And that does sound like Hanya’s main goal. Is it effective? If the goal is to bury you in sadness, then absolutely. I looked for more than just an overwhelming sadness, but I couldn’t find anything more. It is choking and shallow in its singular direction-sadness. It moves you until you’re drowning in the direction it wants you to go. It hit you over the head, over and over, until you not only got the point, but were up to your ears in it. What do I mean by pornography? I mean it was gratuitous.
What I felt like I was getting, instead of a story that was true, was pornography. It didn’t feel the same way with A Little Life. When I think of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, I can’t specifically relate to the life of Samuel Hamilton or any other character in the novel, but I can relate to the human emotions that they’re experiencing-a struggle for self-worth or the search for greatness in a universe devoid of meaning. It was a world that was made up by a writer to sell a point, or emotion, or message.Īnd it’s not the lives of these people, lawyers, rape victims, famous artists and actors, that I can’t relate to. What was it Jude possessed that everyone wanted? A purity? But even when that purity was broken, tainted, people still wanted to possess him. Everyone wanted to possess him either by force or by the will of their love. Save for one person in each period, there was no in between with Jude. And everyone else, for the next period, wanted to love him. It was a world I didn’t recognize, one that felt fantastical, and obviously fiction.Įvery person Jude met-for a large period of his life-from the monastery, to counselors, to truck drivers, to a random doctor, to his first boyfriend, wanted to abuse him.
Jude, who I’d consider the main character of the novel, lived in a reality I couldn’t relate to, one that seemed so overbearingly sad, so evil, that it edged on unreality. It’s the melancholic feeling that the writer is reaching out to the universe and asking “is there more than this?” and the world whispers back “there’s less.” READ: Why John Williams’ Stoner Is My Favourite Novel Of All Time - A Quiet Reckoningīut as the novel progressed, I thought it moved from great to good-perhaps really good, but not quite in the realm of what I consider to be an all time great novel. As I read on, I felt the way Hanya Yanagihara expressed herself was a feeling I recognized from other great books, and what I called a “quiet reckoning” in John Williams’ Stoner.
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