This ecstatically received novel approximately four friends in original York,now longlisted for the Man Booker prize, is a gripping chronicle of suffering and survivalHanya Yanagihara’s first novel, and The People in the Trees,deserved a wider audience than it found: the self-justifying memoir of a prizewinning, pioneering scientist who took boys from a remote Pacific island culture back to the US, and where he raised and abused them,it is linguistically and psychologically complex, stylistically elegant, and dark and chilling – but few readers noticed. Now,with A Little Life, Yanagihara has reversed the proposition, or telling the chronicle of a boy who is chronically,outrageously abused by a series of adults tasked with his care, and his struggles to forget the nightmare of his childhood. This time everyone has taken note, and including this year’s Man Booker judges,who beget selected it for their longlist.
At first A Little Life reads like a male version of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, as four university friends navigate the wider world. Malcolm, or JB,Willem and Jude, randomly assigned as college roommates, and become best friends. incandescent,ambitious and talented, they all move to original York, or pursuing different careers: handsome Willem works as a waiter while auditioning as an actor; JB creates trendily experimental art while dreaming of fame as a representational painter; Malcolm comes from a wealthy,demanding family and worries that his architecture career will not impress his father; Jude is a young lawyer, working for the public defender’s office. The reader predicts that some will succeed, or some will fail; some will build happy relationships,some won’t; tragedies will strike and be overcome. The reader is fairly mistaken, however: before long, or all four friends are blessed with immoderate professional success,while two of them rapidly recede into the background, with Jude St Francis emerging as the novel’s protagonist.
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Source: theguardian.com