The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, \ufeffsaid in Politico that it was the best book he read last year.\ufeff \ufeffThe designer Victoria Beckham enthused to Elle about reading it on her Kindle in bed every night in 2017\ufeff. TV presenter \ufeffNaga Munchetty\ufeff gives friends copies \ufeff\u201cbecause they need to read it\u201d. \u201cWhat \ufeffreading \ufeffA Little Life\ufeff \ufefftaught \ufeffme \ufeffabout \ufeffleadership\u201d\ufeff ran a recent headline in the business magazine Forbes.<\/p>\n
In 2022, when a man named Bob Jackson read every novel ever nominated for the Booker prize \u2013 315 titles going back more than 50\u00a0years \u2013 his favourite wasn\u2019t Wolf\u00a0Hall or The Line of Beauty but A\u00a0Little Life:\ufeff \ufeff\u201cI keep running it over in my head, asking if there\u2019s anything better. But I don\u2019t ever come up with anything that has generated such lasting fondness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nobody saw the success coming. \ufeffYanagihara, editor-in-chief of T, \ufeffthe New York Times \ufeffstyle \ufeffmagazine,\ufeff hoped for \u201ca few dozen readers\u201d for her book. By \ufeff2021, 245,000 print copies had been sold \ufeffin the UK\ufeff\ufeff; the figure now stands at \ufeffabout \ufeff550,000, excluding digital copies and audiobooks (a new\ufeff recording by Magic Mike\u2019s Matt Bomer came out in February\ufeff).<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t have judged it to be a book that should have wide appeal,\u201d said \ufeffJames Daunt, the managing director of Waterstones, \ufeffblindsided by early demand for a\ufeff 730-page\ufeff litany of degradation that Yanagihara\u2019s own editor reckoned would be \ufeff\u201cjust too hard for anybody to take\u201d\ufeff (he wanted it \ufeffcut by a third;\ufeff Yanagihara said she\u2019d go elsewhere if he didn\u2019t take it as it was).<\/p>\n
Even the book\u2019s admirers \u2013 I\u2019m one \u2013 are left in two minds. One review declared:\ufeff \u201cA Little Life is the best novel of the year. I wouldn\u2019t recommend it to anyone.\u201d\ufeff Online, there are tearful TikTok reviews and Instagram selfies of fans tattooed with their favourite lines but also outraged Reddit and Mumsnet threads condemning it as misery porn \u2013 a charge levelled repeatedly in reviews for A Little Life, many of which are scathing.<\/p>\n
That particular criticism still doesn\u2019t convince me, but if I felt sure\u00a0of one thing when I reviewed A\u00a0Little Life positively back in 2015, it\u2019s that I wouldn\u2019t be reading the novel again any time soon. Even the title makes me recoil. Deep into the book, those three words turn radioactively evil: \u201ca little life\u201d is what eight-year-old Jude\u2019s first kidnapper says he needs to show, to please the men paying to rape him.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the moment I think of whenever I see the novel mentioned. Yanagihara lulls us into interpreting the title \u2013\ufeff an echo of a line in TS Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land \u2013 \ufeffas merely condescending or ironic before demonically electrifying it, 400 pages in. Much of the book was written late at night in the renovated bottle factory in New York where she lives (the steel beams apparently block internet reception); I\u2019ve never been able to shake the thought of her calculating that ugly twist after dark.<\/p>\n
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Author Hanya Yanagihara resisted editorial pressure to shorten the novel<\/p>\n
For me, the passage is enough by itself to torpedo the widespread notion that A Little Life is badly written, yet I still struggle to make sense of the book\u2019s astonishing popularity. Just reward for a modern\u00a0classic? Evidence of our cheap taste for trauma? A symptom\u00a0of post-millennial malaise? As I spoke to some of A\u00a0Little Life\u2019s fans and haters, and readers in between, trying to understand why the novel speaks so strongly to us and what it has to say, I heard all these arguments and\u00a0more \u2013 wondering all the while if I was only putting off the moment when I\u2019d need to re\ufeffimmerse myself in its universe.<\/p>\n
