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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/IHad360K_KarmaDammit on 2024-12-01 14:16:15+00:00.
Look at any social media discussion of the most overrated books, or critically acclaimed books that people hated, or the worst books that have become popular in the last ten years, or any similar topic, and there's one book you're very likely to see: Hanya Yanagihara's 2015 novel A Little Life. Google Yanagihara's name, scroll past her Wikipedia page and Instagram, and the first thing you'll see is an article comparing her novels to poorly written Wattpad fanfiction. The 2023 Pulitzer Prize in criticism went to the author of an extremely harsh negative review of A Little Life. It has an average of 4.3 on Goodreads, but 4 of the top 5 most popular reviews there are one star, with one of them literally starting with the words "Fuck this book". The internet is full of absolutely scathing reviews of A Little Life, from professional critics and random social media users alike.
And yet when it initially released in 2015, A Little Life was massively acclaimed by both audiences and reviewers, with various critics calling it "the great gay novel", "the most beautiful, profoundly moving novel I've ever read", and "an epic study of trauma and friendship, written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured". Review aggregator Book Marks lists 34 "rave" reviews, 9 positive ones, and only 3 mixed and 3 negative. On top of this, it was a massive bestseller, won the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. So what happened to make this critically acclaimed Great Work of Literature into such a widely criticized, highly controversial topic?
So What's it Actually About?
A Little Life was written after the release of Yanagihara's first novel, The People in the Trees, a critically acclaimed but relatively obscure novel about a fictional scientist based on Nobel Prize winner and convicted child molester Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. The theme of child molestation is one that continued heavily in A Little Life, so if that's something you'd rather not read about (or if you just don't want spoilers), maybe skip this plot summary. (Just as a note, I haven't actually read the book, and this is just based on various other plot summaries online. So if I got any of the details wrong, let me know.)
A Little Life is about Jude St. Francis, a disabled lawyer traumatized by his horrible childhood. He is surrounded by a circle of incredibly understanding and loyal friends: Willem, Malcolm, JB, and his adoptive parents Harold and Julia, none of whom he is initially willing to confide in. Much of the novel consists of Jude self-harming, being traumatized by his past, and gradually revealing the events of his childhood. And they are very grim.
You see, Jude was raised in an orphanage run by priests, who were all pedophiles and sexually abused him. One of the priests helped him escape, then sold him to pedophiles who sexually abused him. He was eventually rescued by the police, who sent him to state care, which was run by pedophiles who sexually abused him. He eventually ran away and was taken in by a psychiatrist who turned out to be a pedophile and sexually abused him. And also ran him over with a car.
Despite the love and support of his friends, Jude's adult life is also absolutely miserable. JB becomes addicted to meth and mocks Jude's limp, ruining their friendship permanently despite his many apologies. Jude dates a cruel, abusive man named Caleb who sexually abuses him, beats him nearly to death, and mocks him for using a wheelchair. After this, Jude ends up in a happy romantic-but-not-sexual relationship with Willem, but then needs to have both legs amputated. Then Willem and Malcolm are both killed by a drunk driver and Jude kills himself.
A Slathering-On of Drama
Most of the initial reviews, as I've already mentioned, were highly positive, but one that definitely wasn't was Daniel Mendelsohn's review in the New York Review of Books, the oddly-titled A Striptease Among Pals. It foreshadowed a lot of the criticisms that would later be widespread: the lack of character development, the carefully diverse but boring cast of token minorities, and most of all the general distastefulness of a book that centers around a gay man suffering for no real artistic or literary reason, an "unending parade of aesthetically gratuitous scenes of punitive and humiliating violence". He also suggested that the target market for the book were college students without the life experience to see how absurd it was, and who see themselves "not as agents in life but as potential victims".
This led to an angry response from the book's editor, Gerald Howard, who said that he had heard from many "readers of, ahem, mature years" who loved A Little Life and that college students were too broke to afford a $30 novel anyway. Which, y'know, he's not wrong. He referred to Mendelsohn's review as "an invidious distinction unworthy of a critic of his usually fine discernment", which he claimed was upset less with the book itself and more with the idea that the wrong people would enjoy it. This led to another response from Mendelsohn, in which he quoted Howard as having criticized the novel during the editing process for many of the same things Mendelsohn had talked about in his review, and referred to the book's style as a "slathering-on of trauma...a crude and inartistic way of wringing emotion from the reader".
That was where things stood for about six years, with A Little Life's reputation still enthusiastically positive outside of some drama around the few negative reviews. In 2019, it was included in The Guardian's list of the 100 greatest books of the 21st century. But in late 2021, another notable negative article was published: Parul Sehgal's "The Case Against the Trauma Plot". This wasn't specifically about A Little Life, but rather about the tendency for modern fiction to focus on its characters' trauma above all else, treating them less as people with their own intrinsic personalities and more as blank slates whose character traits are determined only by their tragic backstories, with books and films populated exclusively with "Marvel superheroes brooding brawnily over daddy issues".
But her example of the ultimate trauma plot, with all the associated tropes dialed up to 11, was A Little Life, starring "one of the most accursed characters to ever darken a page". She refers to him as "this walking chalk outline, this vivified DSM entry", whose trauma "trumps all other identities, evacuates personality, remakes it in its own image". But Sehgal's criticism would look downright complimentary compared to the next negative review that came out.
Childlike in its Brutality
Andrea Long Chu's Pulitzer-winning article on Yanagihara's books--at least partially a review of her then-new novel To Paradise, but focusing more on A Little Life--is one of the most entertaining negative reviews I've ever read. I highly recommend reading through the whole thing, but I'll go through it anyway.
By the time you finish reading A Little Life, you will have spent a whole book waiting for a man to kill himself.
This is the opening line, and it's one of the less critical parts. Yanagihara herself is "a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health", a writing style close to "Munchausen by proxy" with a view of love that is "childlike in its brutality". Chu quotes widely from Yanagihara's writing for fashion magazine T, in which she writes about her trips through Asia, her love of fine jewelry, and exactly the sort of fancy food that the characters in A Little Life constantly eat: "from duck à l’orange to escarole salad with pears and jamón, followed by pine-nut tart, tarte Tatin, and a homemade ten-nut cake Yanagihara later described as a cross between Danish rugbrød and a Japanese milk bread she once ordered at a Tokyo bakery".
In fact, as Chu points out, parts of A Little Life, such as
“[He] turned down an alley that was crowded with stall after stall of small, improvised restaurants, just a woman standing behind a kettle roiling with soup or oil, and four or five plastic stools … [He] let a man cycle past him, the basket strapped to the back of his seat loaded with spears of baguettes … and then headed down another alley, this one busy with vendors crouched over more bundles of herbs, and black hills of mangosteens, and metal trays of silvery-pink fish, so fresh he could hear them gulping.”
are a slightly rephrased version of the articles Yanagihara wrote about her own vacations for a fashion magazine:
“You’ll see all the little tableaux … that make Hanoi the place it is: dozens of pho stands, with their big cauldrons of simmering broth … bicyclists pedaling by with basketfuls of fresh-baked bread; and, especially, those little street restaurants with their low tables and domino-shaped stools … [The next day] you...
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