A Little Life

there is a lot to say about this book. there are things that worked for me, and things that didn't, and i get both the praise and the criticism. and before i go into this, i will clarify that i really did like A Little Life, and i did get attached to the characters, and i did find it hard to put down. but here goes.
i read this book at what i feel was the perfect time: as i neared my 18th birthday. and although the lives of the characters span across many, many years, i never felt that they were much older than me, twenty-something at most (which to me was a flaw in the writing). i have also been thinking an awful lot lately, and the book didn't help. in fact, it made me think even more, a scary amount. it also made me cry twice.

however, and this is a point that is important to make with A Little Life: i don't feel that a book is good just because it does a good job making the reader cry. and this book in particular, in my opinion, relies too much on this. i've seen somewhere that Hanya Yanahigara wanted to write a character so broken that they were beyond being fixed, and sure, for that a character would have to suffer, but as you add one traumatic experience and then another and then another, at some point it becomes almost ridiculous. we are just faced with the fact that every single person Jude had encountered until a certain point in his life has been an evil pedophile rapist, with absolutely no exception, and now he will never get better, no matter how loved he is. his sorrow is so enormous that it pushes almost every other character out of focus, and the ones that we still see are shaped by how that sorrow affects them. all we see is his self-harm and self-hatred, to a point where is becomes too much.

curiously, this is the second book i've read recently that people have criticised for being too grim, the first being Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. and that book, in my opinion, is just as grim as it should be. there is trauma, and pain, but it serves a purpose, and it tells a story. in A Little Life, however, the pain felt like an exhausting rollercoaster meant only to emotionally manipulate the reader, and when things finally get better you don't feel relieved, because deep down you already know that eventually, probably very soon, they'll get worse again, because in this story, nothing is ever truly good, and no one is ever truly happy, and everyone dies, and therapy doesn't work, and suicide is the only way out. we never see the characters grow, or change, or become better people. this book a lot like Jude himself, too stubborn to actually want to get better, but that is disguised by the notion that there are people who are “too broken to be fixed”.

i would like to end the review on this:
apparently, Hanya Yanahigara is anti-therapy, and yet A Little Life was the best ad for therapy i've ever encountered.