Sipped Ink vol 3 issue 4

A Little Life — Week 4

This is the second edition of the weekly letter I’ve started with an excuse, but this time it’s a good one: I’ve spent the majority of the week on a trip to Norway, and as I type this I’m about 12 hours from starting a mountain hike with a 6am start. So forgive me if this week’s edition is more questions than answers, and maybe you can help me out by filling in some of the blanks with your responses on the site.

Things moved quickly this week, with a lot changing over the course of these 80 pages.

Firstly, we saw further breakdown in the relationships between our central quartet. Jude and JB are no longer on speaking terms, and therefore neither are Willem and JB. It’s a sad state of affairs to see such a close-knit group pull apart, but it reminded me somewhat of George RR Martin’s recent comments that characters in his Song of Ice & Fire series die because it’s true to life. Much of what we’ve seen of the group dynamic to this point has been relatively idyllic, and yet the four are quite different people who have matured into their own challenges: their circumstances no longer entirely compatible. We get snatches of regret over this new circumstance from Jude, of course, but also — affectingly — from JB:

[JB] missed his friends, he missed how innocent and clean they were, he missed being the most interesting among them, he missed never having to try around them. — 270

Powerful too, is Jude’s pained reflection:

He had never done it before, and so he had no real understanding of how slow, and sad, and difficult it was to end a friendship. — 293

I only hope that this doesn’t mean we as readers will lose touch entirely with JB and (to a lesser extent) Malcolm; I want to see what those guys get up to.

This week we also see several further instances of Jude hiding (from) himself. As previously we have seen him attempt to channel Jude, we here see him pondering how the way he dresses protects him from the truth of himself:

When he has clothes on, he is one person, but without them, he is revealed as he really is. — 306

And we also get Black Henry Young’s report that Jude ‘becomes someone else at work … borderline frightening, just incredibly relentless’ (p. 265). This self deception, clearly, is a symptom of Jude’s deep reservoirs of guilt and shame: his inability and refusal to accept the things that he has done, and that have been done to him. Jude cannot square those facts with any kind of self-concept that would allow him to go on living and functioning, and therefore he acts to suppress them.

In most circumstances it would be borderline unbelievable that a close friendship of a decade or so would not have included knowledge of the friend’s sexuality. In the case of Jude St. Francis — skilled and practiced in the arts of self-deception and denial — it seems entirely plausible that his extensive campaign of secrecy should include even these most basic elements of himself, and even in the case of his closest confidant. Yanagihara handles the moment of near-revelation well, making us feel Jude’s extreme discomfort at the subject having been raised, and also Willem’s despair that Jude continues to insist on retaining the secrets of his past — that this hole in his knowledge of his friend will persist.

What we have to deal with this week is the subject of Jude’s relationship with Caleb. This is both a triumph and a disaster for Jude: initially that he is able to take a chance on what he would conceive of as a ‘normal’ kind of happiness, and ultimately that the result should be not just unsuccessful but disastrous. Yanagihara does well to deftly insert the relationship between JB and Jackson as a way of foreshadowing: that someone would stay in a relationship that they felt so demeaned by; that someone would do so despite being unable to find their own internal logic for their actions. As Jude himself conceptualises it, the symmetry to the two relationships is that ‘they are the damaged and the damager, the sliding heap of garbage and the jackal sniffing through it’ (p. 326).

Still, with these precursors set in place by the time we meet Caleb, he at first seems interesting and attractive in a way that might appeal to Jude: forthright where Jude is reserved, engaged in an industry with enough parallels to Jude’s that they have common ground, but with enough differences that they don’t want for conversation. And yet signs quickly reveal themselves that Caleb is poisonous. Despite his family history, his behaviour in response to Jude’s condition is indefensible. And his characterisation of Jude as weak is almost comically misguided — almost. (Jude’s unwillingness to defend himself from the charge is pathetic in the true sense of the word.) Still, one of the reasons we dislike Caleb instantly — even before the physical abuse — is his misunderstanding of, and lack of true appreciation for, Jude, who we have come to know so well.

Around this brief depiction of Jude & Caleb’s relationship, Yanagihara weaves some interesting questions for the reader. Chief amongst them, for me, is the question of the extent to which Andy is unknowingly correct when (~p.332) he hypothesises that Jude’s more extensive injuries are resultant of an elaborate pattern of self abuse that goes beyond his (now sadly normalised) cutting. It seems that there may be an element of wanton self-destruction in Jude’s actions when Yanagihara shows him as unable to understand why, on two occasions to date, he invites Caleb into his space against his own better judgement. We have extensive evidence that Jude conceives of himself as undeserving of happiness. When Harold asks Jude why he would sustain a relationship that saw him treated so poorly, his response is simple and heartbreaking: “I was lonely” (p.335). The truth, however, is likely more complicated. Before he commits to the relationship we witness Jude’s internal battle:

On one side is everything he knows, the patterns of his existence as regular and banal as the steady plink of a dripping faucet, where he is alone but safe, and shielded from everything that could hurt him. On the other side are waves, tumult, rainstorms, excitement: everything he cannot control, everything potentially awful and ecstatic, everything he has lived his adult life trying to avoid, everything whose absence bleeds his life of color. — 315

He literally thinks of Caleb as having been ‘dropped into his life as a test’ (ibid.). Despite what Caleb might think, Jude is courageous enough to take that test in refutation of the thousand reasons he might not. And when it proves to be the wrong choice, Jude is able to rationalise the experience as further proof that he should not expect or desire happiness in his life:

His time with Caleb has confirmed everything he feared people would think of him, of his body, and his next task is to learn to accept that, and to do so without sorrow. He knows he will still probably feel lonely in the future, but now he has something to answer that loneliness; now he knows for certain that loneliness is the preferable state to whatever it was — terror, shame, disgust, dismay, giddiness, excitement, yearning, loathing — he felt with Caleb. — 333

We can’t fault Jude for thinking this way, given what he has endured (only some of which — we are reminded by a quick, Texas-set aside — we are yet privy to). What hurts is that we know he is wrong: that he has been tragically, thoroughly mistreated and the victim in an extensive series of terrible circumstances. If love and good fortune were to be portioned out equitably in response to one’s deserving them, then we readers know that Jude St. Francis would be overwhelmed with good things in his life. That fate has thus far persuaded Jude that his ill fortune is in return for some flaw in his person remains the book’s central tragedy.

That’s going to have to be it for this installment, since I’m due to start walking in 10 hours! Thanks this week in particular to Melanie for keeping in touch about how the book has been bringing her down right before work, to Michael for another lovely postcard chronicling his mother’s reading progress, and to Simon for another recipe! Will he attempt za’atar-dusted roasted cauliflower?

Tune in next week.