I listened to a podcast segment about this text last year when the 2015 Man Booker shortlist was announced, but I delayed picking it up until a few weeks ago. After seeing it appear across various social media platforms in the past month or so, I impulsively opened it and began. What many consider some of the book’s main faults: a lack of authenticity associated with the characters’ backstories, weak execution of foreshadowing, and the male-centric cast all underscore why Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (which I have embarrassingly still not read) captured the coveted Man Booker last year over this and the others on the shortlist.
A Little Life situates readers–somewhat–within the consciousnesses of four college friends as they navigate adulthood in New York City and beyond. One of the four, Jude St. Francis, proves the main subject of the friendship and the novel as well. Jude’s turbulent yet still monetarily successful life keeps the other three–Malcolm, JB, and Willem–tethered together as they all pursue vastly different careers. While early on, the story follows the four of them, the later sections focus mainly on the relationship between best friends Jude and Willem and the queer male relationship that unfurls between the two.
Despite the adequate criticisms, I want to highlight one profound aspect of the text that truly encapsulates what I feel to be the essence of ‘the contemporary’. Yanagihara sets up this idea of contemporaneity with what is portrayed but also, and more importantly perhaps, what is omitted. The readers observes the obvious characteristics of contemporary social culture: communal living, the breakdown of nation boundaries through what seems like ceaseless wanderlust, a present–yet still underrepresented in some sense–emphasis on racial consciousness and identity. However, what readers do not see much of over the course of the text proves one of if not the most singular symptom of contemporary culture: technology. Text messaging and email are both referenced, but Yanagihara goes no further. We do not see the reliance on smart phone applications and social media that one may expect to observe in a text so inherently tied to contemporary identity. Perhaps this is partly due to the success all four men begin achieving as their lives unfold, or perhaps there is something deeper, something more metaphysical going on here.
I was reminded consistently while reading A Little Life of Giorgio Agamben’s work on the notion of the contemporary. He postulates, ‘Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism’ (41). This is exactly the distinction Yanagihara arranges in the narrative. Readers see the characters fretting over exorbitant rent prices in Manhattan and using phones and computers to communicate, but social media and the internet more broadly are scarcely mentioned if at all. In this way, we have a ‘relationship’ with contemporary culture that proves ‘a disjunction and an anachronism’ while still exhibiting clear signs that associate it with a world we recognise.
I was both frustrated with parts of the novel while also appreciative of the authorial risks Yanagihara takes in arranging it. I wished for more moments of interiority from Malcolm and JB. The first two hundred pages or so really excited me for what may come, but overall, as a reader, i felt slighted by the way in which the narrative offers certain insight without ultimately following through consistently. We get the entirety of Jude’s abusive childhood that proves central to the overall narrative, but we only get snapshots of, for instance, the relationship between Malcolm and his parents and JB’s struggles with artistic fame and addiction. Why is the reader offered these plotlines without the necessary closure?
Overall though, the novel proves exceptionally well-researched and the final section and ending are executed quite well. The gripes it receives are not minor by any means, but Yanagihara still presents a narrative that focuses on the fundamental nature friendship in a contemporary, interconnected space that demonstrates the intrinsic importance of causality and chance.
a cursory review 