A little life

[namechanging1]

Really enjoyed the beginning.....then it started getting too depressing....I am now about page 500....have started skimming, does it get better? It's too depressing at the moment, and I am starting not to care anymore as it all seems so helpless.
Do I carry on?

More Spoilers!

Well, we'll have to disagree. For me it was mawkish, credulity-straining and gratuitously sadistic. There were things I liked in the first fifth or so about the NY scene, when everyone is still getting established and before the two other friends who are not Jude and Willem evaporate, but then it went all overblown soap opera. Not only was Jude universally beloved despite his frequently awful behaviour, by everyone from his saintly doctor to his saintly law prof/adoptive father, he was the most brilliant lawyer of his generation (got into a top university on a full scholarship after spending most of his teens as a rent boy, is a brilliant mathematician, pianist AND cook, and inspires total devotion in everyone he meets after the age of 18 apart from his evil rapist boyfriend) and his three friends were likewise a famous actor, a famous architect and a famous artist, AND everyone who wasn't saintly was appallingly evil and monstrous. A friend of mine said someone at her book club complained that you could reduce the plot to '"I'm sorry, Willem',"said Jude. He cried. Later he cut himself.' repeated a thousand times.

Well yes. But parts of it were still moving 😄

George

Excellent précis

The 'credibility-straining' was deliberate - the story is a fable, so it's not meant to be realistic.

It's so emotionally draining ! Great book but I won't be reading it again

But what does the 'credibility-straining' fact of Jude being NY's top litigator AND Willem being a famous filmstar AND Malcolm a famous architect AND JB a famous artist add to the novel? It's like one of those early chicklit novels about the lives and loves of four friends, and one is a top magazine editor (blonde), one a top fashion photographer (brunette), one a top advertising executive (redhead) and one a top journalist (mixed race).

Parable, not fable

But what does the 'credibility-straining' fact of Jude being NY's top litigator AND Willem being a famous filmstar AND Malcolm a famous architect AND JB a famous artist add to the novel?

Nothing in terms of appeal, but they don't detract, either. To me these 'conveniences' go hand in hand with the parable aspect.

If it is a parable southeastdweller what do you think the lesson is?

Are you referring to this:
She says she thinks the book is a bit of a parable of adulthood, which begins as something full of social possibility and narrows to something increasingly introspective. “In the end you are really left on your own,” she says. “If you look at the friends who come in and out of Jude’s life and how they are not able to really save him – that part is, I think, an accurate reflection of my adult life, and no doubt of a lot of people’s.”

I am not sure that is the meaning of a parble - I thought it was a story to illustrate a lesson "don't hide your light under a bushel" etc. Is the lesson just a statement "we are all alone"?

from the Guardian: www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/26/hanya-yanagihara-i-wanted-everything-turned-up-a-little-too-high-interview-a-little-life

I loved it. Can anyone recommend something similar? Has anyone read her other book?

I've picked it up and put it down a couple of times in bookshops, cherry. The plot involves a self-justifying abuser, a Nobel-prize winning scientist who is also a convicted paedophile, and his time on an anthropological expedition to a remote island in the 1950s.

Worm, that's a strange interview, isn't it? She appears to think she has written an entirely different novel to the one I read. I picked it up in the first place, because I liked the idea of an edgy, NY-set novel about an aging friendship group where no one moved to the suburbs, got married and had children, but it stopped being that very quickly, when two of the four friends are totally sidelined and one eventually killed off, and turns into a relentless parade of the horrors an author can load one character with. We never get to see whether friendship can save Jude, because the author has lost interest in the friends.

One of the worst books I've read. Started off ok and just got worse.

And yes the impossibility of it and repetition of I'm sorry and the cutting. gneh

I agree Peckwater She says she believes we are all alone and that your friends cannot help save you. I think the last third of the book turned into misery "porn" it was relentless and the plot did not advance - it became a chore to finish whilst I had devoured the first third (with the variety of stories about the friends lives).

I like dark books - my favourite writers are Gissing, Zola, Hamilton and I once got in trouble at school for saying that Jude the Obscure was my favourite book, so I can take misery but this was a grind.

I thought this comment (from the Guardian article) was controversial (does the writer think abuse is worse for boys and easier for girls?)

I am not that interested in abuse really. But what I am interested in as a writer is the long-term effect it has, particularly in men. I think women grow up almost prepared for it in a way. Boys still don’t and it happens to a great many of them. It takes away their sense of masculinity. And of course they are not equipped or encouraged to talk about it. It causes terrible psychic harm.

I loathed it. Creepy torture porn dressed up as literature, with added treacly sentimentality and an odd attitude to gay men and their relationships. It reminded me of that type of fan fiction written by teenage girls where one character gets hurt or tortured so the other character can comfort him. I'm always baffled it gets so much praise.

To the poster who said it's not torture porn because these things happen in real life: yes they do, although i still think the misery visited on Jude is unbelievable. It's not that these things don't happen; it's how the subject matter is treated. I couldn't bear the relentless, graphic description overlaid with sentimentality.

Two far better depictions of adults living with the consequences of an abusive childhood are My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

It reminded me of that type of fan fiction written by teenage girls where one character gets hurt or tortured so the other character can comfort him.

Oh, God, that's exactly what it's like! It's like 'hurt/comfort' slash where Harry Potter keeps being sexually enslaved by Death Eaters, gang raped by drugged House Elves and subjected to appalling horrors in Snape's dungeon, in order for Draco Malfoy to emerge as a good guy and rescue him so they can have snuggly, healing consensual sex about ten seconds later, but hey who's being realistic?

Only without the snuggly, healing part, obv.

My Name is Lucy Barton is really good, I agree. (And I love Jude the Obscure, though my husband claims to have laughed at Little Father's Time's suicide note when he read it as a student.)

Hurt comfort! That's it. I knew there was a term for it!

I didn't think the abuse Jude receives was unbelievable - I've read in newspapers that in to people have gone through even worse experiences than he did.

'That in real life' I meant to say.

It can happen in RL. For example, Broken by Shy Keenan and Stuart: A life Backwards bear that out (Staurt is abused and asks to be put in care and then is horrendously abused in the care home). However, I agree with Bookworm it is just too gratutious and unrelentlingly described. It is a novel and not a RL memoir and in the end fails to advance the plot.

If it is a parable southeastdweller what do you think the lesson is?

I think the lesson is a very depressing one. That sometimes life is hopeless and futile.

Two far better depictions of adults living with the consequences of an abusive childhood are My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout and Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

It's all subjective, of course, but to me, the depths Elizabeth Strout and Gail Honeyman write about in terms of their protaganist's don't come anywhere near as close to what Hanya Yanagihara achieved with her characterisation of Jude.

It is interesting how people can have such polarised reactions to the same book. I didn't believe in Jude (or any of them) as a character at all.

I'm clearly reading the wrong type of Harry Potter fanfic!

I loved A Little Life too - and cried my eyes out.