Overall: 3/5 stars
BLURB: When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.
Okay, so this is not the book for anyone that is not feeling 100% good and content about life because it will make you feel everything but good things. When other people had recommended this book to me, the general consensus was always that it was sad and that it would break me. And, naively, I thought people were just talking about an ending, that surely there would be good moments in this 700+ page book as well as bad.
Well, I was fucking wrong wasn’t I? Jesus christ, if I had to describe this book in one word it would be grim. So unbelievably, unrelentingly grim. This is at the heart of why I only gave the book three stars. Because it does deserve five. This is a book that is so insanely, beautifully written and I don’t think in its entirety there is one unnecessary word or plot. It all fits together so beautifully and, honestly, immaculately.
Yanagihara uses perspective so cleverly -- flicking between the four boys and a few other supporting characters in a way that weaves the novel so rich and full of life. I genuinely thought that these characters were real people, living real experiences, they were so deeply written and fleshed out; and I recalled all the little moments between them and learned all of the different characters names (which is unusual for me for books of this length, or focusing on this many men).
The viewer hears the same story from not one, but two or three different perspectives and with how each character perceived each moment. We learn why characters reacted the way they did to events sometimes hundreds of pages after they happened and we laugh and cry and sob along with the characters.
The text also beautifully alludes to such big tragedies, it’s like (pardon the unimaginative analogy) watching a train wreck in slow motion but being powerless to stop it. It undercuts all of the good and beautiful moments in the text, because you know there is pain yet to come.
There’s something Yanagihara does so well, and that’s showing the long term effects of bullying/abuse on the characters. There’s one moment, where a drug addicted character makes fun of one of his friends for his disability (it says something about this book that writing that moment out doesn't phase me or feel particularly tragic) and it shows the long term impact on his friend, having someone who he trusted break that and be cruel toward him. It's so beautifully and tragically done (take a shot for everytime I say tragic in this review) and something that was so impactful for me to read.
It’s also a book that made me love and then hate and then love and then hate and seesaw on every single character in this text. It didn’t matter if they were the main character, one of the boys or a supporting one. All of these people do terrible things, and all of these people do exceptional things for each other. It’s raw, it’s brutal and it’s utterly fantastic writing.
Speaking of, one of my favorite things about this text is the nontraditional relationship at its heart;
“[t]he word “friend” was so vague, so undescriptive and unsatisfying-- how could he use the same term to describe what Jude was to him that he used for India or the Henry Youngs? And so they had chosen another, more familiar form of relationship, one that hasn’t worked. But now they were inventing their own type of relationship, one that wasn’t officially recognized by history or immortalized in poetry or song, but felt truer and less constraining.” (Yanagihara, 569)
This is something beautiful and, to be honest, unexpected about this text, which, for the record, is quite a gay book (for better or worse). But that never feels like anything big for the characters, it is merely their lives, and I loved that.
The heartbreaking thing about this text is that the beating heart of it is simply Judes struggle for autonomy. And I adore that. It’s crushing and beautiful and you can see its thread woven so eloquently throughout the text everything comes back to it.
I think my favorite moment of this book, one I noted to talk about in this review, was during Chapter 23. One character tucks his partner into bed while a dinner party with all their friends goes on in the next room and there’s something so domestic and sort about it that it made me cry. And it’s really funny that that’s the moment in this book that made me ball my eyes out but it did, though, maybe I just needed to cry. I continued crying, as the chapter went on, time passed and the partner (tucked into bed previously) got an infection. In his fever, he forgets who his partner is and there’s another heartbreaking scene where his partner has to explain to him both who he is, and who the character is himself. The descriptions and language used continue to break me and damn did I continue crying here too.
I’m almost proud to say I only balled my eyes out once (above) and cried, somewhat lightly, a second time at the very end of the text. At his adopting, Jude hides a CD with his singing and some letters at his adopted fathers house. Then, decades later, when we, as the viewer, have totally forgotten about the moment, right at the end of the book, the father finds the CD and plays it and reads the letters and it's just such a potent moment it’s absolutely stunning and I’m so glad Yanagihara included that. I’m repeating myself, but I thought it was so clever that it came up right at the end when the viewer had forgotten about it. I loved it. I’m in awe.
Ultimately, I'm so so conflicted about how to rate this book. Because it is so incredibly beautiful, clever and stunning and if I was simply writing it on the style the author would get six stars. But I can’t separate the content, which is horrific and bleak and about every kind of trauma you could think of. So, I can’t give this book more than three stars because of that and because it was such a heartache of a read. So, I guess the only note I would end on is to be careful when you pick this book up, because it is so so so stunning. But it’s also so so so heartbreaking, and to be honest, cruel, in the same breath.
Reviewers note: I actually cheated, I’d been trying to read the physical copy of this book for four years, and couldn’t get more than 50 pages in. So, instead I picked up an audible free trial and listened to it for 33 hours, narrated by Oliver Wyman who did an incredible job. I’d highly recommend this audiobook version.
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