8/18/2023 0 Comments A little life hanyaParentless and horribly scarred, with his legs disfigured in an incident whose details he guards as closely as everything else about his past, he’s profoundly aware of his “extreme otherness.” The book slowly discloses luridly gothic episodes from his life before college, among them abandonment, childhood in a monastery, horrifying physical and sexual abuse, prostitution, and abduction. The novel centers on Jude, who’s 16 when he arrives at an affluent New England college with only a backpack of baggy clothes. Yanagihara approaches the collective traumas that have so deeply shaped gay life obliquely.īut queer suffering is at the heart of A Little Life. Her characters suffer relatively little anxiety about the public reception of their sexual identities-only Malcolm will be tormented by coming out, before realizing that in fact he’s straight-and HIV is conspicuously absent from the book’s weirdly ahistorical New York City. Yanagihara approaches the collective traumas that have so deeply shaped modern gay identity-sickness and discrimination-obliquely, avoiding the conventions of the coming-out narrative or the AIDS novel. Just as Yanagihara’s characters challenge conventional categories of gay identity, so A Little Life avoids the familiar narratives of gay fiction. In essays and interviews, Yanagihara has spoken of her desire instead to write across difference, exploring what she sees as specifically male friendships and emotional communication. From Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1982) to Justin Torres’ We the Animals (2011), novels about gay men and their lives have often been more or less easily mappable onto the author’s biography. Another is that readers have come to expect such books to be written by gay men and to be at least plausibly confessional. The complexity of the characters’ relationships to sexual identity is one way Yanagihara elevates them from mere “window dressing,” and I suspect it’s one reason A Little Life hasn’t been recognized as a book fundamentally about gay male experience. In college, JB calls Jude “the Postman” because he seems to entirely escape the usual categories: “We never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him … post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.” Willem spends much of his adulthood pursuing sexual relationships with women, before he recognizes his desire for Jude and acknowledges their friendship as a life partnership. Of the novel’s main characters, only JB unambiguously embodies an immediately recognizable and unambivalent gay identity. Three of them form their primary physical and emotional bonds with other men, though sometimes in ways that challenge the usual nomenclatures. The book follows a group of four men-Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm-over three decades of friendship, from their years as college roommates to the heights of professional success. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was released in March, is one of the most buzzed-about books of the season, hailed as a “tour de force,” “extraordinary,” “elemental and irreducible,” “astonishing,” and the work of “ a major American novelist.” But no coverage of the book I’ve seen has discussed it as a novel fundamentally about gay lives-as the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years. But I think it’s possible that novel has happened, even if no one has quite realized it yet.
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