From Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story (1982) to Justin Torres’ We the Animals (2011), novels about gay men and their lives have often been more or less easily mappable onto the author’s biography.
Another is that readers have come to expect such books to be written by gay men and to be at least plausibly confessional. The complexity of the characters’ relationships to sexual identity is one way Yanagihara elevates them from mere “window dressing,” and I suspect it’s one reason A Little Life hasn’t been recognized as a book fundamentally about gay male experience. In college, JB calls Jude “the Postman” because he seems to entirely escape the usual categories: “We never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him … post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.” Willem spends much of his adulthood pursuing sexual relationships with women, before he recognizes his desire for Jude and acknowledges their friendship as a life partnership. Of the novel’s main characters, only JB unambiguously embodies an immediately recognizable and unambivalent gay identity. Three of them form their primary physical and emotional bonds with other men, though sometimes in ways that challenge the usual nomenclatures.
The book follows a group of four men-Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm-over three decades of friendship, from their years as college roommates to the heights of professional success. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was released in March, is one of the most buzzed-about books of the season, hailed as a “tour de force,” “extraordinary,” “elemental and irreducible,” “astonishing,” and the work of “ a major American novelist.” But no coverage of the book I’ve seen has discussed it as a novel fundamentally about gay lives-as the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years. Dear Therapist: My Roommate Is Cheating on Her Boyfriend With Me Lori Gottliebīut I think it’s possible that novel has happened, even if no one has quite realized it yet.
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