A Little Life

I bought “A Little Life” in grad school because the Discourse said I should read it. I put off doing so because I worried about it being little more than self-indulgent misery porn stretched out to operatic length. Yes, it is long. Yes, the prose tends to a dangerous shade of violet. Yes, the subject material can turn even the most calloused reader's stomach. What elevated this novel beyond mere schlock is its refusal to pity or rationalize its characters, particularly the protagonist. It allows Jude's trauma to exist without rationalization. Yet the book is not without beauty. Unsurprisingly for a story populated by artists and intellectuals, it is one of the most unabashedly aesthetic novels I have read recently. “A Little Life” is drama pitched in a high and tragic key: unforgiving, compelling, occasionally transcendent.