Considering how seemingly universally loved 'A Little Life' is I'm jumping in the deep end here by saying: I thought it was ok, but certainly not great.

Wait, wait! I'll explain.

Author Yanagihara is a really good writer, and some of the scenes show that off incredibly well. Indeed, I'd argue that the strength of 'A Little Life' is in these fragmentary, mundane vignettes. She's so good at capturing moments in time in almost every sense: grounding tactile details, small character portraits, the emotional inner life of the character being focussed on, the mood. These sections in the text are not only strong from a technical standpoint, they're also just really interesting. There are several of these sections that take place at parties or restaurants, and she draws your attention as the reader to these minute details that feel like the written equivalent of candid photographs that really capture something of the soul of these moments in, yes, a little life.

But therein also lies the problem.

These stunningly vivid vignettes are at direct odds with the actual plot of the novel, which is this intense drama, and speaking just for myself, I'm not usually in the mood for both of those things at once. All that to say: the pacing of 'A Little Life' is all over the place, and it never feels particularly intentional, and then in the last third or so of the book she just... stops with the vignettes altogether and writes it as a straight drama. There's still a flavour of attention to detail in the same way, but it's all in service to the overarching plot.

And I thought that was good and fine too, but it was a jarring shift in pacing.

While we're here let's talk about structure.

The way 'A Little Life' initially presents itself; you'd think that this novel would focus fairly equally on the intersecting plotlines of four friends (Malcomb, JB, Jude, and Willem) by cycling through their different points of view. But no. Though both JB and to a lesser extent, Malcomb, get a few vignettes over the course of the novel, none of that information ever really goes anywhere, and they're so sparingly included that it's plain wrong to say that either of these characters is a protagonist, certainly not Malcomb, who I think is given one POV section, and thereafter merely referenced. And then JB gets maybe three sections if I'm being generous, though because he has more baring on the plot we'll count him as a principal side character.

In other words: any POV sections not focussing on Jude or Willem are, in terms of the actual plot, dead weight that just absolutely weight the first third of the novel down and then are cut loose and never important again.

The same could be said of the sporadic first-person ramblings by Harold, Jude's mentor and father figure; but these at least come home to roost in the end, and would have been completely fine but for the aforementioned extraneous POV sections. Also, considering that the final chapter of the novel is from Harold's POV (for good reason), it would have made sense to start with his narration too, but that's more of a subjective editorial opinion.

On that note, I absolutely did not jive with the way that Yanagihara dragged out clueing the reader in on the identity of the POV character at the beginning of each new chapter. And it was clearly on purpose, because she did it every single time: wait one or two pages before including their name or some obvious identifier. And again: for no discernable reason other than stylistic preference. But it made it frustrating as a reader because I'd end up having to skim down each page to figure out who's POV the chapter was from and it took be out of the story every single time.

Finally, the plot itself, minus the bells and whistles of the structure and writing style.

Controversially, I thought it was...alright.

I can't say this with anything other than anecdotal evidence to back me up, but I have the feeling that people are less willing to criticize sad or tragic stories on the grounds that authors should be encouraged to tackle serious subject matter. Or some such thing. As though compounding tragedy is somehow more 'real' or likely than compounding good fortune.

It's not.

Fact being stranger than fiction, it's not that what happens in 'A Little Life' couldn't happen, or that every story must have a happy ending -- as a lover of horror I'd never be caught dead saying any such thing. However, aspects of the compounding tragedies of 'A Little Life' felt, at times, to verge on melodramatic, as though when she set out to write this novel, Yanagihara first sat down and wrote out a list of every single bad thing that could possibly happen to a person and then went: 'yes' and included them all. Well...all but one, and we'll get to that.

'A Little Life' is essentially a cheese platter of tragedy: drug addiction, self-harm, rape, and death in three flavors: accidental, suicide, chronic degenerative disease.

It's a lot, but that also made it predictable and, dare I say, boring.

I could never get invested in anything that went well for any of the principal characters because by about the halfway mark it was painfully obvious that they were all doomed. Doomed not even by circumstance, but by the meddling author of their world.

This brings me back to the one thing that didn't go wrong for anyone in 'A Little Life.' You'd think with so many high stakes issues that these people were grappling with all or most of them would be struggling financially in addition to mentally and physically. But no, no, they're all wildly, and I really do mean wildly, successful in their respective fields. A world-famous actor, a world-famous painter, an uber successful high-powered lawyer, an uber successful high-powered architect.

Come on.

I don't know what odds game Yanagihara was playing at, but if she thinks that every single member of a college friend group ending up with that level of success period, never mind that it was completely even across the board for all them, is likely then she's out of her mind.

So we have this fantasy world where everyone is a rousing success but also doomed to misery and I dunno, but, to pull out a pedestrian phrase, I'm going to call bullshit on that.

And it's too bad, because it really did make me care less about the central character of the entire 700+ page saga.

In summation: 'A Little Life' did not know whether it wanted to be a series of loosely related vignettes to highlight how the small moments are, ultimately, what make up a person's life and that they're worth focussing on or a tragic drama about the incredibly sad life of one specific person.

That being said, I liked Yanagihara's writing style quite a bit, and if she releases anything shorter I'll gladly pick it up because shorter pieces seem to be her strength and I would be excited to read something like that from her.

However, if I see another beast of a novel with her name on it, I'll be turning tail and running the other way.