Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "recovery"

"One gray November day, Elliot went to Boston for the afternoon." This is the first sentence of a story by Robert Stone. Not an auspicious start, to be honest. Grayness and the past tense of "go" aren't exactly eye-catching, but then again, we live in a world now where everything is supposed to be screaming for your attention, so perhaps there's nothing wrong with a quieter approach (especially from a man who won the National Book Award and was a finalist, twice, for the Pulitzer).

Either way, Stone quickly picks up. "The wet streets seemed cold and lonely. He sensed a broken promise in the city's elegance and verve. Old hopes tormented him like phantom limbs, but he did not drink. He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous fifteen months before."

He's a drunk! (It's okay, I can say that, I come from deeply entrenched alcoholic stock. I can also say "lush," but I've never heard anyone outside a jewelry-encrusted WASP in a movie say that.) Anyway ...

"Day in, day out, he was sober. At times it was almost stimulating." I feel the humor in this, the quiet, sad, very battered comedy of a man who has ruined himself with alcohol. Maybe some empathy here for our hero.

"Sober, however, he remained, until the day a man named Blankenship came into his office at the state hospital for counseling." So, like the unperceptive reader I am, I totally missed the importance of this information the first two times I read it. Stone tells us right here where the action of the story is, and how, presumably, Elliot will change in front of our eyes: he's gonna drink.


Boozy booze booze

"Blankenship had red hair, a brutal face and a sneaking manner." In other words, he's gross. It turns out that Elliot is a Vietnam vet, and Blankenship, while undoubtedly a wreck of a human being, is only posing as a service member, all the way down to specific dreams about "The Nam." At this point we consider him a liar, a scammer, a legitimately mentally ill man, or all three. Certainly annoying, but one of the people you treat at a hospital, because it's a fucking hospital. Yet in Stone's words: "Elliot had had enough of him."

Our counselor proceeds to say things like "Dreams are boring" to his admittedly unlikeable patient. This isn't at all ethically approved or useful, but we know Elliot is not in a helping mood.

So, after he botches his psychology session, Elliot proceeds to leave work early and purchase booze (oh no!). No one had taken away his house or shot at him: he just felt anxious, restless, alert to "possibility." Occasionally it's those little nothing problems, and not the house-losing or shots fired that, for whatever reason, send us off on our shitty tangents.

Said tangent translates to him getting drunk, going home, and having a half-fight with his wife, who throws a bowl at his head and misses. There follow sentences like, "Stiff with shame, he went and took his bottle out of the cabinet into which he had thrust it and poured a drink."

If parts of this scene feel clichéd, both Elliot and Stone are aware of this. That's the source of the story's humor and sadness, the knowing eyebrow raise of: we've all seen this before.

As part of the plot, Elliot's lawyer wife Grace has lost a case in which two young parents were abusing their child. The victorious snot of a father telephones her house to gloat, but Elliot, hammered, answers instead. He more or less goads the man into threatening him, and then readies his shotgun after he hangs up, having invited the man to come on by. Our hero has served in Vietnam, and he might be old, but he's apparently not someone to fuck with.


This isn't Robert Stone, it's just a snazzy stock picture, kids.

Then Elliot falls asleep and nothing happens (oh no?). In the morning he drinks some more, then goes out with his gun and walks through the snow until he meets his neighbor: a dapper, happy professor named Anderson, who, seen through the lens of cynical Elliot, you kind of want to punch in the face--since the guy is friendly and likes to ski. (Elliot is not friendly and hates skiing, and in fact has a violent fantasy about stringing razor wire along the trail behind their houses so the Anderson family gets decapitated.)

Elliot threatens his neighbor, perhaps more subtly than he does the plaintiff, but afterwards feels badly about it (which means I feel badly, too, since I kind of identified with the Asshole and wanted the other harmless guy to get hurt).

"Getting drunk was an insurrection, a revolution--a bad one. There would be outsize bogus emotions. There would be petty blackmail and cheap remorse. He had said dreadful things to his wife. He had bullied Anderson with his violence and unhappiness, and Anderson would not forgive him."

