Meanwhile, these superstars experience afflictions as stunning as their success is stellar. All their friends and aquaintances have equally stellar careers or at worse are one degree away from them. they almost meteorically become subjects of Whitney retrospectives, stars of major motion pictures, globetrotting partners at white-shoe law firms, and so forth. After stints as impoverished artists and idealist young lawyers. I am usually a sucker for those kinds of books.Įxcept these friends are sickeningly successful and stupefyingly afflicted. Who am I to hate such a book? Not only is the thing a blockbuster, but it is the story of elite college graduates making their way in the world. The New Yorker praised the novel’s “ subversive brilliance.” The Guardian said everyone should read this “modern-day classic,” a “refreshingly modern take on friendship in the age of anxiety.” A Little Less Life (Please?)Ī Little Life has been called “one of the best books of the year” by the likes of The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, People, NPR, The Economist, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Vanity Fair, Newsday, even Buzzfeed. The book, all 720 pages of it, won the Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. Finally I succumbed.Īnd it wasn’t just my mother. She must have told me three times that I had to read it. My mother, who usually shares my taste in fiction, raved about this novel.
As the novel progresses we learn that Jude was raised by monks who rescued him from a dumpster only to set him on the road to unfathomable abuse. The fourth, Jude, is a lawyer and mathematician with a mysterious past. Three of the four are artists of some sort: an actor, an architect, and a visual artist. On the surface it is the story of four college classmates from a prestigious East Coast college who move to New York City and build their lives. The book at issue is A Little Lifeby Hanya Yanagihara. Why don’t I just walk away? Part of it is the book itself, which, by all rights, I should be loving.
But with each passing page, the word “hate” keeps rising to the surface. I might have even said that I liked the book, or was intrigued by it. And for the first 300 or so pages of this book, I wouldn’t have used it. And the more I read it, the more I hate it.
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