The teasing became too much for me, so I flipped at random to page 398, which happens to be where the episodes of child rape start, with the 9-year-old Jude being hired out to redneck johns in motels in West Texas by a renegade Catholic monk. Yanagihara ostentatiously withholds information about Jude’s condition, deploying phrases like 'those years' and 'what happened then,' along with creepy references to a Brother Luke and a Dr. (There’s an oppressive amount of culinary detail early on in 'A Little Life': oyster mushrooms and braised tofu, gougères, herbed shortbreads, cornmeal gingersnaps, lobster, shrimp risotto, banana bread, cakes covered with fondant, duck à l’orange with kumquats, cilantro and upscale hummus.) At college he was a math whiz, and his readily provided assistance with calculus assignments may explain his friends’ loyalty, because he’s a vacuum of charisma. He’s an assistant federal prosecutor who likes to bake. The least repressed member of the gang is JB, a gay Haitian-American artist on the make who gets his first show painting photorealist portraits of his friends: something of a dated style in the era of mobile phones, but then the action of the novel takes place over the course of four decades in what seems like a perpetual 2007, without reference to 9/11, the financial crisis, elections or any other external events.īackstories sketched, vectors in place (the artist, the creative professional, the celebrity actor in the making), the focus turns to Jude. He has a bottom-feeder job at a fancy architecture firm, is anxious about being insufficiently black, unsure of his sexuality and creatively blocked, but he’s always there to loan his friends some cash. The group’s rich kid is Malcolm, the biracial son of an African-American banker and his white writer wife. He grew up taking care of a brother with cerebral palsy, also deceased, and he takes Jude to the doctor after one of his episodes of self-harm. He’s the handsome one of the bunch, a magnet for women’s attention, to which he often seems indifferent.

He makes his living as a waiter between auditions for theatre parts. Closest to him is his roommate, Willem, the recently orphaned son of Nordic immigrants to Wyoming. But Jude arouses the others’ protective instincts. The boys cruise Lower Manhattan in a flurry of real-estate scoping, gallery hopping and résumé banter.

A little life author