"There is nothing subtle about A Little Life. I really push the conventions of a literary novel, and the restraint of the literary novel. I think that we live in an era where novels are about distance. This is not about distance. It's about largeness and exaggeration of emotions. I did mean it to feel a little vulgar, a little extreme on the senses."
Over the course of two books, Hawaiian-born Hanya Yanagihara has fashioned one of the most distinctive, powerful and provocative voices in contemporary fiction.
Her writing is both an extension of her life and character, and a tantalising refutation of them. The People in the Trees, Yanagihara's first novel in 2013, told the life-story of Norton Perina, a brilliant, cerebral and controversial scientist who believed he had found the key to eternal life on an unspoilt Pacific island. The grand themes – science, family, colonialism, cultural relativism – reflect aspects of its creator: formative years spent on Hawaii, a scientist father and a globe-trotting career as editor-at-large for Condé Nast Traveller.
When I met Yanagihara in 2013 to discuss The People in the Trees, her bright, sunny personality belied the novel's coolly intellectual tone and unsettling subplot, in which Perina is imprisoned for paedophilia (the character was inspired by real-life disgraced genius, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek).
The longer we spoke, the more I realised how artistically uncompromising Yanagihara actually was. “Both my editors asked about the reader’s comfort level. But that’s not something I am really interested in. When you don’t have to depend on [novels] for your identity or your income, you can do whatever you want.”
She ended that conversation by mentioning a second, nearly completed follow-up. "Very long and unsellable", it "was very different [from The People in the Trees]. It is about four male friends in New York who age from 25 to 50."
Last month that second novel, called A Little Life, was released in America to an ecstatic reception. On a recent trip to New York, every bookshop I entered displayed the 700-page literary blockbuster centre stage alongside a cascade of worshipful reviews. Edmund White confessed that the "utterly gripping" novel "kept me reading late into the night, night after night". Cathy Rentzenbrink of British tastemaker The Bookseller declared that "I will be heading to the barricades if this doesn't win prizes galore".
With A Little Life about to be released around the world, I talk to Yanagihara over lunch in London, finding her both different and the same. Since we last spoke she has left Condé Nast Traveller, just installed in the Freedom Tower, and transferred to The New York Times. And although Yanagihara mentions disagreements with her literary editors again, she sounds genuinely humbled by early responses. "It has been gratifying to see people respond to it in so many different ways and for so many different reasons. I have heard from people who felt it opened some path to abuse in their own past. Some don't read it as a narrative of abuse at all. I don't think a book can answer any of those things, but it is humbling that someone would tell you something like that about themselves."
Like its creator, A Little Life is both a continuation of The People in the Trees and a departure from it. Fans of Yanagihara's debut will recognise her apparent fascination with male relationships – their competition and rivalries, love and hate, tenderness and abuse. "I find men interesting because there are a lot of things they are never allowed to discuss, never allowed to feel and never allowed to put voice to. With women, you can talk about anything – politics, make-up or childhood. With two men together, it's a very different conversation. To witness those conversations is to witness what's not being said."
This perfectly describes the cool, slippery and intellectual mood of The People in the Trees which examined masculinity's most extreme excesses. A Little Life, by contrast, is emotionally overwhelming, wearing its heartbreak on its sleeve. "I wanted to do something that felt a little dangerous, that felt inescapable. I wanted something that felt uncomfortably emotionally intimate. I wanted the reader to begin the book thinking it was about post-college New York life and then realise they are falling into some sort of abyss, and there is nothing to break their fall."
A Little Life does indeed begin like one of Yanagihara's beloved coming-of-age campus novels, describing a love square between four male friends: handsome actor Willem, mercurial artist-in-waiting JB, Malcolm who is privileged, steady, but constantly anxious, and finally Jude, the enigma within the novel's riddle. These shifting alliances coalesce into a love letter to the glories and pitfalls of long-term friendship. "I was interested about how relationships change as you get older. You are great friends in your 20s. In your 30s you get married. Your 40s are all about your kids. In your 50s you get divorced and your friendships become primary again. There is an interesting rediscovery of the complications and pleasures of non-sexual friendship."
Although A Little Life begins as an ensemble piece, it is dominated by Jude, the orphan whose desperate past and troubled present command the attention of his friends and readers alike. "I wanted to write a character who never got better," Yanagihara says of her complex hero. "In novels, and American novels in particular, it's not just about redemption, it's about forward movement and healing oneself. Americans are very big on getting better. I wanted to write a character who fundamentally never does. Jude is very consistent. His logic remains the same. His methods of self-soothing remain the same."
Jude’s unrelenting stubbornness and despair proves both frustrating and deeply moving, the slow reveal of his bleak childhood both excruciating and harrowing, to use Edmund White’s word. “I do think there is a point where some people are too damaged to be alive. I wanted readers to ask, is there a point at which somebody really is better off being dead? Is there a point in which they have sustained such trauma that life itself is simply not worth the pain it takes to keep going through one’s days?”
