“Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases…life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully. “
A character says this early in A Little Life, a sprawling (700+ pages), heartbreaking, frustrating, indulgent, and accomplished novel. It is a comment by the adoptive father of the protagonist, Jude, who has had a life you wouldn’t wish on anyone. Abandoned as a baby by parents he never knows, he is abused by the brothers at a monastery that take him in. After he escapes with kindly Brother Luke, he is sold into child prostitution. He escapes eventually, only to be abused again.
Fortunately, we don’t learn this immediately. As the novel opens, Jude is one of four college friends starting life in New York. He and Willem are apartment hunting in the first scene, meeting their friends JB and Malcolm for lunch at a favorite dive afterwards. From the setup, you expect this restaurant to appear again and again as their hangout. It is one of several surprises about this novel that we never see them there again.
Another is that Malcolm and JB, presented as co-leads, are only tangential to the plot. They come in and out as supporting characters, JB more centrally at the beginning and Malcolm in a shocking twist near the end. Overall, this really is Jude’s story and, to a lesser extent, Willem’s.
Willem becomes a successful actor while Jude is a litigator. Their decision to become romantic partners surprised me a bit. It’s as utilitarian a love story as I’ve ever read. It was also my first problem with the characterization: Willem is so ideal and saintly that I wasn’t sure what the author meant by him. Was he coupling with Jude out of brotherhood or romantic desire? Guilt over his young brother’s death? Or is the author depicting the platonic life partnerships that some encounter in modern life?
To be clear, Willem and Jude are not strictly platonic. However, their tortured sex life is also something you wouldn’t wish on anyone. Are we supposed to want them together or apart? The author has interesting things to say about inevitable settling.
There is a cruel final twist towards the end that lands like a plank of wood. I’m inclined to applaud the bleak courage it took the author to upend everyone. The final life rearrangement is not wonderful but brutal.
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