Books
The world as it is
Hanya Yanagihara’s speculative new novel imagines different kinds of utopia—and finds them wanting
by JON DAY
One of the most unbelievable things about Hanya Yanagihara’s bafflingly successful second novel, A Little Life, wasn’t the horrific traumas experienced by its main character, Jude St Francis, but its cloying representation of male friendship. Jude’s life was marred by sexual abuse, extreme violence and self-harm, but his close friends—an artist, an architect and an actor—made up for this by not only being beautiful, rich and wildly successful in their respective fields, but by being, for the most part, preposterously nice.
Some critics saw in Yanagihara’s celebration of friendship a radical reclamation of a kind of relationship that has historically been neglected by the realist novel. Writing in the Atlantic, the novelist Garth Greenwell argued that in prioritising friendship over romantic love, and in playing with “aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera,” Yanagihara had written the first “great gay novel.” But when drawn out over 700 pages, A Little Life’s representation of friendship not only felt too good to be true, it also didn’t feel all that revolutionary. “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship?” Jude’s friend Willem asked himself at one point. “Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.” If this really was a new kind of love, it was one that sounded a lot like the old kind.