Elliot has been here before, has been educated through AA to the point where he knows all the tropes of addiction. This reminds me of a passage from Azar Nafisi's The Republic of Imagination, in which she tells the story of an alcoholic Sinclair Lewis, who, while being wheeled away to a hospital for his sickness, and while obviously drunk, looks at his wife and says in a nasty imitation of her voice, "You're a monster, what are you doing, you're ruining our family, you promised me you wouldn't drink!" In effect, savagely having his wife's side of the conversation for her, since he knows her reactions to his old, shitty behavior. The difference here is Elliot is better off--potentially--because he's only mulling these ideas in his head, and seems ready (at the moment, at least) to not act like a total dick.

As evidence for redemption, at the very end we get: "Elliot began to hope for forgiveness." A simple, bald statement that makes sense, given the balls we've just been through with him. Now he waves to his wife, whom he spies in the window of his little house. At this point, tired and hungover, all he wants, or needs, is a single response from Grace (significant name, by the way, right? Elliot made a joke about it earlier, prompting her to say, "You're really good at this ... You make me ashamed of my own name.") ... "It seemed to him that he could build another day on it." The story ends before we know if she waves back.


At least Elliot isn't trapped here in a Hateful-Eight-type situation.

One obvious point is that Blankenship is not responsible for Elliot drinking. No part of his shitty, yet entirely normal and unremarkable day is responsible. Not the snow, not the boil on his asscheek, etc. The dude, and only the dude himself did it, and he understands this perfectly, even during his rather spiteful conversation with his wife, or his dickish threatening of various people.

The title "Helping," then, carries a bitter irony. Elliot is supposed to assist people and he doesn't. We see him act like a bad counselor, a bad husband, a bad neighbor. Yet, by my account, he's not a complete shit, if only because of his self-awareness (although you could make the case that knowing something is bad and doing it anyway is worse than being ignorant and fucking up, except this would belittle the horrible power of addiction, which is literally a neurological disease).

Elliot's "fuck-you" attitude has become tired, because he is old, he has been through this before, and, not even that deep down inside, he doesn't want to do any of this. At some point he even says, "It's out of my hands," which is true, because he's an addict under the power of his substance, and once he starts he literally, physically can't stop: although I'll hammer home that he first decided to start drinking, so he's gotta own up to that (can you tell I've been around these sweet recovery programs? ; )))))

Elliot does manage to say some halfway decent things to his wife, but that doesn't give him any points, since this logic sounds a lot like an abused partner insisting, "Sometimes he's really nice!"

Still, I have to call out my own judgments of him as an "asshole," "not a total shit," etc. When I see a character, or a person in real life, I consciously try to avoid judging her (not all the time, actually I judge people constantly and just try not to, and sometimes it works), so this guy Elliot deserves the same; even more so because I relate to his struggles with a substance, with his violent fantasies of axing cheery, pleasant pillars of community, too (which I then feel badly about). I've even put my life partner through some similar shit, although it ends up much less dramatic than it is here, and I'm not an alcoholic (I pass out after three or four shots). But I come from addicts, and I have to face that particular train track for the rest of my life, which seems obvious when you consider I picked this story to write about.

And while Elliot fucks up helping, and so does Grace (losing the case), it's not all bad. Maybe she'll wave back! And maybe this man won't drink again.

Eh. Better him than me if he does. (The extent of my Darwinist impulses.) I wish him well ...? I definitely wish you well, whether you read this or not.

Hope it helps!

'Masu' (as in Masuji) in Japanese happens to mean trout.

He stood firmly apart from the left-wing trends in late-1920s literature. Instead of literary agitation, he preferred river fishing, and wrote a series of essays about this peaceful hobby. He was always 'The Compassionate Angler'.

Ibuse's post-war writings are often filled with bitter condemnations of the war and its after-effects.

On Black Rain, his most famous work: 'Written in an understated tone, and with a thread of irony running through it, this novel is nevertheless by far the most devastating account of the effects of nuclear war ever written.'

His name had been put forward for the Nobel Prize, and he would have been the ideal candidate because of his anti-war stance. It was a matter of indifference to him when he did not receive it. He hated literary log-rolling and the tedium of social life, and when he was awarded his cultural merit prize in 1966, he felt he could not face all the dignitaries and journalists, so slipped away unobserved to a neighbouring restaurant where he spent the night celebrating on his own with sushi and flagons of sake.