The novelist\ufeff Megan Nolan was 25 when A Little Life came out\ufeff. She read it at the time and says there\u2019s no mystery about the book\u2019s success. \u201cIt\u2019s like a car crash: Yanagihara is very skilled at creating grotesque moments of extremity that you can\u2019t look away from\ufeff and manages to repeat that all the way throughout.\u201d Nolan was gripped but suspicious of the novel\u2019s melodrama until she recently listened to the audiobook when it popped up on her Spotify account. \u201cI\u00a0was taken aback by how absolutely strange it is \u2013 I don\u2019t actually know if I like it or not, but I\u00a0respect how bizarre it is,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Part of that peculiarity \u2013 ignored by those who focus solely on the trauma \u2013 lies in the extreme sense of whiplash generated by the contrast between Jude\u2019s past and his gilded adulthood, where the book begins. Yanagihara, who wanted everything in the novel \u201cturned up a little too high\u201d, like a fairytale, shrouds Jude\u2019s grisly history deep inside a glossy narrative of his life together with three former college roommates, who each match his stellar law career with their own outstanding achievements in art, acting and architecture.<\/p>\n
Throughout the book, the four criss\ufeffcross the globe (there are trips to Paris, Rome, Doha, Tokyo, Hanoi, Morocco and Ethiopia, among a dozen or so other destinations), enjoying any number of sedulously enumerated dishes \u2013 \ufeffguava souffl\u00e9\ufeff, \ufeffsablefish with tobiko\ufeff \u2013 and at one point sourcing marble for a kitchen countertop from \ufeff\u201ca small quarry outside Izmir\u201d\ufeff. Jude calls in a favour from Spain\u2019s minister of culture to close down the Alhambra for a private birthday tour. His increasingly complex medical problems \u2013 including a degenerative \ufeffspinal condition \ufeffand sepsis from chronic self-harm \u2013 are tended to 24\/7 by his close friend, \ufeffAndy, a Welsh-Gujarati orthopaedic surgeon, \ufeffwhose wife says his devotion to Jude is what first attracted her to him.<\/p>\n
These elements, improbable as they might sound, are key to the case that A Little Life makes for the importance of friendship\ufeff and a large part of the novel\u2019s appeal to its fans. (When one character suggests that Jude and co should \ufeff\u201cstop clinging to one another and get serious about adulthood\u201d, \ufeffthe reply comes: \u201c\ufeffThousands of years of evolutionary and social development and this is our only choice?\u201d\ufeff) Yet the near-utopian camaraderie of the main characters \u2013 all dead by middle age \u2013 ultimately makes the novel all the more devastating.<\/p>\n
Hearing about me writing this piece, a colleague puts me in touch with her daughter, Caitlin Duffield, who read the novel during lockdown on the recommendation of a friend while furloughed from her job at a mental health charity. \u201cHe didn\u2019t warn me \u2013 he just said: \u2018It\u2019s excellent and really sad, read it.\u2019\u201d She took to her mum\u2019s sofa for a week, overwhelmed. \u201cI remember just weeping constantly, even at the happy moments,\u201d she recalls. Afterwards, she looked up drawings posted by fans online, wondering who might play the characters on screen. \u201cI just wanted to stay with them, which is something I don\u2019t tend to feel [after a novel].\u201d<\/p>\n
But Duffield, 25 at the time, felt differently after passing it on to another friend in turn. \u201cHe messaged me later: \u2018What the hell are you doing recommending me this book? It\u2019s horrible. Why did you\u00a0like it?\u2019 I started to interrogate the extent of the suffering and almost felt embarrassed. Looking back, it becomes so depraved. But at\u00a0the time I was captivated and totally invested.\u201d<\/p>\n
The writer and broadcaster Pandora Sykes, 38, had similar misgivings. She got a copy when it came out and took it to a wedding in France, which was \u201cabsolute agony \u2013 all I could think about was how soon I could get back to the book. It seemed to be proving a basic, almost biblical truth that sometimes the world is desperately cruel again and again to the same person: having a terrible experience in life doesn\u2019t inure you from having another.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as the years went on, Sykes questioned how far she had been drawn to what she calls the \u201ctrauma porn\u201d element, buying tickets nonetheless for the keenly anticipated \ufeffWest End stage adaptation in 2023\ufeff \ufeff(Jude was played by Happy Valley\u2019s James Norton)\ufeff. The audience walkouts made headlines, but Sykes didn\u2019t get that far, selling her seats: \u201cI\u2019d just had a baby and I thought: \u2018Do I really need to be putting myself through this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Looking back, it\u00a0becomes so depraved. But at\u00a0the time I was captivated and totally invested<\/p>\n
