A book review of Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” — What Makes A Novel Great?

When I first started reading A Little Life, I thought it would immediately be placed in my top ten all time books.

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. 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 Reckoning

But 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. Why?

Relatability

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 was a world I didn’t recognize, one that felt fantastical, and obviously fiction.

Every 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. And everyone else, for the next period, wanted to love him. Save for one person in each period, there was no in between with Jude. Everyone wanted to possess him either by force or by the will of their love. What was it Jude possessed that everyone wanted? A purity? But even when that purity was broken, tainted, people still wanted to possess him. It was a world that was made up by a writer to sell a point, or emotion, or message.

And it’s not the lives of these people, lawyers, rape victims, famous artists and actors, that I can’t relate to. 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 didn’t feel the same way with A Little Life. What I felt like I was getting, instead of a story that was true, was pornography.

Writing As Pornography

What do I mean by pornography? I mean it was gratuitous. It was over the top. It hit you over the head, over and over, until you not only got the point, but were up to your ears in it. It moves you until you’re drowning in the direction it wants you to go. It is choking and shallow in its singular direction—sadness. I looked for more than just an overwhelming sadness, but I couldn’t find anything more. It is sad and you will be sad.

Is it effective? If the goal is to bury you in sadness, then absolutely. And that does sound like Hanya’s main goal.

She says, in an article in Vulture:

One of the things I wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never gets better. I also wanted the narrative to have a slight sleight-of-hand quality: The reader would begin thinking it a fairly standard post-college New York City book (a literary subgenre I happen to love), and then, as the story progressed, would sense it was becoming something else, something unexpected.

She accomplishes exactly what she set out to do, with intention, and that’s why I think it’s pretty good, though not great. It started off, exactly as she said, with that literary quality New York City book, that I might quantify as great, but progresses to something sadder, something awful, and it only gets worse from there.

It is strange, what we do as readers. We expect there to be a turn, a revival, a healing, but she never gives us one, and though it was intentional, it feels shallow, it feels easier to do than to resist the temptation to the sadness take over the narrative, to rely on a singular feeling, and press that button for all it’s worth.

In this interview with The Millions, she says:

Much of the process of writing A Little Life was a seesaw between giving myself over to the flow and rhythm of writing it, which at its best, even in its darkest moments, felt as glorious as surfing; it felt like being carried aloft on something I couldn’t conjure but was lucky enough to have caught, if for just a moment. At its worst, I felt I was somehow losing my ownership over the book. It felt, oddly, like being one of those people who adopt a tiger or lion when the cat’s a baby and cuddly and manageable, and then watch in dismay and awe when it turns on them as an adult.

As I read her work, and thought about the process of writing a work like this, and focusing in on the intent to create a novel that doesn’t, no matter what we as readers hope for, get better, the idea that she often would feel taken away by that thought, to lose ownership of her book, makes a lot of sense. She lost sight of a story and gave it up to an idea.

As a writer of novels and fiction, it’s made me think a lot about the difference between a great novel and a good novel.

A good novel sets out with an intention and does it well, while capturing the audience. A great novel teaches you something about yourself, something you can carry for years to come, something that changes the way you look at your life or the universe, and I didn’t get that from A Little Life.

What we get is what could be best described as genre fiction, if “bone-crushing sadness” was a popular genre.

But did I enjoy it? Absolutely. I went through that 800 page behemoth within a week, not able to put it down.