Sipped Ink vol 3 issue 3

A Little Life — Week 3

Hello, and please accept my apologies up-front if this week’s letter is more of a patchwork of thoughts than a refined argument. The weekend kind of got away from me a little, and I find myself scrambling this Sunday evening to patch a week’s worth of notes together into something readable!

I saw a video this week in which Hanya Yanagihara refers to Jude as “the protagonist” of A Little Life; at 250 pages in, that feels entirely correct in a way it didn’t after 100 pages. Indeed, this week’s reading has continued to concentrate on deepening our understanding of Jude, rather than widening its focus much further than was the case last week.

Though we’ve been given only a little by way of further exploration of Jude’s past, I now feel like we’ve gained a fuller picture of his present. Uncomfortable in his own skin, and in his own person in general, we see Jude struggling with almost every aspect of his self. One of the things about his depiction in JB’s unauthorised painting that displeases him so much is how he feels it to be revealing him as ‘mimicking the gestures and postures of adulthood while clearly understanding nothing of them’ (p.175). This, perhaps, in the same way that we have previously seen him attempting to channel his more capable friend Willem in moments of anxiety, as though playing the role of someone he sees as competent would be enough to at least fool people that he possesses competency.

We also see further instances of Jude’s perennial lack of confidence, and his continued expectation of rejection. The most heart-wrenching of these comes at Harold & Julia’s house, when Jude is aware that the older couple have something they wish to speak with him about. In the absence of information on wheat the topic of conversation will be, Jude’s mind immediately turns to pondering all the various forms of rejection he may be about to experience, and to how best to cope with them. When it is revealed that it’s actually the very opposite that Harold & Julia intend — adoption — Jude’s disbelief (alongside his elation) is palpable. However, this too is quickly followed by Jude’s fear that he’ll fail at being an adopted son. We see a flashback to the time he spent a weekend with a prospective foster family, and we catch an echo of the words of the priest dropping him off — “Don’t fuck this up, St. Francis” (p.189) — in Jude’s words many years later when he tells Willem, with reference to the impending adoption, that he’s afraid he’s “going to mess it up” (p.184).

I was struck this week by the extent to which Jude’s life, as well as being marred by tragedy, is also touched with a measure of grace. The depth of his lasting friendships, the development and deepening of his relationship with Harold & Julia, the deal he’s stumbles into to purchase a whole floor of a building. Unquestionably Jude has experienced horrors, but Yanagihara doesn’t deny him some luck and warmth. To do so would feel artificial of course: no life is without both tragedy and good fortune—and in Jude’s case the scales remain weighted too heavily to the one side—but still, there is pleasure for the reader in seeing Jude receive good things, and then there is empathy also in watching him struggle to accept them, and to accept that he deserves them.

Towards the end of this week’s reading (~p.249) was the first time I’d considered the parallels between Jude and Hemming where Jude is concerned. In hindsight there seem to be three options here:

1. the earlier passages depicting Willem’s relationship with his brother were handled subtly enough so as to not read like direct echoes of Jude;

2. Hemming and Willem’s relationship is explored early enough in the novel that information on Jude’s condition is still slight and therefore the echoes are, at best, faint;

3. I’ve been a terribly inattentive reader and owe all of you, and Ms Yanagihara, profuse apologies.

I’m also torn as to whether this parallel is something that would benefit from further development, or whether it is best left as a subtle underpinning of Jude & Willem’s relationship. I’m fascinated to see how the author handles it.

We’ve seen a couple of developments this week in our understanding of just how close Jude and Willem are. My favourite of which is the wonderfully subtle depiction of Philippa’s simmering jealousy:

Willem grinned at him, and [Jude] smiled back, though he could see that Philippa herself wasn’t smiling any longer, but staring at the table. Then she looked up, and their eyes met for half a second, and she looked away, quickly. — 249

(Whilst entirely aware that I risk sounding like the author of some Buffy fan-fiction of dubious merit,) I’m sure I’m not the only one amongst us who is already rooting for Jude & Willem to end up together. (Whilst judiciously kept off the cover of the UK edition, the title of this review of the novel in The Atlantic gives me some hope.)

This week is also the first time we’ve detected serious strains in the quartet’s close relationships. We observe them going through the motions at a party about which few of them are genuinely enthused, before Yanagihara shares with us their mutually-accepted understanding of why they continue to do so:

But really, both of them knew why they kept attending these parties: because they had become one of the few opportunities the four of them had to be together, and at times they seemed to be their only opportunity to create memories the four of them could share, keeping their friendship alive by dropping bundles of kindling onto a barely smoldering black smudge of fire. It was their way of pretending everything was the same. — 221

And we might wonder whether the rift over JB’s paintings of Jude is the beginning of the damage. The repercussions seem to be both deep and lasting. It is this incident which alters Jude’s conception of his close friends:

It would have been too melodramatic, too final, to say that after this JB was forever diminished for [Jude]. But it was true that for the first time, he was able to comprehend that the people he had grown to trust might someday betray him — 177

At its heart, the betrayal here arguably has its roots in the question we’ve encountered previously of how exactly to define friendship:

“You promised me, JB,” [Jude] said. “That should be enough.” He could have added, “And you owe me as my friend,” but he had a few years ago come to realize that JB’s definition of friendship and its responsibilities was different than his own, and there was no arguing with him about it: you either accepted it or you didn’t — 170

It’s a question that we see Willem wrestling with too, when faced with the puzzle of how to help Jude when he doesn’t want to be helped:

[T]he year-after-year exhaustion of keeping Jude’s secrets and yet never being given anything in return but the meanest smidges of information, of not being allowed the opportunity to even try to help him, to publicly worry about him. This isn’t fair, he would think in those moments. This isn’t friendship. It’s something, but it’s not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play — 228

I don’t like to think we’re going to witness the disintegration of this group of once close friends, but as with the mix of fortune and grief that Yanagihara parcels out to Jude, a true account of a life includes partings alongside meetings. We’ll see, I guess. There’s a long way to go yet.

Particular thanks this week to Melanie for her responses to earlier posts, and to Michael for a really touching postcard about how his 80 year-old mother is also enjoying the book.

For whatever reason, one thing I like when reading books in their dead tree form is encountering a page typeset as a perfect block of text. No indentations, no line or paragraph breaks, just a complete rectangle of justified copy. There are a few authors with whom this is relatively common, and plenty with whom it’s entirely unthinkable. Most, however, fall somewhere in the middle, where the prospect is an enticing rarity. Page 218 of A Little Life is the nearest miss I’ve ever seen. Perfect all the way down until the final character of the page is a space before 219 begins with speech. So close! (I realise by telling you this that I’m inviting you to share with me every instance of a perfectly typeset page you encounter for the rest of your living and reading days. Feel free, I’d love to see them.)