Book Review: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Hanya Yanagihara's sophomore novel, A Little Life, is anything but sophomoric. It gets published this week, though I read it in the waning days of 2014, staying up in the night longer than was good for me during the busiest retail season of the year, and finishing it in one last chunk of a five hour reading session on Christmas Day. To say that I was unfit for company when I at last closed the book is to engage in the most careless of understatement. 

This book simply undid me.  And thus it's fitting that a book that was difficult to read is proving difficult to review.  I've put it off for a couple of months now, but as I said, the pub date is drawing nigh, and it's better for me to write my review now so that I'm not unintentionally influenced by anybody else's. 

You will hear two things about this book that I would argue are not exactly true.  The first thing everybody (including the publisher's promotional material) says is that this is the story of four friends.* Not so much, say I. This novel is, more than anything else, a close psychological study of a man named Jude. He has three friends from college, Willem, JB, and Malcolm, whom he remains in touch with in the decades to follow, but he has a deep and abiding friendship with only Willem.  He also has a close relationship with his mentor and father figure, Harold, and his doctor, Andy. The reader may get close third person narration featuring all of the characters, and random chapters of Harold's first person narration scattered in the middle, but never forget that Jude is the sun in this particular heliocentric universe. 

The second thing that everybody says about this book is how beautifully written it is.  Maybe now we're venturing into the realm of quibbling over semantics, but when I think "beautifully written," I think lyrical, poetic.  This book is extremely well written, and Yanagihara stuns (and disturbs) the reader at every turn with her human insights and compassion and generosity. But beautifully written?  Not particularly, in my opinion.  Which is just as well, because to engage in lyrical prose juxtaposed against the story of Jude would seem both careless and cruel, in my opinion. Powerful and stunning, yes, but not beautiful.

In the book, we meet Jude as an adult, but it's not long before the reader comes to realize that Jude isn't like the others.  He's quiet and reserved and he lacks the physical robustness with which his friends are blessed.  He has no family, which is perhaps unusual but not unheard of, but more than that, he has no past.  Or at least no past that his friends know.  While they all sense that Jude's fragile physical condition hints at some childhood trauma, his past is essentially a tabula rasa for them. As the pages unfold, the reader comes to understand some of the childhood and adolescent horrors that Jude has survived that have left him scarred in every conceivable way: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. 

More than anything else, A Little Life is a love letter to Jude, avatar for all of the broken people of the world. It is a testament to friendship and to love, but also to the limitations of friendship and love. In this world, these ideals cannot save what's broken; they can only minister to it. And sometimes that has to be enough.

Despite weighing in at over 700 pages, it is not plot that comprises most of this novel's heft, but character development. With every passing chapter, I came to care more deeply for Willem, Harold, and Jude in particular, and despite having finished this book over two months ago, my heart still aches from the emotional wrenching it gave me. There are books that are hard to put down because they're just that good, and there are books that one needs to put down because they're just that difficult, and A Little Life is simultaneously both.

To say more about the plot would be a bit spoiler, so suffice it to say that we follow Jude and his friends from college to young adulthood and all the way through middle age. Jobs, careers, lovers, spouses, and other friends all flit through, but mostly it's Willem, Harold, and above all, Jude. I'm not sure I've ever encountered such a complete portrait of a fictional character as Jude.  As the reader gradually learns of the horrific abuse Jude suffered as a child,  nearly always at the hands of those who were charged with his welfare and protection, it was sometimes more than I could bear, but as my coworker Nancy says, the readerly exhaustion is nothing compared to what Jude himself must feel on a daily basis. There is a haunting account of grief in the last 100 pages or so that is the most superlative evocation of loss and grief that I have ever encountered. Ever.

This book is not for everybody.  It's possible that it should be accompanied by trigger warnings. But for stalwart readers who value a deep, rich, and emotional experience,  A Little Life will be hard to beat. It's without a doubt the best book I read in 2014 and will probably occupy that position for 2015, despite being only two months (and some change) into the year. For those of you who know me, let me put it this way:  A Little Life has had greater staying power with me than any other book I've read since J K Rowling started publishing Harry Potter.

