But his social advancement turns out to be sadly ephemeral. Francis receives an elite education and the chance to turn his remarkable cognitive abilities to professional success. An abandoned child, reared in an orphanage and rescued by the state, Jude St. "One of the things I wanted to do with this book," she remarks, "is create a character who never gets better." 2 But in an only slightly less evident sense, A Little Life's depiction of the irremediable trauma of sexual abuse is also a story about the impossibility of social mobility. As Yanagihara's narrative traces the ever more impressive professional triumphs of its characters, it thus simultaneously follows a second plot that reveals ever more of Jude's hidden past: the orphanage where he was repeatedly sodomized the multiyear odyssey of abuse and child prostitution into which he was lured by a kidnapper the shelter whose counselors sexually assaulted him: and finally the psychopathic doctor who imprisoned, raped, and ultimately crippled the lost boy.Īs Yanagihara has herself noted, the point of this gothic serial of sexual predation is to create a nightmarish history from which there is no hope of escape. And Jude, as we gradually learn over the course of the novel is a man terribly damaged, physically and emotionally, by a history of childhood sexual abuse. For, in its most avowed concerns, A Little Life is a novel about the enduring effects of trauma. Francis -the novel's aptly named martyr, saint, and enigma -never gets to enjoy his meteoric path to wealth and esteem. A Little Life tells of the intimate friendships of four men as they journey from youthful obscurity to professional success and middle-aged prosperity. Why all this regret? In one sense, the answer is obvious. It is impossible to read the novel for more than few minutes without coming across an expression of sorrow and contrition.
The phrase "I'm sorry" or, the even more prevalent, "I'm so sorry," shows up more than 100 times over the course of the novel, and that is not even to consider the many other ways the characters convey their apologies (an additional 36 mentions) and regrets (another dozen). Seen from one unsympathetic perspective, the characters do little more than spend their lives expressing their regrets to each other. Yet, in some respects, the events depicted by the novel are remarkably limited. Hanya Yanagihara's widely celebrated 2015 novel follows the lives of four close friends over the course of three decades as they pursue post-collegiate success in New York -a narrative that extends to some 830 pages in its paperback edition. "You must have done something very bad to be left behind like that," Brother Peter used to tell him, after he hit him with the board, rebuking him, as he stood there sobbing his apologies.
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