Ibuse was a perfectionist ... typically wry, self-deprecating humour.

Besides the quality of his writing and his eloquent quietism, one of the things I most value about Ibuse is that he generously helped a tormented misfit, Japan's greatest modern novelist, Osamu Dazai, giving him money, giving him a room in his house and introducing him to publishers and editors at a time when Dazai was in the grip of drugs and alcohol and tried several times to kill himself.

He was that delightful rarity, an untypical Japanese, who nevertheless never lost his native soul, and enriched his native tongue.

writer = sakka 作家

Read! Yome!
読んでください!
Write! 書いてください!

So, wow. Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life was not what I expected, which means I'm dumb, because the cover photo of the book is a man's pained (or orgasmic--how bittersweet) grimace.

*Lots of spoilers ahead*

The story opens up with two friends looking for an apartment. They've known each other since college, they're basically broke, but they have all the giddiness and flexibility of youth, so they take a crappy, possibly-unsafe place on Lispenard Street, in Manhattan.

1. That's the title of the first and last sections: Lispenard Street. Here we get our first window into the lives of Willem Ragnarsson and Jude St. Francis, as well as the rest of their inner circle: Malcolm and JB.

Willem is a waiter who wants to be an actor; handsome, kind, Midwestern, but afraid of ending up like the middle-aged men who sort of morphed from "waiting tables until my big break" to just "waiting tables." Basically, everyone can't help but love Willem.

Jude is a new lawyer at the Attorney's Office, where he helps do the hard, unpleasant work of helping people find justice.

Malcolm is a grunt in an architecture firm, but has plans of running his own one day. He's biracial, rich, and fairly awkward and dithering--except when he's planning buildings.

JB is a struggling artist who wants to be a famous struggling artist. He is the loudest and brashest of the group, with Haitian parents, and is openly gay.

So here we are: four guys just living it up in NYC, happy and overworked and bohemian. They go to parties, laugh at dinners together, and share inside jokes. Sounds nice? Cool, because shit is about to become horrible.

The narrator's lens focuses tighter and tighter on Jude: skinny, handsome, pale, but also quiet, mysterious, full of unknowns. He walks with a limp--why? "Car accident," he says, but even his closest friends don't really know much about him. He is vague about his past, and because of this everyone has learned to respect his privacy, even if they do wonder.

You can guess by this point that the mysteries of Jude St. Francis are not all nice.

2. In Section II, "The Postman," we see the boys in college. JB nicknames Jude "the Postman" -- postmodern, post-racial (we don't know even know if he's really white), post-everything. He's an enigma, but they love him anyway.

Then we see Jude in law school, where he excels. I'm kind of fuzzy on the timeline, but he's also getting a master's in mathematics, because he's good at that, too. In fact, Jude is extremely organized. He can cook, garden, and fix things with amazing precision. He is highly perceptive, he remembers specific conversations years later, and he knows exactly what his friends like and don't like. More importantly, he actually gives his friends what they like and doesn't give them what they don't. Jude doesn't have a mean bone in his body.

He does, however, have body issues. He has "episodes" where his legs and torso lock up and he can't move, where he is in tremendous physical pain. Willem, who lives with Jude, has learned to help his roommate without asking, but very obliquely so as to spare Jude as much humiliation as possible. Because Jude is very private, and he seems sensitive to the idea that he is a burden because he is physically limited. "Disabled" is a word he refuses to consider, even though they they got the apartment at Lispenard Street in part because it had an elevator.

If I remember correctly, "The Postman" is also where we start getting flashes, just little clauses or prepositional phrases tucked away inside longer sentences, about Jude's past. Mentions of "the counselors" or "the home." A bit creepy, enough foreshadowing to taint the happy smiles of NYC life with a kind of nausea, like you're at the outer edge of the whirlpool but just starting to close in.

3. Section III, "Vanities," follows JB as he deals with a drug dependency, caused in part by a rich asshole named Jackson with whom he starts hanging out. It ends with him pathetic and high, horribly insulting Jude by mimicking his limp, until his friends (even Jude) get him help.

4. "The Axiom of Equality" is next, and is where things start to get really fucked up. The positive parts are Jude's relationship with one of his law teachers, a man named Harold, and his wife, Julia. The three of them begin a tentative relationship that resembles a family. Harold has lost a son in his first marriage, and this pain isn't the sole reason he tries to connect with Jude, but it is a part of it. Harold acts as a mentor/father figure, and eventually puts in the real paperwork to adopt Jude. Sweet!

