A Little Crazed…why is Hanya Yanagihara’s Man Booker shortlisted novel so divisive?
Having raced through Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (no mean feat: it’s massive) I’m not surprised this is the book that everyone’s talking about right now. The favourite to win this year’s Man Booker prize, with its American author (deputy editor of The New York Times Style magazine) interviewed just about everywhere, one thing is obvious: nobody but nobody is neutral about this book. The responses – whether outraged or glowing – are as passionate and crazed as the novel itself.
The story follows four male college friends in New York from their early 20s to their mid-50s. One of them, Jude St. Francis, is physically and emotionally damaged by appalling childhood abuse. Slowly, Jude’s history is revealed, and his friends offer unconditional, if frightened, love.
On Twitter, people are talking about having to put the novel down and walk away from it, too distraught to continue; there is even a Facebook group for people who need ‘a shoulder to cry on’. Some are furiously tweeting that it is ‘homophobic’, and yet an essay in the Atlantic heralded it as ‘The Great Gay Novel.’ Cathy Rentzenbrink of The Bookseller stayed up the whole night to read it in one go, whilst Christian Lorentzen in the London Review of Books finds the book flawed and ridiculous (‘What real person trapped in this novel wouldn’t become a drug addict?’).
I found A Little Life intense, sometimes overblown, largely implausible, overlong, often horribly distressing and completely engrossing. While the other Man Booker shortlisted authors – Tom McCarthy, Marlon James, Chigozie Obioma, Sunjeev Sahota and the peerless Anne Tyler – garner impressive reviews, none are provoking the levels of passion and fury that Yanagihara’s book is. Perhaps this, above all, is the sign that A Little Life should bag the Man Booker.
