Can we talk about A Little Life? ( with spoilers)

[onlyconnect]

I've just finished it and am thinking about it constantly. Jude has taken up residence in my head.
Anyone else read it and would like to share some thoughts on it?
I ripped through it in about a week and loved it. Quite soon I was thinking that it's one of the best ever for me. I do see flaws now though but they're not detracting too much.
I have barely ever read such relentlessly harrowing fiction. At times I had to stop reading and am struck that at one point it becomes a relief to be reading about Harold's dying son Jacob. That is one if the things I loved about it: my own response at certain points surprised and shocked me.

Loved this when I read. Haven't read anything as good since.

I loved it too. I was tremendously invested in each of the characters and lingered over the last few pages so as not to have them leave my life sooner than necessary.

The warning is that all books will now prove to be a disappointment in comparison....

Yes I feel that too. I just can't stop thinking about so much of it: the horror of Jude’s childhood. Could that actually happen ? Also Jude’s suicide. Part of me is happy for him that he succeeded but also desperately sad at the horror of it.

I loved it. It was a extremely harrowing read and it stayed with me for months.

I howled at the car accident. How could the author have done that to Jude? And to me?!

I audiobooked it. It is fantastic. Really gets to you

I didn’t love it-too horrific.

Oh I loved it. Devastated by the car accident.
Sobbed on a train as I finished it. Thought about it for weeks and weeks.
Nothing has compared.

Read somewhere that you have to take it as a bit of a fairytale as the highs, lows, goodies and baddies are so extreme.

I hated it. Sorry.

It’s crass misery porn.

I have such mixed feelings about it. I really really enjoyed reading it, I was dying to get back to it every evening, and for such a long book it never palled on me. But I did feel like the heaping of misery upon misery was just trying to emotionally manipulate the reader. It didn’t seem believable that literally every adult Jude interacted with as a boy would be a child rapist. And I didn’t buy Willem’s ‘turning’ and their subsequent relationship.

Ratatatata yes I read that it's a fable. This is important I think as yes, if you take it as a "real" story, it is (hopefully) impossible to believe and there's something else I can't quite put my finger on too about the nature of the characters who are extreme but in some cases ( Jude himself for example) still complex.
The extreme privilege of many of the characters is interesting. We're so used to seeing moderate privilege- tv dramas and novels seem to disproportionately feature the comfortable middle classes - but the level of wealth of Malcolm, Harold , Willem and Jude is something else.

AppropriateAdult I didn't see Willem as turning. He had always loved Jude and there had always been an intimacy between them.
It was a shift in acceptance and commitment.

Misery porn- I do see what you mean and have asked myself about this. It's part of the fable quality that it seems everyone Jude came across was a rapist but I take it that not everyone was but no one intervened enough to prevent it. Once someone is in that abusive loop it does often continue. Overall it's believable enough on the level it needs to be for me.

Something not revealed but which I'd like to know is how Jude was discovered after the car accident. Most questions are answered but not that. Dr Taylor was obviously caught too and I'd like to what happened

What are your thoughts about the fact that Willem’s last thoughts were for Hemming rather than Jude? (Sob)

Ratatatata at first I found that devastating and I was thinking about Jude as a sort of replacement for Henning with Willem showing love in the way his parents hadn't for Henning. I don't want that to be the case ( but it is inescapable to a degree). But then I thought it gave a sense of him joining Henning. The book is generally ( and fabulously in my view as I'm an atheist myself) devoid of religion so I don't mean joining him in an afterlife but rather going from the world as Henning himself went. I think too that the sense of acute longing for someone you lose is a feeling I can associate with the moment of death, it sort of fits with my imagined sense of how it might be. Maybe this is me just consoling myself about Willem's love for Jude, which I can't bear to think of as anything other than deep and real.

Oh, come on, it read like an incredibly long Hurt/Comfort fanfic without the comfort. Self-harming, in continual physical pain, disabled, beautiful, brilliant man who bakes when he’s not harming himself, reeling from childhood sexual abuse — not enough for you? Give him a vicious boyfriend who rapes him and throws him down the stairs? Still not enough? Let’s have an extended flashback to every salacious detail of his abuse and child prostitution? Still not enough? Let’s give him, finally, a loving relationship, and then suddenly kill off his boyfriend? And then he commits suicide.

I love this book, and since first reading it several years ago, I re-read it every year.

I find the writing beautiful and nuanced, her descriptions of intimacy, love and grief really reflect my own feelings and sound true for me.

Of course I would hate for all those bad things to happen to anyone, never mind to a single person. But it also seems horribly plausible that a child groomed from an early age could be abused like Jude. His struggle to live a "normal" life subsequently is both tragic and heroic - in as much as it's a struggle for anyone who has lived through grief or loss, to continue in their life. These themes are expressed really eloquently for me. I've never cried so hard when reading a book.

I read her first book and found it far less interesting, so I'm doubly impressed that she's come so far just in her second novel. The disappointment comes when not finding anything else as good as this afterwards.

I disliked it. It’s very compelling, I read it in 3 days, but as it went on it just (in my opinion) became OTT. Just one awful event after another. It made me wonder why someone would write a book like that. I lent it to my friend and she loved it though so I think it’s just a very polarising book!

I lent mine to a friend and she hasn’t given it back. I feel bereft! I need the characters back in my house 😂

Crowbarred I do know what you mean. Although I loved it there is a bit of me that feels that way. I keep trying to rationalise it, which part of me thinks isn't the right thing to do because it's a fable. The bit I struggle with most in terms of the piling on and being able to accept that on some level as possible is the boys' home. Once he has been taken in surely someone would have had some sort of eye on him. And once he was hospitalised after being beaten surely someone would have made some intervention. Although no dates are mentioned, I imagine it roughly spans my lifetime from the ages of the characters so Jude would have been in the boys' home in the mid eighties..... we do know that terrible things did go on in that era and no one stopped them. In relation to Caleb someone with normal self esteems would have ended the relationship after the first punch. Although Caleb's attack is extreme, I find it very believable that someone like Jude would stick around for more after the first punch. What makes it harder to take in are the aspects of Jude’s life and character that are so removed from what we associate ( wrongly) with this type of abuse- the money, level of education etc.

Agree with Lampan.At first I couldn't stop reading it, very compelling but then as more misery was heaped upon misery and all the self harming just being described more and more I just hated it. I'd invested so much time in it that I wanted to finish it but kind of dreaded reading it, total misery porn and unbelievable (everyone super successful etc.) I wish I could unread it.

Where is everyone getting the idea that it’s a ‘fable’? It’s a realist novel about a group of friends in a realistically described (if economically privileged) New York, that keeps the reader reading on because of the continual piling on of more miseries on its main character and the (ethically dubious) promise of the horrible details of Jude’s sexual abuse being held out till two thirds of the way through the novel.

I imagine it primarily appeals to people who like ‘true crime’ full of graphic details of rape and murder, and misery memoirs.

Crowbarred I think it's a fable because of all of the extremities. The goodies, baddies, privilege, settings, gruesomeness etc although yes, told in a realist way.
I'm not someone who's into true crime at all!
As I said, I do have a sense of how you feel but it's not my dominant response