The novelist Hanya Yanagihara tends to torture her gay male characters—but only so she n swoop to save them.
Contents:
- A LTLE LIFE: THE GREAT GAY NOVEL MIGHT BE HERE
- A LTLE LIFE THOR HANYA YANAGIHARA FENDS WRG ABOUT GAY MEN AHEAD OF NEW BOOK
A LTLE LIFE: THE GREAT GAY NOVEL MIGHT BE HERE
Hanya Yanagihara’s novel is an astonishg and amb chronicle of queer life a 2013 say for Salon, the culture wrer Daniel D’Addar lamented the absence of a big, amb novel about gay life Ameri today.
” D’Addar surveyed a number of proment gay wrers about his this, and the next day Tyler Coat summarized their views for Flavorwire a piece tled “The Great Gay Novel is Never Gog to Happen.
” But no verage of the book I’ve seen has discsed as a novel fundamentally about gay liv—as the most amb chronicle of the social and emotnal liv of gay men to have emerged for many book follows a group of four men—Ju, Willem, JB, and Mallm—over three s of iendship, om their years as llege roommat to the heights of profsnal succs. Of the novel’s ma characters, only JB unambiguoly embodi an immediately regnizable and unambivalent gay inty.
A LTLE LIFE THOR HANYA YANAGIHARA FENDS WRG ABOUT GAY MEN AHEAD OF NEW BOOK
”The plexy of the characters’ relatnships to sexual inty is one way Yanagihara elevat them om mere “wdow drsg, ” and I spect ’s one reason A Ltle Life hasn’t been regnized as a book fundamentally about gay male experience. Another is that rears have e to expect such books to be wrten by gay men and to be at least plsibly nfsnal. From Edmund Whe’s A Boy’s Own Story (1982) to Jt Torr’ We the Animals (2011), novels about gay men and their liv have often been more or ls easily mappable onto the thor’s bgraphy.
In says and terviews, Yanagihara has spoken of her sire stead to wre across difference, explorg what she se as specifilly male iendships and emotnal as Yanagihara’s characters challenge nventnal tegori of gay inty, so A Ltle Life avoids the faiar narrativ of gay fictn. Yanagihara approach the llective trmas that have so eply shaped morn gay inty—sickns and discrimatn—obliquely, avoidg the nventns of the g-out narrative or the AIDS novel. ” In s sometim gelg scriptns of Ju’s self-harm and his perceptns of his own body, the book remds rears of the long filiatn between gay art and the eakish, the abnormal, the extreme—those aspects of queer culture we’ve been enuraged to fet an era that’s creasgly embracg gay marriage and is not a register of feelg or exprsn rears are acctomed to Amerin lerary fictn.
In this astonishg novel, Yanagihara achiev what great gay art om Prot to Almodóvar has so often sought: a granur of feelg aquate to “the terrifyg largens, the impossibily of the world. Rob once asked Willem if Ju was gay or straight, and Willem realized that he didn’t have the…. ’s arc foc on his unrstandg of his race as a black gay artist om happens to JB A Ltle Life?