The cover on this book is pretty terrible, I think. I don't generally like photographs of real people for my book covers as a rule, especially when it's not a biography or memoir. The cover alone will turn many people off, which is a shame.  Let's then forget the cover, and here are some passages that will give a flavor of the writing and the characters:

Malcolm: "He was missing, it seemed, the sense of victimization and woundedness and perpetual anger it took to be black, but he was certain he possessed the interests that would be required if he were gay."

Jude: "And this was worse, somehow, having to have Willem, always Willem, defend him. Against Malcolm and JB! At that moment, he hated all of them, but of course he was in position to hate them. THey were his friends, his first friends, and he understood that friendship was always a series of exchanges: of affections, of time, sometimes of money, always of information. And he had no money. He had nothing to give them, he had nothing to offer. He couldn't loan Willem a sweater, the way Willem let him borrow his, or repay Malcolm the hundred dollars he'd pressed upon him once, or even help JB on move-out day, as JB helped him."

Willem: "Lately, he had been wondering if codependence was such a bad thing. He took pleasure in his friendships, and it didn't hurt anyone, so who cared if it was codependent or not? And anyway, how was a friendship any more codependent than a relationship? Why was it admirable when you were twenty-seven but creepy when you were thirty-seven? Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. "

NB: Doubleday publishes this book on March 10. I read an advance reading copy that was provided upon my request by my excellent sales rep. My aforementioned coworker, Nancy, and I both felt strongly enough about this book to make it a selection for our store's First Editions Club.

* The book was pitched to me more than once as the story of four boys from college, following their friendship a few decades into their adult lives. That's not a book I really wanted to read, thanks. People who want to read a book like that definitely would not enjoy reading this one, and people who would enjoy reading this one might not pick it up because they think it's a story they've seen countless times before. That and the cover are the two biggest marketing mistakes I've seen recently with book this monumental.

Book Review: Long Man by Amy Greene

The evening I picked up Long Man to read, I had never read Amy Greene before. I had just finished a different book and wasn't read to fall asleep just yet, and this book was sitting on my nightstand within reach, so I gave it try.  I picked it up at work to bring home because I was drawn to the colors and composition of the cover image; in a fit of mixing my metaphors and media, it reminded me of a cross between Willa Cather (author) and Russell Chatham (artist), neither of whom I actually know much about.

Turns out that Long Man is just up my alley, ticking off a lot of boxes of things that I love in my novels: Literary fiction? Check. Small town setting? Check. Celebrating the quiet dignity of a people often overlooked by the rest of the world? Check.  Southern? Cantankerous characters with old-fashioned names like Beulah? Exposes how the poor get waylaid by so-called progress for the convenience of the franchised? Check, check, and check.

There's no way to sum up this novel without making it sound dull, unfortunately, because the beauty of this novel lies in the richness of the characters and the location far more than in the actual plot.  It's the story of a handful of people in the small town of Yuneetah in east Tennessee in 1936.  Most of the town has already evacuated at the command of the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), who intends to flood this valley in an effort to bring electricity to the region. A little girl goes missing on the same day that a drifter wanders through, a drifter with a checkered history in this town. Did the girl wander off on her own, or was she taken? With very few neighbors left to head up a search party, the girl's fate becomes more tenuous with each passing hour, especially with the rising floodwaters of the river (known locally as Long Man). Meanwhile, a very old woman who lives on the mountain above this valley reminisces about history--her own and the town's--and how nature will have the last laugh over both.

Amy Greene is masterful at demonstrating that while the 1930s South may have been a simpler time, it doesn't mean that its inhabitants are any less complicated than people today. She also lives up to the writerly admonition to show, not just tell. Here are some excerpts that give a good sense of the prose and tone of the novel:

"The people of Yuneetah were losing more than their property. They relied on each other. If a house was taken by a flood they rebuilt it. If a man got sick they worked his crops. If he died they rang the death bell and the whole town came to see what needed doing. It hurt them to part not knowing when or if they'd meet again."