For \ufeffUli Lenart, the manager of Gay\u2019s the Word \ufeffbookshop in\ufeff Bloomsbury, central London, A Little Life is totemic: if it were ever to be out of stock from his shelves, he would feel that something was deeply amiss. \u201cIt\u2019s an intense experience. It\u2019s not just reading a book. I often advise [customers] a degree of self-care during the period where they read it.\u201d He attributes the novel\u2019s ability to connect with readers partly to the fact that \u201csome people\u2019s lives are a marathon of horrific experience\u201d, but also to its indefinable tone and oddly ethereal setting over a 50-year span in New York, untouched by 9\/11; Aids is mentioned only once, in passing. \u201cThe narrative, existing in a kind of temporal bubble, enables us to explore our own experience of taboo subjects that society alludes to but doesn\u2019t really delve into,\u201d\ufeff says\u00a0Lenart, 46.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to forget how timid and exhausted Anglo-American fiction seemed when A Little Life first came out. \ufeffDavid Shields\u2019s 2010 manifesto Reality Hunger \ufeffset the mood for a decade in which authorial imagination was suspect if it didn\u2019t visibly wear the lanyard of experience. \ufeffRachel Cusk\ufeff said making up stories was embarrassing. The hot authors of the day \u2013 \ufeffSheila Heti, Ben Lerner \ufeff\u2013 wrote about themselves, often in mundane and minute detail. Nothing spoke more starkly of the\u00a0seeming loss of creative confidence than an interview in which \ufeffJonathan Franzen claimed that he had considered adopting an\u00a0Iraqi orphan to write about young people with more insight\ufeff.<\/p>\n
Enter Yanagihara. Born in \ufeffLos Angeles in 1974\ufeff\ufeff, \ufeffthe daughter of a Hawaiian oncologist of Japanese descent\ufeff, \ufeffshe first worked in publishing\ufeff\ufeff, \ufeffacquiring the US rights to Sarah Waters\u2019s novel Tipping the Velvet\ufeff\ufeff, before switching to journalism during the dotcom boom. All the while, she was at work on her \ufeff\ufeff2013 debut, The People in the Trees, written over 18 years\ufeff. It sold poorly, but Yanagihara has spoken of the creative freedom that comes from not trying to make a living from fiction: working as \ufeffeditor-at-large of Cond\u00e9 Nast Traveller \ufeffgave her the security to refuse the cuts that A Little Life\u2019s editor advised.<\/p>\n
Her poise was unusual; when asked by interviewers how she felt able to write about gay men\ufeff and about such delicate subjects, she responded that she could write about whatever she liked. She didn\u2019t research Jude\u2019s storyline and\u00a0claimed almost trollishly that his sections always came easiest during the 18 months A Little Life took to write.<\/p>\n
At a time when novels were getting shorter, bittier, as if even to put one sentence in front of another was pass\u00e9, Yanagihara instead produced a \ufeff375,000-word\ufeff saga that compelled you to care about its characters. The page-turning quality \u2013 the comedian\ufeff Nish Kumar called it \u201cthe most immersive novel I\u2019ve ever read\u201d\ufeff \u2013 has much to do with the guessing-game structure of the first 300 pages, during which Jude repeatedly cuts himself in private.<\/p>\n
His friends see that he needs help but, like us, they don\u2019t know why, accepting his silences and vagueness when asked about his childhood or why he always wears long sleeves, even in the sea. Then the novel plunges suddenly into Jude\u2019s boyhood at the monastery, opening a wave of revelations that intensify in horror.<\/p>\n
Daniel Mendelsohn, 65,\ufeff was one of A Little Life\u2019s most disparaging early critics. Writing in \ufeffthe \ufeffNew York Review of Books\ufeff, he called the prose ungainly and the storyline gratuitous, \ufeff\u201cneither just from a human point of view nor necessary from an artistic one\u201d.\ufeff Baffled by its praise, he cited a \ufeffPsychology Today article on \u201cdeclining student resilience\u201d\ufeff and hypothesised that, \ufeff\u201cwhen victimhood has become a claim to status\u201d, millennial readers accustomed to \u201chelplessness and acute anxiety\u201d might be finding solace in a novel that confirms \u201ctheir pre-existing view of the world as a site of victimisation and little else\u201d.<\/p>\n
