Today is the twelfth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "a book you love but hate at the same time".
What a beautiful day to publish a blog post. A completely on-time blog post, going up exactly when it was supposed to. Not late in the slightest...
Anyway, let's move swiftly on.
The prompt for today's post is "a book you love but hate at the same time". I've known for a few days what book I was going to choose for this challenge, and my feelings are complex and ambivalent enough that I didn't want to rush a post about it just for the sake of meeting a self-imposed deadline - which is why this post is going up late (yes, I admit it). Hopefully, once you read this post, you will understand my hesitation.
So! The book I have selected for this emotionally-complex prompt is A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.
My feelings about A Little Life have several layers, naturally, so let's start with the positive. It's been a couple of years since I read it, but when I first read A Little Life, I thought it was a brilliant book. It was well-written, I felt invested in the characters, and it was absolutely emotionally devastating.
This last point is arguably the most important. When the hype surrounding A Little Life was at its peak, discussing the book with other readers felt like commiserating over some shared tragedy that we'd all experienced. Apart from the few people who just didn't like the book, everyone I spoke to who'd read it had been deeply affected by the story, mostly in that it made them cry. I was no exception to this - I finished the book feeling like I'd been punched in the chest, and the "book hangover" it gave me lasted longer than most other novels I'd read that year.
For the most part, I'd say that a book having the power to impact people emotionally in such a strong way is a good thing. In fact, it's one of the biggest reasons I love A Little Life. It's also one of the main reasons I hate it.
In order to explain what I hate about A Little Life, I'm going to need to spoil it, in vague terms at least. So if that is something you'd rather avoid, I suggest you don't read any further.
But first, a Goodreads summary of the plot:
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.
If you think this doesn't sound like an especially happy read, you'd be right. While there are moments of success, love, and hope for a positive future, it all comes crashing down before the book finishes its final page. Without getting too specific, I will say that the ending is decidedly unhappy.
Things are particularly tragic for Jude, a character who has gone through more trauma than I've ever known a fictional person to experience. Physical injury, childhood abuse of every type, intimate partner violence, mental illness, and eventually even the loss of the people he loves most in the world. If you thought J. K. Rowling or George R. R. Martin had it in for your favourite characters, you clearly haven't seen the things Hanya Yanagihara put Jude through.
Although seeing this sequence of events take place over the course of the novel, half happening chronologically and the other appearing in flashbacks, can be distressing at times, it's also a testament to the quality of the book that they come across as effective rather than melodramatic. So fundamentally, I wouldn't have much of a problem with this aspect of the book if it weren't for one crucial detail: Jude is gay.
To be more accurate, we are led to believe Jude is gay. If I remember correctly, his sexuality is treated with a certain amount of ambiguity in the novel, which is made all the more complex by the fact that he was sexually abused by men as a child. Throughout the book, he only has relationships with men. In that respect, he seems like a typical gay man. He is also a typical gay character in the sense that he serves as the author's pitiable punching bag for the majority of the story.
This is my main issue with the book, the LGBT+ representation in it. As I said before, the various qualities of A Little Life are hard to separate from one another. Similarly, the fact that A Little Life has been critically and commercially acclaimed cannot be separated from the gayness at the centre of it. In one review, the book was even dubbed "The Great Gay Novel" - despite the fact that its author is straight. Likewise, the same reviewer argued that even the very genre-mixing of the book is queer, writing that Yanagihara, "engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera."
I wouldn't argue with the points of the above writer, but I would add that A Little Life also plays into the classic queer trope of making its gay characters suffer. Although perhaps to say that this trope is "queer" is a bit inaccurate, since it's usually straight people who like to employ it. They are even encouraged to do so, as critics love nothing more than praising the depiction of a gay person by a straight one, especially if that gay suffers tragically. If you don't believe that this is a thing, just take a look at the Bury Your Gays article on TV Tropes. I'm sure you'll find more than enough examples there.
Now, bear in mind that I was well-aware - one might say painfully so - of this kind of issue within LGBT+ representation when I got to the end of A Little Life. So when I read the absolutely, irrevocably sad conclusion to the story, I had the following thoughts, in this order: "that's so sad", "why?", and "of course".
The sadness speaks for itself. The "why?" was because I wanted to know what message the author was trying to put across. That we live tragic lives and then we die? That we can never overcome the pain we experience early in life? Then, the "of course" emerged. Because of course, the main queer character, having endured suffering from a young age, would have his life end the same way it had begun. Of course, a straight author would only choose to put a gay man at the centre of her story if it fit into a larger narrative of pain and trauma. Of course, this same straight author would be supremely successful and nominated for numerous awards for publishing what could most ungenerously be referred to as torture porn.
In discussing this book with a friend, I was asked if Jude suffers in the book because he is gay, or if his suffering is separate from his gayness. The answer is neither one nor the other. His suffering is not explicitly connected to his being gay - he is not subject to homophobic violence nor does he contract an illness typically associated with being gay, like AIDS) - but nor is it separate. It can't be separate. Even if Yanagihara truly believes she was writing Jude just as she would write a straight character, her depiction of him was always going to be informed (consciously or otherwise) by our media and our society's perception of gay people. I want to know, what came first: her decision to make Jude gay, or her decision to make him suffer? And what made her think those two things would go so well together?
Now, despite what some people may think, my intent in writing this is not to say that straight people cannot write queer characters. Nor is it to denigrate Yanagihara, who ultimately did write a book that touched many people. Yet if it is reasonable to criticise a book as being unoriginal, it is reasonable for me to label Yanagihara's depiction of her queer characters as such. I am also within my rights to question why it was yet another depiction of gay suffering that was so acclaimed by straight audiences, particularly if it is so cliched.
As I said, my sentiment when finishing the book was in large part one of resignation, because as a queer person I have learned never to expect a happy ending for people like me. The conclusion of A Little Life did not surprise me, but it did disappoint me. I do know better than to hope that straight people will give me a happy ending; yet I still can't help but wonder why they so enjoy taking it away.
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Note: I didn't have the chance to mention it in the body of this post, but Brandon Taylor at Lithub and Michelle Hart at Bookriot wrote far better essays on this subject than I could hope to produce. If you care at all about the issue of queer representation and how it applies to A Little Life, I highly recommend you read those as well as or even instead of this post.
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