"For the most part Ellard believed he had done right by his hometown. Outsiders might have judged him for looking the other way when the moonshine runners came through and passed whiskey out by the carloads, but the next day he would see the bootleggers paying their druggist bills and settling up with Joe Dixon. Ellard had always put te well-being of his neighbors above any stranger's idea of morality or justice."

If you like Southern novels, or the works of Kent Haruf, or the literary lovechild that Eudora Welty and Jim Harrison might have produced, you would definitely like this book.  If you savor a sense of place over a fast plot, finding pockets of local flavor amidst this largely homogenized nation of the US, this could be the book for you, too.

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book that I believe I at one time requested from the publisher, but it's possible I just picked it up from my bookstore's galley room. It will be published in February 2014 by Knopf. 

Book Review: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

It's difficult to summarize a book like Claire Messud's The Woman Upstairs, or more precisely, to summarize it and make it sound as interesting as it really is.

Nora is a woman on the cusp of turning forty who fancied herself an artist during her high school and college years, and is thus dismayed with herself two decades later when she is still teaching elementary school. That is, until a certain family moves into town and she falls a little bit in love with all of them and with the potential that each one--mother, father, and son--represents to Nora.

Nora narrates the book in first person, looking back on her life from her formative years through college and onward, but spending most of her time relating in precise detail what her mundane life was like Before and After.  That is, before and after Reza Shahid becomes one of her students and she gets to know his parents, Skandar and Sirena, a couple whose Lebanese-Italian background, by way of France, seems exciting and exotic even in worldly Cambridge, MA.

I had never read Claire Messud before, so I came to this book with no particular expectations, and I ended up being blown away with her insight and sense of language.  The writing is frequently gorgeous and my advance reading copy is full of dog-eared pages. I think what stands out most, however, is Nora's voice.  Nora is a woman whose slow-burning anger has reached a tipping point, and the narrative sears with a rage that is so incandescent that it illuminates her specific character but also Every Woman.  It feels thoroughly modern, but as my coworker Caitlin rightly pointed out to me in a discussion one day, there's also a very classic, almost timeless, feel to it. As if The Woman Upstairs, given a change of setting, could just as easily have been penned by Mary Wollstonecraft or Virginia Woolf or any woman whose life is circumscribed by her time.

Nora's voice is searing, to be sure, but she casts her same critical gaze inward, too, so this is not just a world-done-me-wrong narrative, but also a hard look at the choices she has made for herself, learning to live with those choices, and deciding which ones are worth the time, effort, or courage to change.

Some sample passages for the flavor of the writing, including some where she invokes the Reader, like Jane Eyre does in her narrative:

"I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that I was in love with her--which I was--but in a romantic way--which I was not. You're thinking, how would I know whether I was romantically in love, I whose apparently nonexistent love life would suggest a prudish vacancy, uterus shriveled like a corn husk and withered dugs for breasts. You're thinking that whatever else she does, the Woman Upstairs with her cats and her pots of tea and her Sex and the City reruns and her goddamn Garnet Hill catalog, the woman with her class of third graders, and her carefully pearly smile--whatever else she manages, she doesn't have a love life to speak of. Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us.  There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible emotions, the unrecorded events? Who is it that sees love, more evanescent than any ghost, let alone can catch it? Who are you tell me that I don't know what love is (69)?"

Regarding herself and the members of the Shahid family: "Each of them wanted something, and their wanting made me believe that I was capable. Not that I was an extraordinary woman, exactly, but only not exactly that. Something quite like that. Which always since childhood I had secretely wanted to believe--no: had always in my most deeply secret self believed, knowing that the believing itself was a necessary precondition...My lifelong secret certainty of specialness, my precious hidden specialness, was awakened and fed by them, grew insatiable for them, and feared them too: feared the power they might wield over me, and simply on account of that fear, almost certainly would (119)."