When I asked him recently if he\u2019d changed his mind, he told me he continues to be shocked by A Little Life\u2019s success but that he now views it merely as a symptom of general dumbing down. \u201cI think this is a subject that\u2019s larger than just A Little Life. The sentences are so terrible. I couldn\u2019t believe that serious people \u2013 people I know \u2013 were saying this is so great. There\u2019s something un-adult about this thing that\u2019s happening, where adults are satisfied with a young-adult level of gratification. With a lot of novels that have become great literary occasions, I think: \u2018You\u2019ve got to be kidding me, this is teenage literature, basically.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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Singer Dua\u00a0Lipa\u2019s praise of A Little Life on\u00a0social media led to a \u2018directly attributable\u2019 sales bump<\/p>\n
W\ufeffhen the novel was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2015, the judges were the late poet John Burnside, the biographer Frances Osborne, the publisher Ellah Wakatama and the critics Michael Wood and Sam Leith.\ufeff \u201cNot\u00a0the Instagram generation,\u201d says Leith, who was \ufeff41 at the time\ufeff. \u201cI was probably the youngest, and I\u2019m an old fart.\u201d He says the jury knew you could make a long list of\u00a0what\u2019s wrong with A Little Life, but that would have been to ignore\u00a0its power. \u201cIt\u2019s one-note, but that note is sustained so wine glasses are shattering in the room next door. It was definitely one of the most baffling books in terms of\u00a0accounting for its success, but our\u00a0job as judges was just to recognise when something works, rather than necessarily being able to\u00a0explain why.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wakatama, 58, \ufefftells me A Little Life has been on her mind ever since judging the prize, when she read all 700-plus pages in a sleeplessly rapt 28 hours while on holiday in Turkey. \u201cHow relentless can you be? How much can you mess around with your reader\u2019s emotions? [Yanagihara] goes to the edge and over. You\u2019re then forever trying to figure out why she did it that way. That\u2019s great literature.\u201d<\/p>\n
Once I finally returned to A Little Life during the humid nights of a recent heatwave, I realised I\u2019d forgotten the stark contrast between the flatly shocking details of abuse (which are implicit but not graphic: Yanagihara knows it\u2019s enough to tell us the men in Jude\u2019s motel rooms bring their own bedsheets) and the worryingly lush descriptions of self-harm (when Jude opens a vein, his blood is a \ufeff\u201cbrilliant, shimmering oil black\u201d\ufeff).<\/p>\n
What I don\u2019t think I\u2019d ever noticed\u00a0was how far the atmosphere of gothic terror cloaks a subversive novel of ideas, in which the pile-up of atrocities serves as an intellectual bedrock for provocatively rationalised renunciations \u2013 of sex,\u00a0of life \u2013 that, if anything, left me\u00a0feeling even more uneasy than I\u00a0was 10 years ago.<\/p>\n
It strikes me now that the much-discussed lack of substantial female characters in A Little Life functions as a way to eliminate the possibility of pregnancy from a fictional world in which every child is a tragedy in waiting. Besides Jude, who is abandoned, a vessel for criminal appetite, the novel shows us two other children (relatives of supporting characters); one dies \ufeffafter suffering cerebral palsy\ufeff, the other dies of a rare\ufeff neurogenerative disorder.\ufeff As one character observes: \ufeff\u201cIf we were all so specifically, vividly aware of what might go horribly wrong, we would none of us have children at all,\u201d\ufeff a line that Yanagihara might have had pinned above her desk. Jude, suicidal, ends the novel concluding that, despite all his achievements, he was \ufeff\u201cmost valuable in those motel rooms\u201d,\ufeff one of the more gut-plummeting lines in a book that offers plenty by way of competition.<\/p>\n
