A Little Life in review
This review contains mild spoilers and carries the same content warnings as both Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel and its further adaptations.
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” is a brash and disagreeable reinvention of Finley Dunne’s 1890’s quote “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” and as the year comes to a close and the melancholy of winter cocoons me, I find myself pondering whether Ivo Van Hove’s interpretation of A Little Life may be the only context in which I find such a quote agreeable.
Bruising and beautiful, visceral and eviscerating, Hanya Yanagihara's tome of a novel follows four befriended New Yorkers in a chronological narrative, with flashbacks frequently interspersed throughout. It is as equally magnetic as it is repellent, carrying elaborate and extensive content warnings not earned from merely a singular event or passage: lacerating depictions of suicide and self harm, lashings and child prostitution, addiction and rape all find themselves at the forefront of its plot and test the audiences trauma threshold repeatedly.
While the book found itself as winner of the 2015 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the 2016 Women’s Prize for Fiction, and found itself a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Fiction, it’s possible that its acclaim has been overtaken by Ivo Van Hove’s monumental theatrical adaptation, but not without controversy.
Compared to its preceding novel, Ivo Van Hove’s staging of the colossal, and previously thought unadaptable, tale appears to be an arousing experiment in terror. The novel's more amiable passages, detailing the four friends' lives in Manhattan, are largely discarded, and, quite promptly, the ensemble recedes and Jude is swept hastily to the fore. With James Norton’s protagonist readied, we are soon introduced to his proclivity towards self harm and, through four hours of monologue, nudity and abuse flashbacks, are left suspended in a veritable atrocity exhibition as the nauseating brutality of Jude’s life unravels.
Koen Tachelet has done an undoubtedly phenomenal job at compressing Yanagihara's monumental work into a theatrical telling: While Yanagihara splinters extended portrayals of friendship and flourishing careers amongst monstrous abuse, Van Hove’s adaptation relies less on these tender moments of unionship and instead incorporates a visceral and agonising vulnerability to assure the audience never loses sight of the characters humanity. It is these moments, depicted frequently with monologue and intervals of nudity, that have been a point of contention amongst critics, but feel imperative to its telling, especially while the characterisation and context of Jude’s entourage have been stripped back and less well drawn.
The underutilization of the characters of Willem, Malcolm and JB are starkly detectable, at times disenchanting, but percase defendable when pondering Van Hove’s adaptation alongside its preceding novel. An unmention of Willem’s promiscuity could perhaps be explained to offset some of the script's abandoned romanticism, but with no mention of the relationship with his disabled brother, Hemming, allowed for a more shallowly constructed appearance. JB’s artistic depictions of the four friends, an integral part of his character and of equal importance in the observation of fluctuating dynamics over the plot's course, were relatively underwhelming. And even James Norton’s protagonist, of whom the script so desperately clings upon, finds himself professionally reduced to assure maximal emphasis on his victimhood: Jude’s career, first at the US Attorney’s Office and later at the corporate firm Rosen-Pritchard goes almost entirely unmentioned, despite the set design allowing for him, like other members of the quartet that frequently engaged in their own work at the stage’s periphery, to showcase this. While these tableaus of relative normalcy do emphasise their ignorance to Jude’s manifest abuse, the opportunity to demonstrate the authority and control Jude himself reclaims as a revered and often ruthless defence lawyer is disappointingly lost.
Another stark literary omission occurs in its transgression to stage adaptation when Lucien, a lawyer from Jude’s firm, and forgotten character within the theatrical performance, suffers a massive stroke and consequently, near total memory loss. When Jude reaches his eventual suicide, he injects an artery with an empty needle, causing a stroke and his subsequent death. Yanagihara’s novel details a heartfelt promise made to Harold, that Jude would not end his own life, and its left to be pondered whether his eventual method of suicide is, in some way, an attempt to honor that promise. Jude’s assurance to Harold becomes even more poignant in wake of Willem’s death as it is debatably the most painful endurance of all, in another testament to the sentimentality Yanagihara relies so consistently upon within the novel.
It’s true that alternative adaptations, such as a feature film, would offer opportunity for a more internal, naturalised telling, but Van Hove’s adaptation, with its expected theatrical constraints and stylistic tethers, allows for the story essentials to be condensed into a powerful and concise examination of barbarous abuse and its nauseating ramifications. While this has received scorn from critics, labelling it ‘torture porn’, I find myself more of a staunch defender of the novel’s adaptation than I am of the novel itself.