And this little bit, which somehow reminds me of part of Eliot's Four Quartets: "With the distance I have now, I can see that it was one small thought among all the other thoughts that drift like dust motes through a cluttered mind. But it was a thought I made an object, and held on to and turned over and over in my hand, as if it were an amulet, as if it gave meaning to what had come before; and holding on to it changed everything again (135)."

"I was happy. I was Happy, indeed. I was in love with love and every lucky parking spot or particularly tasty melon or unexpectedly abbreviated staff meeting seemed to me not chance but an inevitable manifestation of the beauty of my life, a beauty that I had, on account of my lack of self-knowledge, been up till now unable to see (141)."

This book was a fine, fine read and if there is any justice in this literary world, it will make both the year-end Best Of 2013 lists as well as the awards circuit when the times come.

NB: I read an advance reading copy of this book provided to me at my request by my sales rep. Knopf published it last week. 

Book Review: Talullah Rising by Glen Duncan

So, I finally got around to starting my copy of Glen Duncan's Talullah Rising.  Knopf didn't see fit to provide me with an ARC on this one (despite the fact that I was an early and avid reviewer of the first book, damn their eyes).  Even my sales reps were unable to procure an ARC of this for me, so I had to wait for them to send me a complimentary finished copy and then wait until I had a big enough gap in my reading to fit this one in.

Let me start off by saying that apparently Jake *so* wasn't the last werewolf, as the children in my life might put it. There're werewolves a-plenty in Talulla Rising and they're not taking "no" for an answer. Tallulah is pregnant in the opening chapter, and she and her familiar, Cloquet, have sequestered themselves in a remote Alaskan lodge for the last full moon of her pregnancy.  Little do they know that a rogue sect of vampires are lying in wait to kidnap the werewolf baby in order to fulfill some bizarre Prophecy of Remshi, the first of all of the vampires. Which of course leads to an increasingly unbelievable series of rescue operations and daring escapes, because naturally the first time won't be successful, or else the book would only be 100 pages.

Like the first book, this book is well written and intensely graphic in terms of violence and sex, and those scenes are not always (or even often) mutually exclusive.  This time the author ratchets it up a notch or two with descriptions of torture in the name of science.

In other words, definitely not for the faint of heart.

I noted far fewer beautiful passages in this book than I did in The Last Werewolf; Talullah Rising is substantial, no doubt about it, but it lacks the lyricism of the first book. Here's one passage that caught my eye, though:

"I stood, transformed (jaws open, tongue as thick as a baby's arm, breath going up in signals of dreadful life), half a dozen trees back from the edge of the drive. Moments ago I hadn't wanted this. Now I wanted nothing else. Same every time: you forgot the Curse was an exchange, took your speech and your mercy but gave you in return the planet's dumb throb and your own share in it. Lilac shadows on the snow, the fine-tuned trees, the Eucharist moon and the victim's heart like a song calling you home."

I think the book would be better served with fewer action-y scenes and more existentialism.  Seems like this time around, every few chapters there was a major crisis or a rescue operation gone amuck and time is running out and OMG will they make it? This false sense of adrenalin certainly makes for a page-turning reading experience but an ultimately forgettable (or at least conflateable) series of events. Too bad, because Mr. Duncan really raised the bar with his first book and redefined the genre

I hope that in the next installment that Mr Duncan will provide readers with less flash & adrenaline, more substance and genre-bending expectations.  He introduces in the last couple of chapters the character who is, arguably, the most interesting (or at least the most mysterious) in the book, and if Marco doesn't play a lead role in the next book, then I'll revoke my book reviewing license faster than you can say, "Reader, I ate him."

There's only one thing left to be said, and that is to note what a pleasure it is to read a thing of beauty like this book.  Knopf usually provides good production qualities and solid typography & design, but the two Glen Duncan books really stand out.  The first one was cloaked in a minimal black dust jacket with blood red page edges.  This time around the jacket is blood red with black-edged pages.  Both have alchemical icons printed in an iridescent gold, and I hope that dust jacket on book three will be that same iridescent gold (like Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet that Holt published over a decade ago). The gold would be both transcendent and reflective (two adjectives that describe the books themselves) and make for a splendid-looking book.