Nothing is revealed about Jude\u2019s biological parents, not simply because it\u2019s beyond the book\u2019s scope, but because we\u2019re constantly nudged to view him as a self-birthed evolutionary breakthrough purged of bodily wants. Avoiding sex in adulthood, Jude wonders if he is missing out an \u201cessential part of being human\u201d, but the answer given by the novel, repeatedly, is no.<\/p>\n
Venturing reluctantly on a date with a fashion designer, he falls prey to yet more terrifying abuse; later, when his friend Willem convinces him that their platonic love is actually romantic, he agonises over the duty he feels in bed. A simpler, sunnier novel might have allowed Jude to rediscover his stolen capacity for desire; instead, his dilemma \u2013 sensitively portrayed \u2013 lets Yanagihara interrogate the necessity of sex in the first place. \u201c\ufeff\ufeffWhen did you get to stop wanting to have sex?\u201d\ufeff Jude thinks. \ufeff\u201cSurely his hatred for the act was not a deficiency to be corrected but a simple matter of preference?\u201d<\/p>\n
A good deal of the novel\u2019s emotional impact lies in its portrayal of this renunciation as choice, not trauma. In interviews, Yanagihara has said that she never wanted a family, contrasting her lack of belief in marriage with her faith in cherished loyalty to close friends who feel similarly: \u201cThis sort of life never seemed like anything \u2018less-than\u2019 to me. The loneliness of living the life I do comes from the fact that so many people do think it\u2019s a lesser existence, a purgatory of\u00a0true adulthood.\u201d<\/p>\n
Given that A Little Life goes to great lengths to portray Jude as an advanced human \u2013 his scarred back is \u201csomething otherworldly and futuristic, a prototype of what flesh might look like 10,000 years from now\u201d \u2013 you wonder: does Jude suffer so much because Yanagihara simply wanted the most compelling repudiation possible of the social pressure to pair off into child-rearing couples?<\/p>\n
Ravi Mirchandani,\ufeff A Little Life\u2019s UK editor, recently spoke of owing several of his end-of-year bonuses to the pop star Dua Lipa, who tweeted to her then five million followers a selfie recommending the book while sunbathing in May 2020 in lockdown (the sales bump, he said, was \u201cdirectly attributable\u201d, and repeated when the singer interviewed Yanagihara on her<\/a> At Your Service<\/a> podcast<\/a> \ufefftwo years later). Lipa, 24 at the time of the tweet, has since called the novel \ufeff\u201ca homage to the purity of friendship above all\u201d, \ufeffand you can see how its idealised portrait of group loyalty might have been catnip to \ufeffgen Z readers starved of \ufeffreal-life contact during the pandemic.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not hard to imagine that the darker side speaks to them too. Although you can find an anonymous blogger arguing online that A Little Life is popular with \ufeffgen Z because \ufeff\u201cit\u2019s an icky fantasy about being the most special victim on the planet ever\u201d\ufeff \u2013 a cruder update of \ufeffMendelsohn\u2019s take \u2013 I suspect the truth is more complicated.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve all seen the headlines about falling birth rates and how young people aren\u2019t having sex, whether because they\u2019re too busy respecting boundaries, scrolling their phones, rethinking coupled-up normativity or daunted by rising costs and temperatures. Whatever the reality, if A Little Life speaks to a cohort coming of age in a post-crash, post-pandemic, pre-AI world upturning old certainties about education, work, sex and relationships, can we\u00a0really be surprised?<\/p>\n Yet what strikes me most, second\u00a0time round, is the novel\u2019s weirdly clairvoyant prefiguring of a\u00a0reading experience that has become so central to everyday life for so many of us, boomer or zoomer. You couldn\u2019t sensibly call A Little Life a novel about the internet \u2013 it barely features \u2013 yet reading it now, it feels so clearly of the internet age. The ever-updating departure board of exotic destinations, the semi-infinite tasting menu of tempting dishes, the artfully curated interiors, all mingled with retina-scalding scenes of violence and suffering: how different is this from the experience of the average half hour on social media, where raw footage from warzones sits beside paid content from vloggers flying first-class to luxury hotels?<\/p>\n If the TikTok generation gets it, no wonder: Yanagihara might have dared hope for only a few dozen readers, but the world soon caught up with her vision.<\/p>\n