But Jude has a hard time believing Harold really means this. Trust issues, perhaps? Well ... Here we see some extended scenes of Jude living with the Christian Brothers in a monastery. Now, I went to a high school run by Christian Brothers, and these guys, while sometimes scary to us, were a world apart from the ones we see here. This, however, does not mean these people can't exist, which is in fact one of the main ideas of this novel. Horrible people exist, but also beautiful people. Navigating between those two sets of humans is a painful, distressing process.

Basically, the Brothers beat and insult Jude constantly. I won't go into the grisly details (which this book does, to its credit), but suffice to say that shit is unpleasant in this religious center. It is all the more heartbreaking because Jude is an orphan, someone in most need of love and care.

There is one Brother who seems to like him, though. Brother Luke ...

Interleaved with these flashbacks are real-time scenes of the crew getting older. Willem becomes famous in his early thirties. Jude moves from his low salary but high-honor position at the Attorney's Office to Rosen Pritchard, a powerful law firm that defends corporations accused of wrongdoing -- not exactly defending the helpless. Harold is surprised at this choice, but continues to love and support his adopted son.

Now, you might be wondering, if you're a non-math person like me, what the axiom of equality is. It's simple. X = x. That's it. A thing is itself. This seemingly idiotic proof underpins a deep part of Jude's personality, which is the belief that he is rotten, filthy, undeserving of hope, love, regard, or help. Jude may be kind and selfless to all his friends, and even to strangers, but he is not kind to himself. In fact, he cuts himself, and viciously so. He cuts his arms, he cuts his legs. His legs often get infections, since they were seriously injured in his "car accident," but he still cuts there.

Harsh, right? These cutting scenes were the hardest thing I've ever had to read. I've read plenty of war novels, tales of abuse, etc., but the only material that came near this in terms of difficulty for me were American Psycho and Jennifer Egan's short story "Sacred Heart," which is also about cutting.

Self-harm, especially self-mutilation with a razor or blade, produces a deep, instinctive, nauseous reaction in me. It's physiological. I cross my arms, fold myself up, grit my teeth, and sort of tighten up my whole body. It's my version of "nails on a chalkboard." When someone mentions veins popping in a bicep, or talks about cutting up their forearms, I just feel sick. (American Psycho made me feel sick just because it was filled with horrific rape and violence.) I've never cut myself as a form of self-harm, but for some reason I'm really, deeply affected by the idea that someone could do it. It's one of the saddest things I can think of.

So reading extended passages about Jude systematically, secretly razoring his arms and legs was horrifying to me. I would put the book down, swallow my nausea, walk around for a second, and then make myself read. Because I wanted to understand what made this guy tick. Sure, the man was abused. He would've learned all sorts of unhealthy patterns from that. But why cutting? I learned that later.

First, we have to look at Jude's first relationship. This is a very unexpected and fast partnership, with a wealthy man named Caleb. Yes, a man; it seems Jude is gay.

When I got to this part, I expressed to my wife, who was also reading the book (but who read way ahead of me), my hope and joy that Jude would be with someone who loved him. Her reaction, a sort of adorable awkward laugh, told me instantly that my rosy idea of Jude's future was wrong.

Yep. Caleb is a psychologically manipulative, physically abusive man. We see flashbacks of Jude's childhood abuse, and then in real-time see Caleb punch and hit him. It's bad. It's really bad because we see how Jude accepts this as normal, rationalizes the violence, even grimly accepts it because it confirms his self-appointed status of "worthless."

I should mention here that Jude hates sex. His close friends have never seen him with a romantic partner, male or female, and of course they don't pry. His friends are even extremely careful about touching him at all. So sex, sex is way too much for Jude to handle. But he has sex with Caleb.

Eventually, Harold figures out something is wrong, and there is a tense scene where Jude's adoptive father protects Jude, and he chases a drunk, insulting Caleb away. Father stepping up for his son! Overcoming adversity! Except when Jude gets home, Caleb is there (he has a key to his apartment, after all, and since Jude is older now he lives in his own apartment, alone). Caleb strips Jude naked, marches him outside, and then drags him back in to violently rape him. The section ends with Caleb hurling Jude down a flight of stairs, which is when he has his mini-epiphany of x=x. "I was born for abuse," is the proof he affirms for himself.

