Garth Greenwell, (whose name has been reverently mentioned on the Hummingbird previously, rated highly Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life in yesterday’s The Atlantic that I wonder if I should put it on my overflowing to-read list. Between him and Josh Rothman for The New Yorker things are constantly being brought to my attention that I am, even when not necessarily enthused about am at least always mildly curious about, which is, of course, why we keep people with good tastes in our lives…
The complexity of the characters’ relationships to sexual identity is one way Yanagihara elevates them from mere “window dressing,” and I suspect it’s one reason A Little Life hasn’t been recognized as a book fundamentally about gay male experience. Another is that readers have come to expect such books to be written by gay men and to be at least plausibly confessional. […] Both the intensity of pain Jude endures and other aspects of his and his friends’ lives—each is brilliant, each becomes not just successful but famous—strain credulity, and while Yanagihara has insisted that the novel’s plot is “not, technically, implausible,” it’s clear that the book is after something other than strict realism. This has annoyed some critics. In The New York Times Book Review, Carol Anshaw accused the novel both of being “allegorical” in its disregard for social and historical reality, and of placing the reader in a voyeuristic attitude toward suffering that’s so baroque as to seem like “a contrivance.”
To understand the novel’s exaggeration and its intense, claustrophobic focus on its characters’ inner lives requires recognizing how it engages with aesthetic modes long coded as queer: melodrama, sentimental fiction, grand opera. The book is scaled to the intensity of Jude’s inner life, and for long passages it forces the reader to experience a world that’s brutally warped by suffering. […] In its sometimes grueling descriptions of Jude’s self-harm and his perceptions of his own body, the book reminds readers of the long filiation between gay art and the freakish, the abnormal, the extreme—those aspects of queer culture we’ve been encouraged to forget in an era that’s increasingly embracing gay marriage and homonormativity.
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This is the claim that animates A Little Life: that by violating the canons of current literary taste, by embracing melodrama and exaggeration and sentiment, it can access emotional truths denied more modest means of expression. In this astonishing novel, Yanagihara achieves what great gay art from Proust to Almodóvar has so often sought: a grandeur of feeling adequate to “the terrifying largeness, the impossibility of the world.”
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird