Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel A Little Life, released ten years ago, has become a contemporary classic – with notoriety and acclaim boosting its profile in equal measure.
The novel begins by following four friends – Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm – as they navigate careers, relationships and friendship in New York. However, it quickly comes to focus on the story of Jude, gradually revealing his deeply traumatic childhood and the ways it is affecting his adult life.
In 2022, UK publisher Picador re-released the novel as part of its new Picador Collection – a range of “era-defining modern classics”. But how has a novel with such harrowing content become one of the most popular books of the last decade?
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This is one of the clearest examples of the “trauma plot”, which literary critic Parul Sehgal has identified as a defining feature of our contemporary cultural landscape. The trauma plot refers to stories fixated on the traumatic events experienced by their characters, perhaps neglecting other aspects of characterisation or plotting in favour of detailed explorations of trauma.
American essayist Daniel Mendelsohn’s early critique in the New York Review of Books countered the novel’s extensive praise elsewhere. He claimed the relentless trauma and abuse suffered by Jude turns it into “a machine designed to produce negative emotions for the reader to wallow in”.
This matches Sehgal’s criticism of the way the trauma plot flattens characters and narratives into explorations of the backstory, “evacuating personality” and reducing “character to symptom”. Sehgal asks: “In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status – our red badge of courage?”
This question could well be aimed at A Little Life. The trauma plot, and its exploration of the depths of victimhood and suffering, has been the novel’s passport to notoriety.
The power of fomo
It’s not only critics that take issue with the novel’s depiction of trauma. Readers have also commented on the seemingly gratuitous nature of the novel’s content and the extreme emotions and reactions it produces. Search “A Little Life” on any social media platform and you will find countless reader reviews ranging from delight to disgust.
Much of this discourse is rooted in the novel’s notoriety and graphic content, or how much readers cried when reading it. It exists in the cultural consciousness more as an experience than a literary work – a challenge to undertake rather than a story to read.
The West End theatre adaptation, which ran in 2023, added to this. Reviews and audience anecdotes foregrounded the graphic content and fainting audience members, rather than the performances or story.
As a result, there is a culture of fomo (fear of missing out) around the novel, as readers fear they haven’t taken part in one of the big literary experiences of the last decade. This has seen its popularity become self-propagating: more readers, more extreme reactions, more exposure, more fomo.
The novel’s consistent readership has been in large part due to online reading communities like BookTok, Bookstagram and BookTube.
Read more: How BookTok trends are influencing what you read – whether you use TikTok or not
The content they produce is often highly emotional, with creators blending reviews with outpourings of feelings and presenting polarised opinions. Social media platforms and their algorithms reward such extremes by encouraging interaction with and sharing of posts, pushing them – and therefore the novel – out to wider audiences.
The novel also has its own social media presence. The Instagram account @alittlelifebook has 65.2k followers at the time of writing and still makes multiple posts a week, ten years after the novel’s release. The account frequently reposts fans’ novel-related artwork, photography, playlists and tattoos. This has established a norm of how people interact with the novel – in highly personal ways that foreground emotion and intimacy with the story.
This enables a connection and community among readers through their reaction to the depiction of extreme suffering. Just as the play was a sell-out success despite its mixed reviews, there is this desire for the connecting and cathartic experience of reading and enduring suffering.
Queer canon or queer controversy?
A Little Life has become one of the one of the most widely read and loved queer novels of the last decade. That’s despite considerable controversy over the depiction of its gay characters and Yanagihara’s position as a woman writing about gay male trauma.
This controversy has not stopped the actor Matt Bomer, who is gay, from narrating a 10th-anniversary audio book. The actor has also voiced audiobook versions of Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (1956) and Little and Often by Trent Preszler (2021) – both of which explore the alienation of queer people.
A Little Life is continually placed within a queer canon, as academics and journalists frequently discuss and praise its representation. Readers often place it on lists of the best LGBTQ+ fiction despite its controversial handling of this material – again suggesting the controversy is fuelling readers’ curiosity rather than quelling it.
In a 2020 study of the novel’s reception on social media platform Goodreads, researcher Joseph Worthen suggested it is somewhat unique in producing a “reluctant five-star phenomenon” – where readers do not want to rate the book so highly but feel compelled to, because of the strong emotional impact it had on them.
The way emotions trump aesthetics and enjoyment in readers’ judgment of the novel, acting as “a passport to status”, demonstrates why A Little Life remains so popular. It offers a seemingly endless supply of emotion, and possibilities for connection, at a cultural moment when virality rules.
Natalie Wall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
