Sipped Ink vol 3 issue 9

A Little Life — Week 9

In the end this was Jude’s story, of course, but the way in which Yanagihara positions him in relationship to his friends is a key component of the book. We might look back and say that, by dint of the author or celestial design (depending on your viewpoint) Jude is blessed with exactly the set of friends that he requires: an architect who turns his wealth into relative comfort by intuitively understanding his physical limitations; a fiercely loyal and compassionate best friend with whom he comes to share a profound love; and finally (in many respects), a talented artist who is able to chronicle those relationships and Jude’s journey in particular.

The presence of JB’s work has an important role in the book, as Yanagihara returns multiple times to ideas around perspective. Where we have, during ‘The Happy Years’, seen Jude begin to move past some of the trauma of his youth and conceive of his time with Willem as ‘the only part of his life that counted’ (p.641), he returns, in his depression, to thinking of his childhood as:

those fifteen years whose half-life have been so long and so resonant, that have determined everything he has become and done. — 695

Jude’s depression also leads him into falling back on old ways of thinking about himself. Whilst the successes and pleasures of his adulthood have allowed him to experience true enjoyment and to marvel at his good fortune, the loss of Willem causes him to revert.

How has he forgotten so completely who he was when he was with Willem? It is as if that person has died along with Willem, and what he is left with is his elemental self, someone he has never liked — 696

In his depression Jude’s thinking becomes very binary. He thinks again of himself as incurably bad and Willem as naturally good. The calculus that Jude falls into is that the subtraction of the latter from his life renders him not just bereft at his loss, but also a less diluted form of himself and therefore more terrible.

He knows now: People don’t change. He cannot change. Willem had thought himself transformed by the experience of helping him through his recovery; he had been surprised by his own reserves, by his own forbearance. But he — he and everyone else — had always known that Willem had possessed those characteristics already. Those months may have clarified Willem to himself, but the qualities he had discovered had been a surprise to nobody but Willem. And in the same way, his losing Willem has been clarifying as well. In his years with Willem, he had been able to convince himself that he was someone else, someone happier, someone freer and braver. But now Willem is gone, and he is again who he was twenty, thirty, forty years ago. — 668

As I have argued before, it is the novel’s central tragedy that Jude remains convinced of his inherent badness. In the end, what is so sad (per Harold, in the novel’s closing moments) ‘isn’t only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing’ (p.720).

I’m enormously impressed with Yanagihara’s construction of a kind of alt-bildungsroman, dealing not just with the trauma of youth but how the effects persist throughout life. Some of the passages dealing with abuse were difficult to read, and — as alluded to above and in earlier posts — some of the novel’s contrivances are somewhat neat-seeming: Jude St Francis’s life seems pulled between polar extremes of suffering and good fortune. In my opinion however, this doesn’t work against the book, though I’m aware that for some it made the characters less relatable or less believable. In an interview with The Guardian, Yanagihara gives some indication of why she approached the novel in this way:

To me you get nowhere second guessing how much can a reader stand and how much can she not. What a reader can always tell is when you are holding back for fear of offending them. I wanted there to be something too much about the violence in the book, but I also wanted there to be an exaggeration of everything, an exaggeration of love, of empathy, of pity, of horror. I wanted everything turned up a little too high. I wanted it to feel a little bit vulgar in places. Or to be always walking that line between out and out sentimentality and the boundaries of good taste.

There is also a nod to this within the novel: Jude, when suffering in the wake of Willem’s death, blames the fact that he’s unprepared for his grief partly on his having started to believe in his life as a story with an upwards-trending narrative arc:

What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier. — 664

And yet, whilst certainly heightened, the novel is perhaps more realistic than most in its resolution. Jon Michaud, writing in The New Yorker, offers this opinion:

“What makes the book’s treatment of abuse and suffering subversive is that it does not offer any possibility of redemption and deliverance beyond these tender moments. It gives us a moral universe in which spiritual salvation of this sort does not exist.”

Indeed, Tim Adams — in the Guardian article linked above — feels that the novel’s morality sits alongside its duration as a tool in the writer’s arsenal with which to capture the reader’s attention and make them engage with the text emotionally. He writes:

The lack of solace the book offers gives it a 19th-century feel, not just in its melodramatic length, but in the authorial refusal to let the reader disengage.

