A Little Life is a masterpiece.

At the beginning of Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, “A Little Life,” four young men, all graduates of the same prestigious New England university, set about establishing adult lives for themselves in New York City. They are a pleasingly diverse crew, tightly bound to each other: Willem Ragnarsson, the handsome son of a Wyoming ranch hand, who works as a waiter but aspires to be an actor; Malcolm Irvine, the biracial scion of a wealthy Upper East Side family, who has landed an associate position with a European starchitect; Jean-Baptiste (JB) Marion, the child of Haitian immigrants, who works as a receptionist at a downtown art magazine in whose pages he expects, one day soon, to be featured; and Jude St. Francis, a lawyer and mathematician, whose provenance and ethnic origins are largely unknown, even by his trio of friends. Jude, we later learn, was a foundling, deposited in a bag by a dumpster and raised by monks.

As the novel progresses, though, we get closer and closer to Jude, who becomes our protagonist. A Little Life spans Jude’s entire life, beginning in these early college days and ending with his death as many bildungsroman (coming-of-age) novels do.
Yanagihara sets her novel apart in her masterfully zig-zagging timeline: we’re moved between people, dipping in and out of their lives; we’re moved between years, collecting details from the past that inform the future, and vice versa. We become inextricably entangled, and by the end I found myself reminiscing on the beginning along with the characters. I was fully absorbed, and — laughing when the characters laughed, crying when they cried — I ultimately realized the stakes were as high for me as they were for the characters.
A Little Life is a book about art and creativity, aspiration and achievement, family and friendship, and identity and discovery. These four friends are all from starkly different backgrounds, and they navigate their new lives in New York city just as they navigate each other. They talk about films and paintings and, indeed, create them and these boys luxuriate in their shared passions and new discoveries. They’re there for each other’s successes, for every day, for the low points. It’s a novel about a friendship that turns into a family.

Yanagihara is bold in how much she dares to address in just one novel, and how explicitly.
Listing all of these potentially triggering topics reminds me just how difficult a novel A Little Life really is. I had to put it down multiple times, both to recover and to also give myself time to process what I had just read. I needed to give space to the trauma I had just read about.
It’s haunting and graphic, but I maintain that A Little Life is a masterpiece.


Yet it’s a friendship that saves us time and time again, from the schoolyard to the office and beyond so why aren’t there more novels and films about it? Why is the sexual relationship always at the center?

Of course, there is sex in A Little Life, but it is sex between friends – and then it becomes something else entirely. Willem thinks at one point of his relationship with Jude: “They were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but which felt truer and less constraining.”