Jude and Willem - the former an orphan raised by monks in South Dakota, the latter the son of a Swedish couple who work on a Wyoming ranch - eventually emerge as protagonists. This theme of male friendship, explored by Yanagihara with an intensity that feels claustrophobic, drives the harrowing story. The four friends portrayed in A Little Life - two of them white and born in the rural West, the other two African American and raised in the East - have formed a bond so strong it feels as if their worlds are destined to revolve around each other forever. It poses this question: how does one navigate desire when all pleasure to be discovered in the sexual act has been forever stripped away and turned into the stuff of nightmares, and yet the deep longing for love remains? There may never have been a cover that better captures the emotional heart of a story - that is to say the agony and the ecstasy of desire.Ī Little Life - the title mocks itself, given that the novel weighs in at an impressive 720 pages - follows the lives, over the course of several decades, of four men who first meet in college and who all move to New York City after graduation to pursue their careers. Only after finishing the novel did I come to understand how right this dichotomy is. Here is a man portrayed in the midst of orgasm, and yet even after I learned this I had difficulty reading the image, since the moment it purports to capture looks so painful. The credits reveal the photograph, by Peter Hujar, is titled Orgasmic Man, and with that the mystery seems solved. At first glance one wonders, what is happening here? Is this man in pain, or ecstasy? It seems it could be either. His lips are also closed and yet expressive. His eyes are closed, squinted tightly shut, his brow furrowed, his cheek resting against the back of a limp right hand. HANYA YANAGIHARA’S second novel, A Little Life, features a photo on its cover, a black-and-white close-up of a handsome man who resembles James Franco (but is not).
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