And Yanagihara agrees, that Jude’s arc (if not precisely his circumstances) mirrors her own experience:

If you look at the friends who come in and out of Jude’s life and how they are not able to really save him — that part is, I think, an accurate reflection of my adult life, and no doubt of a lot of people’s.

In Jude’s case ‘save’ is perhaps too strong a word, but it returns us to the idea of perspective. Through all of their kindnesses, their care and vigilance, and their near-limitless compassion, the small army of people Jude is surrounded by during ‘The Happy Years’ bring a great deal of pleasure to his life. Yanagihara asks us to weigh this in the balance once we’ve closed the book for the final time, and assess whether those kindnesses still hold value if the end result is Jude’s suicide. Harold, in particular, struggles with this, going so far as to question his own motivation for the reflexive desire for Jude to continue to live.

For a novel that contains such extremes then, A Little Life operates most effectively at the micro level. In Michaud’s words:

the most moving parts of A Little Life are not its most brutal but its tenderest ones, moments when Jude receives kindness and support from his friends

We find the ethos of these small moments in one of the book’s central messages, reprised in the closing chapters. Harold, wearily repeating to Jude “there’s not an expiration date on needing help, or needing people. You don’t get to a certain age and it stops” (p.675). And Jude, for his part, wishing ‘he were above want, above need’ (p.688) and lamenting, but at least admitting, how dependent he is on Andy (p.669).

For all of his money and property and even the love he finds, Jude can never reach a place of complete independence. External forces, or else his health, always intervene. He may desire it more keenly than the others, but — Yanagihara tells us — it’s a forlorn wish. To close oneself off from all dangers is to close oneself off from the world. Or, in the novel’s formulation:

All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well. — 701

In the end, perhaps because of its perspective over the course of decades, I found the novel’s central question to revolve only partly around friendship and more specifically a meditation on the formulation that Yanagihara uses in a piece for The Vulture:

[T]he mercilessness of time, and the mercy of love.

This recalls, for me, a moment of clarity for Jude earlier in the novel when he comes to a similar conclusion:

They all — Malcolm with his houses, Willem with his girlfriends, JB with his paints, he with his razors — sought comfort, something that was theirs alone, something to hold off the terrifying largeness, the impossibility, of the world, of the relentlessness of its minutes, its hours, its days. — 502

When he loses Willem, decades later, Jude reflexively finds himself weighing up his losses against his past happiness — his calculation likely preceding our own similar thoughts — and his grief (understandably) won’t let him see beyond the present, in either direction.

And so he fears he is grieving not so much for Willem but for his own life: its smallness, its worthlessness. — 688

For someone who values independence as much as he instinctively does, it’s interesting that Jude conceives of his worth in direct proportion to how his friends feel about him, and — in the end — in terms of what he & Willem shared. It is both touching, and very sad to read his pattern of thought along these lines:

But although he hadn’t been convinced, it was somehow sustaining that someone else had seen him as a worthwhile person, that someone had seen his as a meaningful life. — 689

That someone should reach the end of their life and conceive of it in sum as ‘something that has happened to him, rather than something he has had any role in creating’ (p.693) is enormously sad. And yet there is also an enlightened truth in it. There is a kernel there of Jude finally accepting that he never had control, that the world was always bigger then he was. All of the terrible things that were forced upon him when he was powerless to resist, and all of the wonderful things that came into his life unbidden and regardless of whether he thought he deserved them: Jude, like all of us, was rarely ever in control — was always subject to the whims of fate. Had he lived on perhaps he would have come to find relief in that instead of frustration. Perhaps he would have been comforted to realise that none of it was a judgment; none of it was resultant of some inherent flaw in his character. Maybe he would have gained perspective on the fact that he had faced more than his share of insurmountable challenges, and had survived them. Though he may never have known quite how much those of us watching loved him for it.

Thank you all for joining me in reading A Little Life. I hope you enjoyed the novel, and I hope you enjoyed the experience. Thank you also for all of your contributions, big and small and regardless of their format — I appreciate them all.