Book Blogger Hop: Most Desired ARC (RH folks, are you reading this?)

This week's Book Blogger Hop, sponsored by Crazy for Books, is a short answer for me, for once.  What is the one ARC that I'd love to get my hands on right now?  Easy.  Haruki Murakami's forthcoming novel, 1Q84.  It sold out in Japan upon its original publication and it's going to be a hot-ticket item for this fall.  I'd fall at the feet of my Random House sales reps if they could procure a copy for me. 

Book Review: I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson

I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson.  I think I love I Think I Love You!  

Sometimes in the midst of winter, after the long fall list of heavy-hitting literary books, it's nice to relax with a lighter book.  It's even nicer when the "lighter" book surprises you with an unlooked-for depth to keep the story lingering in your mind just a little longer.  I first read Pearson several years back when she published her debut novel, I Don't Know How She Does It, the story of a woman who tries, with intermittent success, to balance her high-profile, high-finance job with being a good mother and a good wife and a good person.  Since I was not a mother or in a high-profile position at the time, nor did I feel I was ever likely to be, it was an unusual choice for me, but Pearson is a smart writer with keen insight, giving a fresh take on a well-tread trope. 

So I was curious when Ann Kingman, my sales rep for Knopf, mailed me an ARC of I Think I Love You, asserting that I would love it.  Turns out she was right.  Whether in film or novel form, romantic comedies are a dime a dozen and not my usual fodder.  I think it's much harder to write smart-funny than it is to write smart-drama (there's only one When Harry Met Sally for every hundred Maid in Manhattans), and I don't like wasting my time with dumb, so I'm fortunate that I've got sales reps who know my taste and don't try to pass off second rate stuff to me. 

In this novel, Petra is your typical 1970s schoolgirl whose love for David Cassidy overshadows everything else in her life, and Bill is the poor sod paid to write all of the bogus copy for The Essential David Cassidy Magazine. Their paths cross when two pivotal events, decades apart, draw them together.  What starts out on the surface to be simply another chronicle of mean girls and teen idol obsession in a 1970s village in South Wales turns out to be a surprisingly poignant and insightful novel about the agony of adolescence, the cult of celebrity, and the ways we become irrevocably changed by our youthful passions.

I realize now, as I'm going back to find the pages I dog-eared, that the passages I noted tend toward the un-funny, but they are pretty representative of the insights that Petra has about love and relationships.  

"It's so hard for a child to understand their parents' unhappiness. 

Mine, if I'd only known it, were infected with the virus of incompati-

bility.  Nobody died from it, but nobody lived either."  (85)

[Upon contemplating a telephone after attending her mother's funeral]

 "It's not always easy to recognize the significant moments of your

life as you're living them, but Petra realizes this is one of them.  To 

stand in that hall and to realize that neither of her parents will ever

answer the phone again...Death itself is too big to take in, she already

see that; the loss comes at you instead in an infinite number of small

instalments (sic) that can never be paid off." (195)

[On visiting her baby, born dangerously prematurely, in her incubator in hospital]

"As Petra found out, you learn a lot about yourself when you're so close

to that much vulnerability...that the unendurable is endurable, if you just 

take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes

ever with your precious child."

Interestingly, the cover on the finished book looks identical to the advance reading copy I read, with one major change: the publisher apparently decided to stop pretending they cared about a male audience for this book and changed the background from a bright yellow to a bright pink.  My yellow cover looks curiously like the paperback cover for Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (cf the image above [but imagine a canary-yellow instead of the Pepto-pink that is shown] with the image at left to see what I mean). Incidentally, I would think that fans of Nick Hornby would like this book, partly because of the music connection and partly because he also writes smart-funny pretty well. Now, though, the publisher has pretty much shot itself in the foot in terms of marketing to a male audience.  But fair enough.  Not a ton of men were going to read it anyway--mostly men like my husband, who enjoy reading books that one might call "relationship-y," like Nick Hornby, and mostly prefer women's writing over men's writing.  The people who will like it are those who enjoy the works of Hornby, Jill Mansell, Helen Fielding, and other authors who write coming-of-age, women's relationships, and smart-funny well.  

