This is far from the only tautology this novel contains. Take, for instance:Īnd oh, he wanted to go, he wanted to get away, he wanted to go to college. He was tugged, in those days, between trying to resign himself to the fact that his life would forever more be what it was, and the hope, the small and stupid and stubborn as it was, that it could be something else. The balance - between resignation and hope - shifted by the day, by the hour, sometimes by the minute.
Instead of what he imbibes on this walk, in what way it benefits him, for what reason it has become a habit, to what destinations his mind drifts, all we get is a pointless list of street names useful only for tracing the route on a map, should for some odd reason someone want to. Today he would walk to the Upper East Side: up West Broadway to Washington Square Park, to University and though Union Square, and up Broadway to Fifth, which he’d stay on until Eighty-sixth Street, and then back down Madison to Twenty-fourth street. Early on, reference is made to a nine mile route the main character, Jude St Francis, ritually walks each Sunday. Several extremely serious and heady conversations key to the novel’s development occur in a boring New York apartment wouldn’t it have been interesting to set at least one of them in an atmospheric Marrakesh bazaar or evocative Parisian café? New York does not fare much better. Each of these locations is apparently worth mentioning, but not one is worth exploring.
It is not until well after the six hundredth page that a building in Andalucía receives attention for a couple of sentences. The peripatetic bunch who make up the four college friends at the novel’s centre travel, for various purposes and at various times, to, amongst others, Sri Lanka, London, Rome, Paris, Russia, Stockholm, Beijing, Morocco, Bhutan, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, and India. Perhaps there really was a time when parents named their children Caleb, Isodore, Rhodes, Phaedra or - worst of all - Citizen.Įvery location the book mentions goes similarly unexplored. Its fifty-year span has a strangely ahistorical New York setting no President or public figure is ever mentioned to give us a clue what year we might be in neither Watergate, global warming hysteria, Monica Lewinsky, 9/11, nor Iraq come up, and we are left only with the occasional reference to the existence of email or mobile telephony. It surely cannot be that this is accidental, but even so its purpose is obscure. Likewise some of its minor characters’ names promise something of more portent, but this too is opaque. The flaws, to get them out of the way first, are numerous but somehow not sufficient to completely derail this current favorite for the Booker Prize. Nevertheless, the question of what exactly we are left with except the voyeuristic and rather ghoulish intrusion into the misery of one of modern literature’s most unfortunate characters is not easily answered. The ecstatic response to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life meant I was excited from the moment an email arrived to tell me it had arrived for collection from my local bookshop until I was presented with a 720-page hardback monster weighing more than our family dog. At least this bombshell put me in mind of a most amusing Kingsley Amis review in which he commented that handling a similarly proportioned behemoth “so that it will lie open on desk or lap is impossible to one of normal muscular power. This might matter less if closing it on purpose were not such a constantly attractive option.” No such worries for A Little Life, which is overly ambitious, significantly overlong, at times irritating and unintentionally self-satirising, profoundly unfunny even when it tries to be the opposite - and at times almost hypnotically readable, relentlessly harrowing, and compelling in the extreme.
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