How to explain this novel’s success? The critic Parul Sehgal recently suggested A Little Life as a prominent example of the “trauma plot” — fiction that uses a traumatic backstory as a shortcut to narrative. Indeed, it’s easy to see Jude as a “vivified DSM entry” perfectly crafted to appeal to “a world infatuated with victimhood.” But Jude hates words like abuse and disabled and refuses to see a therapist for most of the novel, while Yanagihara has skeptically compared talk therapy to “scooping out your brain and placing it into someone else’s cupped palms to prod at.” (Jude’s sickest torturer turns out to be a psychiatrist.) More compelling about A Little Life — and vexing and disturbing — is the author’s omnipresence in the novel, not just as the “perverse intelligence” behind Jude’s trauma, in the words of another critic, but as the possessive presence keeping him, against all odds, alive. A Little Life was rightly called a love story; what critics missed was that its author is one of the lovers.
Reading reviews of the book, I realized I wasn’t alone in my seemingly masochistic enjoyment of the book’s trauma. But there are also those who share my husband’s opinion, hating the book for what it put them through emotionally. I struggled to find an explanation for why I had loved this aspect of the novel, felt I understood it even, when so many others hadn’t felt the same. Then, one day, I found myself saying, “It’s like reading fanfiction! It’s supposed to be over the top!” Suddenly, the book and my dedication to it began to make sense.
It would be a mistake, however, to try neatly to divide the works of anyone into those that speak only to their time and those with a universal resonance. If we look carefully enough, what seems to concern only one parochial period of humanity’s story often says something more general about the human condition.
What does it mean to be free? Throughout her profound debut novel, “None but the Righteous,” Chantal James demonstrates how hard it is to shake myths compounded by a legacy of injustice. In this deceptively slim book, she considers the layers of spirituality and history tangled in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of one young man whose life reverberates with the beauty and horror of the city he calls home.
SEVEN
Cramped room
with my sound-
asleep brothers,
I fantasize
filth—rivers
a convocation of desert eagles rises from your spleen,
each one carrying a stone—this one to mark the blood
leaving your body, your face now a milk white grotto,
& one from the basilica in your heart destroyed, in part,