased son — there is a distinctly familial quality to the manner in which the two men interact. We observe this blurring of friendship & family in Jude’s own mind in respect of Harold, when he spends the night at the older man’s house:

In those minutes, he pretended that they were his parents, and he was home for the weekend from law school to visit them, and this was his room, and the next day he would get up and do whatever it was that grown children did with their parents. — 127

We might wonder whether, though not related by blood, what is at work here is what Harold (in another context in one of his chapter two monologues (an abrupt-seeming structural shift for the novel)) terms ‘something extra-biological’ (p.163). Are the boundaries of friendship and family porous or otherwise malleable in the same manner as the distinction Jude makes between applied math and pure math (~p.124)? It seems somehow related to his understanding of friendship, as evidenced in this conversation with Andy:

“I’m going to tell your fucking crew they’ve got to keep their eyes on you” […]

“Don’t you dare, Andy,” he’d say. “And anyway, it’s not their responsibility.”

“Of course it is,” Andy would retort. As with other issues, they couldn’t agree on this one. — 141

Like pure math Jude seems to see friendship as existing solely for its own sake, to be something beautiful, he is perhaps too self-loathing and too afraid of pity to believe that it also has practical purposes, like mutual preservation, and that it comes with responsibilities for same, as Andy suggests.

Related, there was a detectable echo in this week’s reading on the theme of personal responsibility, between Jude’s near-suicide and Harold’s becoming a father. When the former accidentally cuts too deep he faces the option of ‘letting this accident become its own conclusion’ (p.144); and when the latter impregnates Liesl it is the couple’s indecision that results in their son’s birth. This counterpoint of life & near-death is neatly drawn, and Yanagihara includes in both instances a mention of the man’s momentary relief that a decision had been removed from his hands. This leaves us to wonder not just how little of our lives we control, but also how much we are ultimately willing to accept responsibility for.

Towards the end of the section’s second chapter there are other distinctions drawn, which I think are also applicable to how the novel handles friendship & family. Harold’s explanation of fairness’s place in law (from p.164), and his conception of familial love as arising from fear (p.167), are both brilliantly handled by Yanagihara. Introduced with just the right weight, they are large concepts laid out with a simple clarity that invites the reader to pick them up and add them to a set of lenses through which to view the world of the novel. Might we say, for instance, that as the love of family is born partly of (and intensified by) fear, platonic love has its basis in a mutual understanding of fairness?

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