Book Drop // A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (2015)
We start this novel meeting a tightly bound crew of four New England university graduates as they establish themselves as young adults in New York City. For the first 50 or so pages of this whopping tome, we attend parties, go on dates, find apartments, start jobs and settle into the lives of a cast of young New Yorkers making their bid for success in the city. Yet there is more to this novel than a big-city story. As the narrative develops, the history and trauma of one character, Jude, comes into focus. What had initially been set up as a novel about class, ambition and society, is quietly subverted into one about abuse, suffering and the long road to recovery. I have never read a novel that deals with violence and physical and psychological suffering with such directness. It is a challenging read. But like Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, (one of my all time favourite books), Yanagihara does not offer redemption from these moments of suffering, nor attempt to explain away the morality of them with neat plot devices or convenient conclusions. A very good book worth reading.