Now we move to "The Happy Years," Section VI. How much happiness do you think is going to be in here? Well, some, luckily. But also a lot of shit.

Okay, so Jude recovers from the wounds he sustained from Caleb, but is severely emotionally scarred from it. It's one of his major "snapping points" in the book. He eventually attempts suicide, but one of his friends finds him. Here is where we really see that Jude has people who will love him no matter what. This is the sweetness at the bottom of the pain: Jude has people who love him.

The pain part has a lot to do with the monastery, but also with Brother Luke, a quiet man who treats a nine-year-old Jude kindly. You already know where this is going.

Luke abducts Jude and goes on a Lolita-like roadtrip to seedy motels, except unlike Humbert Humbert, Luke pimps his "beloved" out to other pedophiles for money. Yep. There is a lot of this. Jude is coerced into having sex, with Brother Luke as a warped version of a father figure, promising he will keep Jude "safe." This is one of the most harrowing and psychologically unsettling depictions of abuse I've ever seen, and the mind tricks are almost worse than the rape. "You were born for this," Luke tells him, which is beyond heartbreaking. He is training Jude to be a vehicle for sex, nothing more, while leading him on with visions of a perfect future where they live in a happy cabin together.

So of course because a child should never be put in circumstances remotely approaching this, Jude starts acting out. He throws himself against walls until he's bruised all over, which is bad for Luke's "business." So of course Luke teaches a now preteen Jude to cut himself, which doesn't show as much. Yeah, he literally "teaches" a kid how to self-harm as a means of letting off steam.

Luckily, Brother Luke dies. He kills himself when the cops catch up with him, which means cue Jude's scenes of the foster care system. It's ugly, too. He has counselors who rape him every night, and of course they verbally abuse him, too. They beat him, because why not? No one cares about a traumatized child with no parents.

At first, I was shocked, as you might be. After surviving Brother Luke, after being rescued by the police, the police deliver him into a system that exposes Jude to more pedophile rapists? I guess that's the sad truth.

But eventually Jude runs away from them and starts hitchhiking, where, yep, he prostitutes himself to adult men. He ends up getting sick and finding his way to a man named Dr. Traylor, a psychologist who keeps Jude in a basement and forces him to have sex. After an unknown number of weeks/months, the doctor tires of his prisoner and then tortures him in a field by chasing him with his car (Jude is on foot of course, almost naked). Then he actually runs over Jude's legs: this is Jude's "accident," the reason why he can't walk well, while he has agonizing physical episodes.

Damn. So, just take that in I guess. There's also some good stuff: Jude and Willem begin a relationship (Willem is revealed as bi, and doesn't think of himself of "gay" at all, or even "bi" for that matter). I was terrified when they first began dating, because I was sure Willem would suddenly snap and begin abusing Jude like all the other people I'd seen. But this was the difference. Willem was good, a good person, and he treats well. Not perfectly, but with love and care and attention.

During this whole time, too, Jude is making more and more money and rising in the ranks of Rosen Pritchard. He is a famous lawyer now, known for his ruthlessness, which is totally at odds with how everyone else knows Jude. And Willem is a world-famous megastar. (Malcolm and JB are also famous in their respective professions, architecture and art. Everyone gets fame!)

Okay, back to terrible things. Willem learns about, or more precisely finally confronts the fact that Jude cuts himself, and they try to deal with it, and with each other. This is when I actually understood--truly, emotionally understood--how cutting gave Jude a form of control. It was one thing he could do with his body that no one else had any say over. It was his.

Cutting is also a way to defuse the memories of his childhood, which has been popping up in his mind with increasing frequency. (This is the method of delivery of the flashbacks.) But we can sense that the memories aren't going away, that they are getting stronger, and no amount of cutting will help, although Jude certainly cuts himself a shit-ton.