The novelist Garth Greenwell represents audiences' ardent attachment to Yanagihara’s writings and brings forth an important discussion surrounding its portrayal of gay male characters, declaring it “the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years,” however I find myself wondering if the latter is too generous, and instead is merely a collision of audience and writer both infatuated with martyrdom. It is undoubtable that Yanagihara knows how to write devastation beautifully, but she doesn’t appear to know how to isolate that from perpetual victimhood. Her unforgiving depictions of queer characters seem to exist only in hospice, her writing unconvinced that life and its saving is a worthy or necessary outcome. Jude is force fed sentimentality, nauseating piety, and his vulnerability exaggerated to a grotesque humiliation and brutality without compassion; surely not the representation the queer community had hoped for.
Even when separated from its pedestal as a novel waving the flag of queer representation, there exists an authorial malevolence in such excessive and visceral depictions of torture masquerading under the pretense of realism. Further than its hollowing reports of savage abuse exists an implcation that the accumulation of abuse has a direct correlation to suicide and ones theoretical right to exist. It's a naive assertion offered by Yanagihara, and, in another format, Van Hove, seemingly without great consideration of its impact or even empirical cogitation that such undue and gratuitous amounts of suffering could border farce.
Ivo Van Hove and Koen Tachelet’s collaboration remains equally as graphic and disorientating, but, stripped bare of Yanagihara’s half developed romanticism and audience compensation, allows for a concise and poignant telling of the cruelty of abuse without sweetened literary palette cleansers. Van Hove’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist, nor is it included for mere shock or titillation. Jude’s suffering is so extensively and excruciatingly documented because it is the foundation of his character, and his characters abuse the foundation of the adaptation. This still doesn’t allow for its adaptation to be deemed palatable, with Jude’s self harm an enduring motif, his white shirt an increasingly bloodied externalisation of abuse, his tribulation remorselessly displayed without being forcefully dramatised, its telling remains guttural and grievous, but, unlike Yanagihara’s portrayal, not quite relentless.
So is this a performance infatuated with victimhood, or is this an accurate portrayal of what it may be to live an existence enduring such mistreatment and exploitation? Is the lack of Yanagihara’s written nuance problematic or efficacious? Could it be that Van Hove’s adaptation is a testament to a societal infrequency in consumption of harrowing and grevious travesty without a cloak of romanticism and consolation?
These lines of questioning borders on the political, and, quite perplexingly, this is a tale intentionally non-politicised: Both Yanagihara and Van Hove’s is a New York of privilege without politics. Aware of its modernity but uncertified in all aspects, we are forced to wallow in the tales eternal present day. There is no mention of the terror attacks within its own locale, nor is there reference to any recognisable cultural figure that could moor the tale to a particular year. The characters’ emotional lives are foregrounded and the political and cultural zeitgeist is rendered into vague scenery and yet, its adaptation remains surprisingly subversive. Despite wealth’s rotten underbelly being left primarily underdeveloped and their privilege undiscussed, it demonstrates as a performance that uses the middle class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation of individuals under the influence of barbarity, abuse, destruction and pride.
To assure theatrical rendering of a timeless present day is wonderfully simplistic staging and lighting: an open plan apartment seamlessly transforms into monasteries and nightclubs, hotel rooms and hospital beds, with illuminating screens playing shots of New York acting as bookends to the stage, offering us perhaps our only tether to an otherwise unmentioned outside world. Jan Versweyveld’s set and the costumes of An D’Huys undoubted artistry in their own right, conceived and curated with poise and consideration. Similarly, the play’s sound design, although obscure, was a grand success, and the central acting performances a theatrical miracle.
James Norton offers an astounding performance as Jude: embodying both adult and juvenile side by side, often within the same scene and the same urbane and soiled costume. His performance of a collapsing past and present is a convincing and powerful theatrical representation of trauma’s ability to endure, and provides another layer of harrowing, tortuous vulnerability that could not have been achieved without such stellar casting. Equally, Jude’s multiple tormentors, portrayed by Elliot Cowan, are acted in a way that not only echoes Jude’s inescapable and visceral hardship, but forges an unshakeable nightmare from which us, the viewers, are unable to become untethered. Cowan’s ability to shapeshift between characters, sometimes oily and vicious, but always unredeemable and unsubtle in their brutality, is both exemplary and extraordinary.
Luke Thompon’s Willem emerges as an almost angelic figure in comparison to the latter and to Yanagihara’s written characterisation: his indomitable niceness, puppyish decency and unwavering devotion to Jude offer some of the only refuge and relief compensated to the audience, and despite my critiques of a half written character, Thompon assures a superlative portrayal. Omari Douglas and Zach Wyatt represent the remaining duo of the four protagonists, and although underutilised, do a superb job at engaging within their allotted positions.
Numerous critics have contemplated if it weren't for such spectacular and phenomenal showmanship, would the audience have remained in their seats for the near four hours of emotional terrorism, and I find myself pondering exactly why we did. Were we persisting out of sheer hope for a sunset and happy ending? Were we hoping to be offered consolation? Were we anticipating for Jude to emerge as a villain, with something tangible to tether to his character, making all its barbarity justifiable? Were we wanting to emerge from this a somehow more empathetic audience, more knowledgeable on the relentlessness of abuse and its lifelong ramifications? Or was it just a spectacle in morbid curiosity?
