"A little life, follows four college classmates --broke, adrift, and bouyed only by their friendship and ambition--as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty ...

Maybe the first thing to say about A Little Life is that almost no one at NUBClub got through the book without crying. The better question was how many times you cried through the book. Yanagihara's long and unrelenting novel is effectively an analysis of how severe abuse and sexual assault scar a life and reverberate through all of one's decisions. Jude is just a deeply, uncompromisingly self-destructive character, and Yanagihara seems to have no qualms at all about making sure he makes every wrong decision and suffers every torture he can. Jude finds a new lover -- he's a violent abuser! Jude has three good friends -- why would he open up to them? Someone actually loves Jude enough to want to adopt him as an adult -- why accept that love? None of us thought it was an unrealistic portrayal of a cycle of abuse, but wow was it a lot to absorb. The power of that depiction, alongside the compelling and very sympathetic view of Willem (Jude's closest friend and sometimes lover) as successful actor and soul-searcher of his own right, made this a favorite novel for a few of us. Others, while not taking away at all from Yanagihara's powerful writing, found flaws in the structure. We weren't really sure why the novel needed to focus on JD at all, and why Malcolm was so briefly sketched while everyone else was richly developed. The sheer magnitude of the suffering Jude goes through started to overload some of us, and we weren't sure why we really needed the book to end the way it did. Is there no hope at all in this work? The critics left feeling it was a good but sloppy and overwrought work, while the supporters defended it as a moving tribute to the horrors of sustained abuse. Whatever you tolerance or preference for this kind of thick sadness porn, just have tissues at the ready if you're going to try A Little Life, because Yanagihara is on a mission to make you cry and this novel will just keep the hits coming until you do.