But Jude and Willem's relationship lasts. Sex is a huge issue, but they have it, and Jude feels this is where he fails as a romantic partner. He just hates sex (with good reason for him). Jude blames himself for this, as he blames himself for his physical issues, for his difficulty with intimacy and opening up. He can't believe a good person like Willem would actually choose him. But still, he finds he relies on Willem, and even needs him, more than he's ever needed anyone before. Even when Jude has to amputate his legs from below the knee, Willem is there for him, caring for him, not judging him, not thinking he is deformed or filthy. The two of them truly love each other.

Then, of course, Willem dies. Malcolm dies, too, as they are both in a car when a drunk driver rams into them.

Cue Section VI, Dear Comrade. Jude obsessively attaches himself to everything Willem left behind -- his shirts, his voicemails, his movies (he was a famous actor, after all). He almost starves himself to death, but his friends and family intervene again to save him. It's way too late to be mentioning him, but Andy Contractor is a big form of help, because he's a doctor who's treated Jude since he ended his years-long cycle of abuse. He's one of the few people who knows about Jude's cutting, and at least some of his past. He's also the guy who performed Jude's amputations. But even this amazing man can't "fix" Jude. He just treats him as best he can. Jude, for the most part, tries to live in a delusion of believing Willem is alive. When he can't do that, he drugs himself and sleeps, but in his friends' final intervention, Jude realizes he needs to make a change. He actually tries to regain weight and engage with his loved ones and go to therapy. We see Jude actually trying to be alive.

Section VII, Lispenard Street. This section is told as a letter or message from Harold, as one or two previous chapters were. Here we learn how Jude commits suicide by filling his veins with air (an extremely painful way to die).

So, a few final notes. Some of the things Jude lives through seem melodramatic, Hollywood-like: a deranged psychologist tortures Jude and then runs over him intentionally with a car, in the middle of an empty field? But in a very horrifying way, none of this is really shown in Hollywood: Jude as a child having to have group sex with grown men. So there's this mix of disbelief (Can this really happen?) with reality (Here are the depths life can sink to.)

In the unlikely event you've read this, you may be wondering, "Why would I ever read this thing? It's depressing as fuck." And it is depressing as fuck. It feels like diving into a black pit of horrible feelings. But it also has a lot of sweetness: the friendship of Willem and Jude, of Harold, of Andy and Malcolm and even JB (although Jude and him end up having quite a strained relationship).

After reading this, I feel more emotionally connected to the reality of how hard it is to be disabled. While reading, I understood how I take the simple act of walking for granted. (Even Jude reflects on how he used to run without thinking about how amazing it was.) I also got a sliver of what it might be like to suffer truly horrible, life-changingly horrible abuse. It reminded me that whatever my problems and pains, it was not this. I don't mean to say it invalidated my problems, because it didn't -- just that it put them into perspective. I found this to be a positive thing.

It is easy to read A Little Life as a meditation on friendship, and it is that. It is also a reflection of villainy. Brother Luke and all the abusers/pedophiles are pretty one-dimensionally horrible. Dr. Traylor in particular is a psychopathic madman living under a quiet man's skin. What goodness we see in them is false, a front for violence and rape, and this is a lesson Jude struggles his whole life to understand. Is all goodness just fake? Willem and Harold stand as his major refutations to this idea, but it takes decades for Jude to even start believing it. Progress (both emotional and physical) is painfully slow with him, and it is one of the many things Jude berates himself about. In his mind, he is a weight on everyone around him, a freak, someone to be pitied.

So are there just "good" people and "bad"? I feel bad saying Yanagihara makes this simplistic claim, but it seems so. Several characters are complex--Willem, for one, who isn't always an angel--but you can pretty easily sift people into "good" and "bad" camps with this book. Friends like Andy may challenge, get frustrated with, and yell at Jude, but it's always appropriate and done with love. Harold in particular is the long-suffering saint, respecting Jude's privacy and lack of intimacy for literally decades without ever hurting him. A perfect dad, in other words.

Does reality contain these two pinnacles of humankind? Psychopaths and saints? Well, technically, yes. But thrust into this binary world is Jude and his terrifying sense of grayness, of confusion. Who is good and who is bad? As a survivor of abuse, Jude has to struggle for years to overcome the idea that he did not in fact deserve to be hurt, that he was not "born for" prostitution and rape. In other words, he has to relearn what good is, and this takes a hell of a long time. This is why he ends up with Caleb, another in a series of horrible men Jude had to contend with.