It was Parul Sehgal in an article for New Yorker that described Yanagihara’s writing as an “exemplary novelistic incarnation” of “trauma theory,” referencing theorist Cathy Caruth’s notion of traumatic events as not a simple, healable wound. If Yanagihara is accurately described in such complementaries, why, as an author so phenomenally capable of narrating wealth and misery, tenderness and devastation, was there no developed reference to psychology? Instead we are left with an onslaught of depredation and literary manipulation. It seems that Yanagihara’s relentlessness manifests not only in Jude’s excruciatingly detailed abuses, but in her exploitation of consumers' weakness through bloodied, barbaric, and cheap shock. If Van Hove’s adaptation is to be besmirched by critics as sadism, Yanagihara’s is nearer to Munchousen by proxy.
Her presumption of a credulous audience is apparent and distasteful, not once does it seem she considered the implications of her writing, or its potential to be received as farce. It takes a greatly skilled writer to so poetically avoid adequately addressing psychology for eight hundred odd pages, but not a good one. Martin Amis once famously queried, “Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?” and the surprising answer is that, despite her efforts in misery, Hanya Yanagihara has. Yanagihara’s is a story of tenderness, both painful and adoring; hinging on sentimentality and bordering both exploitation and exhibitionism. Van Hove’s is instead a tale of abuse; coarse, simplified, harrowing and unabated.
Depictions of much of the mistreatment Jude suffers has long been cloaked in teary eyed romanticism, inchoate and exploitative in its portrayals; the ageing of childhood trauma packaged with a beautiful idealism, its effects only surfacing in ways that are palatable for audience consumption. It is an undoubtable rarity to find such graphic depictions of abuse within mainstream media, of that comparable to Van Hove’s resolute rendering. Within literary fiction, Nabokov’s lyrical prose cocoons the complexity and horror of monstrous paedophilia throughout his 1955 novel Lolita, the torture of Theon Greyjoy in A Game of Thrones, although repugnant, is still dressed in fantasy, and it seems the only sustained depictions of depravity remain within horror, where writers appear liberated to be less decorous and the audience subscribes themselves eagerly to witness whatever graphic and formidable onslaught is to be showcased.
Van Hove’s theatrical adaptation offers a whiplash-inducing bifurcation between Jude’s endurance of odious abuse in the present, existing to us in flashbacks and the stellar narratorship of Nathalie Armin, and the execrable ramifications that persist. It’s undoubtedly disorientating and uncomfortably graphic, but staunch in its dedication to realism under the constraints of a story oversaturated with barbarity. Showcasing this brutality with poise, Van Hove appears strikingly capable of articulating a tale of endurance and tortuous tribulation without undue exploitation: it remains close to the point, and adamant in its refusal to stray. He isolates Jude’s manifest abuse, quiets the external noise of his counterparts and curates a demonstration in terror, barbarity and its lifelong ramifications.
Too, Van Hove has assured that Jude’s tormentors exist further from the hollywood horror tropes of masked killers and violent gun men, and exist instead as both known and human. Cowran’s maleficent characters are vivid and emotionally exhausting, graphic and relentless, and not once envisioned as a misunderstood victim; a grand feat when presenting fictionalised abuse within the mainstream media. While Van Hove disregards audience comfortability in a way entirely necessary to unpick the unadulterated grotesqueness of abuse, due to the latter and various more subtle, storytelling marvels, there is still room for us as an audience to engage in these travesties without sacrificing our own vulnerability.
All too often we have bore witness to approaches, varying in their success but similar to Yanagihara’s; tales of abuse within the context of glorification, exploitation, artistry and sentimentality. It feels radical to suggest within lyrical prose, theatre, or further media that abuse, in all its materialised formats, is disturbing, unromantic, and unproductive. Trauma is not a personality trait, nor does it define a character's personhood, and there is worthy criticism of both Van Hove and Yanagihara within the latter, but it does endure, through decades and fictional storylines, through joy and through sadness; much like grief, the impact of abuse is often there to be grown around instead of shrunk.
Whether A Little Life has earned approbation as the first piece of media to successfully elevate depictions of abuse from exploitation and horror, or it merely proves as evidence that men are capable of lasting more than two minutes while conceiving something of passion, I find it undisputed that A Little Life is one of the most grievous, complex and divisive pieces of fiction to settle within the mainstream across the past decade, and likely for years to come.
Note: I thoroughly recommend Andrea Long Chu’s January 2022 article for Vulture as a detailed unpacking of Hanya Yanagihara's published novels, their themes and as a sensational example of literary critique focusing on A Little Life.
