“A Little Life”
By Hanya Yanagihara (Doubleday)
Hanya Yanagihara’s massive new novel, “A Little Life,” is hurtful. That’s because, among other things, it is the enthralling and completely immersive story of one man’s unyielding pain. It also asks a compelling question.
Can friends save us? Even from ourselves?
Yanagihara — a New Yorker whose first novel, “People in the Trees,” won her many devoted fans — makes this a Manhattan tale, though it properly begins at an elite college in Massachusetts where four young men of wildly divergent backgrounds come together. We follow them, willingly, for more than 700 pages.
JB is the gay son of Haitian immigrants in Brooklyn. Extremely amusing, he has a cruel streak common in artists as successful as he becomes. Willem is a loving soul who, it seems, is ruthless only once, when he too easily leaves his emotionally remote parents behind in the Midwest to become an actor. The two are the quartet’s star personalities.
Malcolm is a blunderingly oblivious child of privilege. Even his father, one of the first of an early generation of black CEOs, can barely relate to Malcolm, who obsessively crafts rooms and buildings from paper.
But it is Jude, lame and in constant pain from childhood injuries he won’t reveal or explain, who somehow weaves them together in an unbreakable spell. Each of the others is tenderly protective of him in ways even they don’t understand. Jude is emotionally broken as well and in the constant process of trying to fix himself. It’s a secret struggle but one the others sense and try to abet.
Willem and Jude begin their postcollege lives together in barely livable apartment on Lispenard St. in Tribeca. Willem waits tables at a trendy restaurant. Jude, a brilliant mathematician who switched to law, is doing a turn of service in the U.S. attorney’s office. JB and Malcolm are experiencing similarly clichéd starts in their professional lives, JB embedded in the downtown art scene, Malcolm hacking it out at a big architectural firm.
They will all have glittering careers, and their bond will endure through their rise even as Jude remains their focal point. His endless drama is such that it should exhaust them and us. But Yanagihara makes brilliant work of this character, revealing with compelling specificity both the horrific sexual abuse in his past and his almost noble struggle to become the man others so want him to be.
“I know my life is meaningful because I’m a good friend,” says Willem, whose love for Jude deepens into romantic partnership. “I love my friends, and I care about them, and I think I make them happy.”
Willem tries, how he tries, as do the others in their way. All they want for Jude is for him to be comfortable in what is a very good life. Meanwhile, Yanagihara’s close study of those lives and Jude’s trauma makes for a stunning work of fiction.
“The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and the Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom” by Blaine Harden
As Kim ll Sung rose to power, No Kum Sok made a show of his devotion to the Great Leader — all the while planning his escape with a warplane of immense value to the U.S.
“The Stranger” by Harlan Coben
The irresistible Coben returns with a tale of menace about an anonymous man who whispers a few words into the ear of a guy who has everything, and destroys his life. As Adam Price discovers, the sinister stranger is in the habit of ruining lives that way and must be stopped.
“The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America’s Youngest Serial Killer” by Roseanne Montillo
The devastation wrought by Boston’s Great Fire of 1872 was soon followed by the arrest of a serial killer who picked off children playing in the streets. But controversy erupted when it was revealed that the killer was a 14-year-old. A true and truly intriguing period piece.