It's worth noting that this book is almost totally about men--male friendships, male relationships (including romantic), male heroes and male villains. These men are rich and poor, black, white, and multiracial, but their maleness stands out like a huge exclamation point throughout the whole novel. I'm sure masculinity is one of the book's themes, but that one doesn't really interest me right now. (Maybe on the second time around reading, if I can stand it.)

I feel like I'm shortchanging Willem in this whole piece, since he really comes through as Jude's anchor, the man who gives Jude a reason to live. Harold is amazing, but he's Jude's dad, and a husband is a whole other thing. Willem is a part of Jude, and Jude takes that feeling 100% seriously. The scenes of them traveling together, having quiet moments together, are beautiful, if tinged with melancholy because of all the horror buffering them.

This leads me to a note about the writing itself, which is cold and clear and fascinatingly nonjudgmental. I think it benefited the story an incalculable amount to write about horrible abuse with a neutral tone; I don't think I could have done it, restrain my hatred for those characters.

Legitimate reviews have noted the fact that the story seems to take place in a world devoid of major events like 9/11. There aren't many pop culture references, even though Willem works in Hollywood. I didn't mind the lack of trendy name-dropping, and in fact cutting that stuff out allowed me to focus on the relationships more. However, I do agree that this stylistic choice gave the story an otherworldly quality, a New York that is somehow divorced from New York, a ... fictional New York?

The metaphors and similes are simple but usually fitting, without being boring, which is hard. Murakami is someone else who is great at this. Yanagihara doesn't go in for high-flying eloquence a la Nabokov; she just lets the story tell itself. For some reason, the image of ice-cold water resonates with her words. Like she is filtering the story to you through a crystal-clear lake, making it actually refreshing, even when you're reading about the worst of humanity.

It is Jude, Willem, and Harold who seem to get the deepest treatment, who are the most focused-on, the most complex. Jude is undeniably the main character, and next is Willem, that patient, loving man who turns a best friendship into something more, and manages to maintain that until he dies. But the overall effect is one of an extended close-up on Jude, a shadowy, often-nightmarish, sometimes dreamlike exploration of his life. He seems so improbable a character because he is: a rich lawyer with a history of chronic sexual and physical abuse living with a superstar actor in New York City. Actually, when I say it like that, it seems slightly less impossible. And this is part of the point, to me: as someone who never lived through that kind of abuse, it's hard for me to really say, "Yes, that can happen. That happens." and believe it. This book helped me believe it. Do I think every abuse case involves being terrorized with a car? No. But does extreme abuse exist? Certainly. Even in my personal life, I've heard stories so unsettling that it makes me turn pale to think about them. So in other words, Jude's story isn't hyperbolic.

Once I accepted this, I accepted Jude as a person much more deeply. I granted him the right to have his problems, because the things that caused those problems were so severe. I was on his side when he didn't want to have sex, even with Willem. Having read hundreds of pages of Brother Luke, I was like, "Dude, if you never want to have sex again, don't." But Jude, always trying to please, makes himself sleep with Willem, at least for a while.

It is this trying that is most noble and heartbreaking about Jude. He pushes on with sheer force of will, trying to live and be happy even though life gave him fifteen years of unfiltered hell as soon as he was born. And, sadly, Jude is overwhelmed by his life (past and present) and kills himself. But by the point that was revealed, I was prepared for Jude's death. I knew the book was going to have him die, in part because the title is A Little Life. It's going to show me the end of a life, as well as the meat of it.

But I was also prepared for Jude's death because as he gets older, we see his slow, unwilling realizations that he is getting closer to it. We see him reluctantly accept that he can't walk anymore, then as he reluctantly accepts that he will have to amputate his legs. The hardest thing to accept, for me as the reader, is the idea that Jude won't ever be able to "get better" mentally. He will always be traumatized.

Even writing those words feels like a betrayal. I'm not a psychologist, but I work in a psychology lab, and it feels like undermining my profession to say that a person can't get better. But the book made me reflect on how hard it is to "get better," to improve and process painful emotions and thoughts, to change maladaptive behaviors and replace them with healthy ones, to learn to be more intimate and honest, to practice self-care instead of self-harm. All these things involve effort and discomfort, and in Jude's case, it was simply too much. His story is sadly not an uncommon one.