Yanagihara has no answers to these testing questions, and sounds sceptical of psychologists whose only answer she sees is one of continuous endurance. “It is the one medical profession that will not give a patient permission to die. How can that be? For therapy, life is always the point of life. I don’t think life is always the point of life.”
In this context, A Little Life interrogates notions of value and happiness as espoused by the 21st century American dream. Jude achieves everything his society could ask for – money, a stellar career, a glorious apartment, friends, and eventually love with a movie star – but discovers that they offer only temporary respite from his original anguish.
“We tend to talk about death as if it is losing a battle, but that assumes living is winning and dying is not. In America where everything is about winning and losing, it seems an awfully reductive way to think about people who choose to stop whatever pain they are in. All the skills Jude has are the ones that count in society – intelligence, money, ability. But he doesn’t have the fundamental skills he needs to be healthy. This is not a way of blaming him. I hope it makes readers consider the qualities we do value are maybe not the most useful ones in the end.”
A Little Life has already been hailed as a queer classic – not only for many of its readers' perception of tender, gay relationships, but also for presenting alternative visions of all social relationships, whether parental, platonic, professional or romantic. Even the conventional Malcolm decides against having children. "My characters are choosing a really different version of adulthood," Yanagihara argues.
In many ways, the 40-year-old writer is in an ideal position both to evoke the allure of mainstream capitalist culture and to critique it. On one hand, she has worked tirelessly to attain the sort of life most people dream of: jobs at Condé Nast Traveller and The New York Times, a lovely apartment in the Soho district of New York City, world travel and now literary success.
On the other, Yanagihara is a born outsider. The eldest child of Japanese-Americans (she has a younger brother), she grew up on the margins of the United States in Hawaii. While she attended the prestigious Punahou High School, which counts Barack Obama as an alumnus, she is also the first member of her family never to work in the fields “picking pine or pineapples or beat sugar cane, as both my parents did when they were young”.
Yanagihara has incorporated this measured non-conformity into her adult philosophy. Motherhood, for instance, holds no attraction. “I don’t like kids. I don’t live in a world where people have kids.” And although she has recently been in a relationship with a man from outside New York, she declares herself at odds with America’s obsession with marriage. “I am slightly suspicious of the government legislating a relationship, period, between two adults. I don’t think marriage is a good thing for women in general. It just seems a little bit feudal. I find it very disturbing that you would just turn over everything that you’ve earned to somebody else.”
Yanagihara is quick to reject any suggestion of self-conscious rebellion on her part. “I think I am very conventional. The privilege of being unconventional is for those of us who have been raised completely conventionally.” Unlike Jude’s, Yanagihara’s background sounds suitably idyllic, blessed with loving, supportive parents. “They wanted me to be an artist. They thought I might be a cartoonist, and encouraged it. A life in the arts always seemed viable to them. I had nothing to rebel against in that way.” How did she rebel, then? “I guess just by being a brat. My parents were very lax – about drinking, about deadlines, about curfews, about grades. When you have very lax parents, you tend to get more conservative kids.”
Proving her point, Yanagihara graduated from the prestigious Smith College with an extraordinarily clear idea of her career path. “I am very unimaginative. I wanted to move to New York and become an editor.” She pauses. “Now I have got to figure out what I want to do next.”
Recently turned 40, Yanagihara finds herself at various crossroads, not least the new challenge of working at The New York Times. "I like having a job. I like having an office to go to. I wish I didn't have to go in every day, but I like having colleagues. It keeps you relevant in a lot of ways. Writing is such interior work. It's good to have someplace to go and people to talk to."
While she would always work for financial reasons, Yanagihara sounds uncertain how to balance her professional and artistic existences. A Little Life, like her debut, was written in the evenings after long days at Condé Nast Traveller. "Physically it was a hard book to write. I would work all day and write at night. It was about staying up and typing, typing, typing. It was just not sustainable. I don't think I could do it again."
Perhaps this explains the temptation to leave America. “I want to move to Asia,” she says towards the end of our meeting. “I don’t want to live in the States for the rest of my life. A friend of mine is trying to get me to move to Ubud in Bali. The most work would be in Singapore or Hong Kong.”
Yanagihara's most immediate challenge, however, is to come to terms with her creation. "A Little Life did bring up questions in my own life that I hadn't anticipated, and left me without ways to solve them. It is personal, not so much based on content as in ways of thinking about life. It really is about coming to terms with how you think about your history, how you have coped or not coped with certain things. It's a surprise because you don't go into a book think this is going to answer X, Y or Z questions. Instead you come out with new A, B or C questions."
In this, Yanagihara becomes just another reader of her extraordinarily rich, involving and demanding novel that is sure to be one of the books of the year.
Her final word will doubtless speak for many on reaching the final page. “There was relief and sorrow. It was upsetting to leave the life of this book. I loved spending time in it, punishing as it was.”
James Kidd is a freelance reviewer based in London.