It's a black Friday, Book Blogger Hop!

This week's book hop from Crazy-for-Books is a discussion of what is your favorite book cover.  As a bookseller, I'm inundated with dust jacket images on a daily basis.  And I don't trust people who say they have never bought a book for its cover.  That, my friends, is bulls#it.  It may not be the only, or even the primary, reason you've bought a book.  But unless you only ever walk into a bookstore with a specific title in mind, and then you walk out again having bought that book and only that book, you've bought a book for its cover.  It would be impossible to choose a single book jacket that is my favorite, so I'll launch into a mini-discussion of jacket art instead.

Because I'm a bookseller and thus am usually reading books months before their publication date, over half of the books I read have a non-pictorial cover, or "plain wraps" as we say in the book collecting bidness.  Some galleys (paperback uncorrected proof copies of the forthcoming book) have the finished art printed on their wraps, though, and some are a work in progress, so it's always interesting to see how the art direction has changed on any given title.   One example from a couple of years ago is the imcomparable Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.  This extraordinary novel had me in thrall from chapter one. It's a rare author who can plumb the horrors of civil war and the operating theatre one moment, the vagaries of the human heart the next moment, all with equal deftness, but Verghese rises to the challenge with grace. With surgical precision he limns his characters, treating even their flaws with compassion and a true generosity of spirit, adroitly weaving medical techniques and philosophy into this sweeping story of family & fatherland, love & loyaly.  It is, without a doubt, one of the best books I've read in the last decade.

The copy I read from 2008 was bound in plain salmon-colored wraps--truly a galley copy.  When I raved about it to our publisher's sales rep (Ann Kingman from Knopf), she sent more copies to our store for other readers, but they were the Advanced Reading Copy with decorated wraps that mimicked the final jacket art on the hardcover.  Compare the early 2009 hardcover jacket art with the 2010 paperback art below, left and right, respectively:

     

It will be difficult to discuss the appropriateness of each cover without talking about the plots and story arcs of this book, but I trust that it's not a spoiler when I saw that much of this book takes place in Ethiopia and that much of the drama involves a set of twins.  I love the cloth dust jacket art.  To me, it speaks of something epic and grand, with the boys and their dog silhouetted against a sky that is, at least to me, ambiguous.  Is it sunrise or sunset?  Or could it be something else entirely?  Could those fiery colors in the sky and the scorched black of the ground symbolize something else instead?  (Okay, so I actually don't like the term "symbolize" but the jacket art reminds me of the first time I saw the movie Gone With the Wind. I was quite young, not quite preteen, and watching the movie with my mom, probably on Turner Classics.  In the scene where Atlanta is supposed to be burning, to my young eyes it looked more like a sunset at first.).  So this jacket art simultaneously suggests beginnings and endings, hope and destruction, and in doing so, it is completely fitting for this novel.

Now, I've never been to Ethiopia, and while there's nothing in the book to suggest the lushness of this forested meadow on the paperback edition, I have it on good authority (Mr. Verghese himself, among others) that the country is not without verdure.  But I'm still puzzled why the dramatic change in cover art.  Sales were fairly robust nationwide for a first novel in hardcover, so it's not like the marketing department had to reinvent the book as a palate cleanser so that customers would think is an all-new, never-before-seen novel.  The solitary figure works well enough, I suppose, for the twin who eventually leaves Ethiopia for New York City, but again, I'm puzzled with the green "world between the worlds" aspect (cf: C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew) of the paperback cover. 

For me, though I think both covers are attractive, the hands-down winner for the better, more expressive jacket is the hardcover one.  For those of you reading, which one do you think is better, and why?