Why settle for classic porn when you can read Hanya Yanagihara’s tragedy porn?
Someone warn the porn industry, a strong new contender has entered the market on the 10th of March in 2015 and is ready to steal the show, I am speaking of the one and only A little Life by Hanya Yanagihara.
Despite being a man booker prize finalist to vouch for its quality, this work of fiction is infamous in the book community of being labeled as grotesque misery porn for its tragic events throughout the book.
My main problem with this tragedy is that we were deprived of any sincerely happy events to even out the heartache the readers felt throughout the story. It felt like every obstacle our main character Jude St Francis faced was forced; No one enjoys being bombarded by a novel into being emotionally invested and coerced into having some sense of pity towards a character when that should have come naturally.
Not only that but this book of 816 pages was unnecessarily long, it felt like just another one of the author’s manipulative tricks to make us care for the characters by dragging the book, thus obliging the reader to spend more time with said characters, so eventually the heartbreak would be unbearable.
Jude’s childhood was immensely brutal, it contained unthinkable horror and trauma that stained his adult life and pushed him into developing serious self-destructive behavior from aggressively cutting himself to throwing himself in abusive relationships. The book ends with Jude killing himself after the tragic death of the love of his life and best friend Willem Ragnarsson in a car accident. The key issue here is that the message that Hanya conveyed and promoted was; if your agonizing and traumatic experiences make your life dreadful, why bother living at all? Now, I am not an expert by any means but committing suicide when faced with depression is probably not the best note you could end your book on.
The queer representation, or lack of in this book’s case, has caused a huge controversy among readers.
A little life starts out as a post-college book and spans decades from there and Willem is one of the first characters we have come to know and who had a consistent presence in Jude’s life as his best friend and confidant throughout the novel. A love story ignites between the two men towards the fifth section of the book titled “The Happy Years”. However, despite Willem being romantically and sexually attracted to the male protagonist, he was still described and labeled as straight seeing as, in the author’s opinion, he was still attracted to women. Newsflash Hanya, bisexuality is very much a thing and it is time we acknowledge that.
