As my kids would say.
A Little Life is a behemoth of a book, focused on the lives of four college friends as they make their way in the world. There’s Willem, attractive and easy-going, who wants to be an actor; Malcolm, an aspiring architect; JB, a promising your artist; and Jude, an enigmatic lawyer with a brilliant mind and a troubled past. We follow their lives as they grapple with fame, addiction, relationships and trauma.
At least, that’s what google will tell you if you look it up, but the focal point of the book is Jude and all the misery he endures. And there’s a lot of it. Too much, in fact. So much that, by the end, I just felt numb and wanted the book to be over.
When we meet Jude, he’s still a young man, and we see him with a social worker who tells him that the miserable part of his life is now over, that he can leave it all behind him and start again. The point of the book is, of course, that he can’t; Jude’s childhood is so miserable, so filled with abuse of every kind that he is both physically and mentally damaged that he cannot be repaired. And that makes it a frustrating read because it means all characters, Jude especially, are static. Jude self-harms. Jude attempts suicide. Jude has one of the extremely painful attacks that knocks him out. Jude is in pain. Jude refuses help. Jude is given more backstory. And so it goes, on and on and on.
To me, the entire novel felt like the author was winging it (or pantsing it, as it’s known in Nanowrimo-circles: flying by the seat of her pants) and started out wanting to write a book about four college friends as they find their way in life, but soon became interested primarily in one character because all the others get the short shrift here. There’s a subplot about JB’s budding meth addiction that’s resolved by *checks notes* dinner at his mother’s house and a stern talking to (meth, as we know, is known for being a super easy habit to kick). Willem gets the most attention of the secondary characters, but only as his relationship to Jude progresses.
Other than that: it’s torture porn. I honestly don’t get the rave reviews that critics have given this book. Yes, the writing is beautiful, and the relationships between the characters are interestingly elaborated on, but the characters themselves are not that well-developed. JB is a selfish jokester; Malcolm is stodgy but diligent; Willem is kind and beautiful. Jude is never more than the result of his successive traumas and everyone else mostly stands by wringing their hands and pampering him without ever actually trying to get to the root of the problem (and when they do, Jude brushes them off. They let him). It’s also very repetitive: somehow, every man Judge meets during childhood is a sexual predator. I know these people exist, but not at that rate. Truth can be stranger than fiction, and if you want to make fiction stranger than the truth you’ll have to find a way to make it believable.
Also, I’m no doctor, but I frequently found myself thinking, “that’s not how this works.” Andy, Jude’s loyal friend, is also his doctor, and he seems to veer into legally murky territory far too often. Jude, meanwhile, is a very successful lawyer, yet it seems unlikely that someone dealing with as many physical and mental issues as he is would be able to become basically the Most Successful Lawyer That Ever Lawyered. Malcolm and Willem, both successful in their fields after a few hiccups at the start, yet they always drop everything to rush to Jude’s side when the situation requires it, and that just doesn’t seem possible. Their friendship also doesn’t seem that reciprocal; Jude’s nice and all, but you have to wonder what they’re getting out of it.
