I knew nothing about this novel when I bought it.  All the kudos, all the hype that followed its appearance last year had somehow passed me by.  It wasn’t until I kept seeing – on the subway, on airplanes, on trains – so many people immersed in A Little Life, that it piqued my curiosity enough to pick it up at my local bookstore.   My first impressions weren’t positive and I came close to giving up on it on several occasions within the first hundred or so pages. It was partly the setting.  800+ pages about a quartet of entitled, privileged New Yorkers – a lawyer, actor, architect, and artist?  Not again, please. I’m very glad I stayed the course. If I had given up, I would have missed something special: a story that eventually grabbed me hard and wouldn’t let go even after I closed the book for the last time.

A Little Life is the story of Jude St. Francis, a brilliant, successful New York lawyer, and the friends who loved and admired him.  That sounds like the summary of a comforting, uplifting tale, doesn’t it?  But Jude has secrets that he can share with no one, secrets so terrible that success, love, friendship, and all the other gifts that usually sustain a life aren’t enough to rescue him, to pull him free from the pit of self-hatred in which years of childhood abuse and betrayal had buried him.

My summary makes A Little Life sound like a melodrama. In some respects it is.  It’s a novel with conspicuous faults.  It’s over-long and often over-written, cheaply sentimental in places.  A better, more confident editor would have pruned it hard.  But these shortcomings, though important, don’t diminish the novel and its power.  I can’t recall reading a story that traveled so convincingly to the heart of someone’s suffering, a suffering so ravaging that it hollowed out its victim, leaving nothing but the longing to die. Parts of it were very painful to read.  I so much wanted the redemptive power of love and friendship to be enough to heal Jude.  I wanted a happy ending, a tidy resolution, a comforting lie.  A Little Life didn’t oblige and that’s why it’s so good.