By Nicole Elphick
Every year a book emerges as the must-read title on everyone's lips. Think Emma Donoghue's harrowing 2010 title Room or the twists and turns of Gillian Flynn's 2012 thriller Gone Girl. Right now the book that every second person seems to be reading is the 2015 word-of-mouth success, A Little Life, a riveting but emotionally devastating read from 40-year-old American novelist Hanya Yanagihara.
The hefty 720-page work follows several decades in the lives of four men who were college classmates: Jude, a brilliant but broken soul whose life has been irrevocably touched by almost unimaginable tragedies; the kind-hearted Willem; the ambitious painter JB; and the wealthy but occasionally adrift Malcolm. (The quartet have proven so popular that, on the book's Twitter account, artwork of the four names can be downloaded so readers can show their fandom via DIY bags and tees.)
Author of A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara.Credit: Jenny Westerhoff
While the novel at first seems focused on documenting the changing relationships between the four, it slowly reveals itself as an exploration of how much the healing forces of friendship can ever truly combat the corrosive effects of great trauma.
The author herself was taken by surprise by how strongly the book has been embraced by the general public. "It really was very slow burning," says Yanagihara, who is currently in Australia for the Sydney Writers' Festival.
A Little Life, out through Pan Macmillan.Credit: Pan Macmillan
"It has been passed from bookseller to reader, then reader to reader. When it was first published I don't think anyone had any expectations, as my first book [2013's The People In The Trees] didn't really do anything at all. I certainly didn't publish it thinking it was going to find a greater audience. I would have been happy if it had just found a few people who were passionate about it. The fact that it's been more than a few has been completely overwhelming."
As well as the fervent response from readers, the book has also garnered critical plaudits. It scored the gong for the Kirkus Prize in Fiction and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. The New Yorker praised its "subversive brilliance", while the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times said the novel was the first of her adult life that left her sobbing.
But among the rave reviews, the divisive book has also found voices of dissent, particularly about the level of brutality visited upon its protagonist, Jude, with The New York Review of Books describing the narrative as an "unending parade of aesthetically gratuitous scenes of punitive and humiliating violence".
Yanagihara says she never at any point felt the novel might have been too graphic. "I knew it was right for the book. It might not have been right for a different book, but it was right for this one." She also fought hard to keep certain things in the novel, writing in a recent essay that she felt some of the changes requested by her US editor regarding the violence, the excess of emotion and the length of the book were only being asked due to reasons of what she termed "Don't Upset the Reader".
"I think it's a specious argument, this idea that the reader can't take certain things," says Yanagihara. "One of the things that I really did fight against with this book was the sense of subtlety. I wanted to go all the way to the limit of good taste. If it comes to wobbling over that line, then I wanted to be willing to wobble and not have it be seen as chilly or remote. I wanted it to be really maximalist, which is not typically how I am on the page, but I wanted to defy my own instincts."
While her debut book was slowly chipped away at over an 18-year period, A Little Life was written during a whirlwind 18 months squeezed into spare hours after work and on days off while Yanagihara was employed at Condé Nast Traveler. "The first one can take a long time, or it took me a long time at any rate, because I really didn't know what I was doing," she says. "With your second book, you know just in a purely mechanical way what the pitfalls are."
Yanagihara recently left her last job as deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine and next up has planned what she calls a "middle-aged gap year", which will see her taking a well-deserved break ("I don't think my accountant sees it the same way," she jokes) to travel through Tanzania, Morocco, Amsterdam, Bali and more.
But for fans who are keen for more from her characters, there is a glimmer of hope that Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm may end up with a further life on the small screen, not a surprising development given the novel's gripping plot and Yanagihara's cinematic prose. "We might be getting close to something, but I'm not sure yet, I think we're in the haggling stage," she says. "But I'll only sell it if it's a limited TV series, I didn't want to sell it as a movie. It needs some time to breathe."
Hanya Yanagihara appears at the Sydney Writers' Festival on May 19 to discuss A Little Life, on May 20 for the Friendship, Hateship, Loveship panel and on May 22 to give the 2016 Closing Address.