Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel, A Little Life, was garlanded on its US release with the kind of fervid encomia that are the speciality of peppy American book reviewers. It has been longlisted for the Man Booker and is already 2-1 favourite to win the prize come October. The novel takes us on a 700-page tour of the life of an emotionally and physically damaged man, Jude St Francis, and the friends who try to stand between him and the demons (or “hyenas”, as he sees them) that torment him. It is a book about the limits of friendship, about the depths of pain and shame that a human can endure about the unending legacy of abuse.
Reading the novel over an intense three-day period this summer, I was struck by an eerie sense of déja-lu. Not that it is derivative, exactly, but rather that A Little Life feels snatched from another time, specifically the 1990s. It is partly the resemblance to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which is a clear precursor, but also that the book’s introspection, its focus on individual suffering, abuse and self-harm seemed to draw upon a peculiarly 90s obsession that stretched from A Child Called It to Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers and Marilyn Manson cutting themselves on stage to Girl, Interrupted and The Virgin Suicides. It is a serious book, taking itself seriously in what seems to me a very American, very 90s manner.
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