But his life, while he lived it, had its periods of beauty and peace. And while they were few and far between, I was grateful to get them; I clung to them, stupidly, thinking, "Now. Now is when Jude's life will only have good things. Because he deserves that."

Well, clearly life never gets to a point of "only good things." Jude always has struggles, always has pain, even when on the outside he looks like a rich white lawyer with his own fancy apartment in New York. He looks like someone who is privileged, and he is: he attains real wealth, unlike 99% of humanity, and he has friendships. Jude knows and understands this, which is part of the sadness, too. He keeps telling himself, "I should be happy. I have so much. There are people with so little." But that way of thinking will never heal you.

Speaking of healing, by the end of the book, I no longer cringed when reading about cutting. I guess I just got used to it.

You could make a case for the book being about sex, or sadness, or trauma, or the difficulty of recovery. But I suppose to me it feels more like a horror story. To be in those rooms, to feel a small fraction of what a child living that life would feel, and to know that somewhere right now that could be--was--happening to a child, is the definition of horror. It's horror because it implicates me, as someone with privilege, as one of the happy people who doesn't understand Jude's silences. But if Jude never was able to "improve," he didn't blame others for their happiness. In fact, he wanted it for them without resentment.

Jude reminds me of that darkly humorous quip from Kafka: "Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope--but not for us."

In Christianity, Jude is one of Jesus' apostles, called "The Saint for the Hopeless and Despaired." Other titles I saw are "Patron Saint of the Impossible" and "Patron Saint of Lost Causes." Desperate people pray to St. Jude. And St. Francis of Assisi is associated with animals, nature, and poverty, as well as an order of monks. I'm not sure if Yanagihara was referencing this St. Francis, or Francis of Paola (who created the Jesuits, which includes Jesuit Brothers), or someone else, or no one. Still, it is impossible not to hear a ring of Christian sainthood, especially the martyrdom flavor of sainthood, in Jude St. Francis.

But enough of sadness, right? I just finished reading this book and needed to get some of it out of my system. I feel better now, but I feel better for having lived with Jude, for having had him percolate through me and leave some of his deep, violent sadness behind. It's not so bad as it sounds; in fact, it makes me feel like more of a real person. The story of someone's painful life and suicide can be uplifting, connected as it is to the fortune and love of having true family and friends. Even if the ratio of dark to light is heavily lopsided, A Little Life ends up on the side of life, of moving on. Maybe it's just the closure that comes from seeing the main character die, that sense of finality, but I feel mildly hopeful right now, like something meaningful was completed. For all the book's inherent grayness, the ending wasn't gray. It didn't leave me hanging. Everything was explained (in graphic detail).

So it makes sense that a book called A Little Life is comprehensive, even if I kept feeling that so much was being left out--more dinners, more parties, more stories of pain. I kept thinking, "I really don't know these guys all that well yet, even though I'm 600 pages in," and then most of them died. You can make an obvious link to real life here, if you want. That sometimes-maddening sense of too much and too little, the difficulty of ever truly knowing a human, while also being privy to things you may wish you hadn't known.

Harold doesn't truly learn what happened to Jude in his early life until the last few pages. Then, after his adopted son's suicide, he finds a letter Jude had written him years ago and hid in his (Harold's) bookshelf. It details all the horrible stuff I've just recounted to you, and this is where Yanagihara leaves us: or not quite.

She takes us back to Lispenard Street, to a scene when Jude and his dad were walking around and found their way back to it, even though Jude didn't live here at this point -- he was older and richer, the two of them were just reminiscing. Jude tells him the story of how once, Willem and he had jumped off the apartment building's roof onto the rickety fire escape, since they and their friends had been locked up there by accident. (We saw this scene in real-time earlier in the book.)

"And then he did." These are the last words Yanagihara gives us. I interpret them in at least two ways: 1.) then he did tell Harold the story, and 2.) then he did jump off the roof, i.e., kill himself (not that he did so then, but the wording implies his suicide).

Well, fuck. I'm tired. Thank you, Jude St. Francis, for showing me you can live even when you're in agony--if only for your friends. You might have killed yourself, but that doesn't make you a failure; it doesn't make your life unimportant, by any means. It just means you lived, and then you died.