Book Review--A Little Life

Thanks to the local library I have been listen to a novel on CD recently, A Little Life, and it is worth writing about on my blog. It is not a book, at first glance, I might like as much as I do. For those who don’t know, I am an Evangelical-Anglican and Creedal Christian. I am seeking to be ordained and minister full time in a church.  I stand behind a traditional view of marriage, and that homosexuality is a sin against the person engaged in the activity, as well as the community he is apart of.  However, despite this, or maybe even because of this, I believe there is much to learn, observe and understand from A Little Life.  I am not sure I can fully whole-heartedly endorse the book.  Not because of my religious convictions per se, but rather for the emotional toll this book makes of the reader.  It is, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, an emotionally punishing book that captures you with amazing writing. If you have the stomach and the mental toughness for the read, the book will provide you a beautifully sad and richly written study of the human condition. 

First, let’s get the basics out of the way. A Little Life is written by Hanya Yanagihara and published by Doubleday.  The book was nominated for numerous award as one 2015’s greatest novels.  The plot takes shape with the unfolding relationship of four friends, Malcolm, JB, Willem, and Jude.  Even so this book focuses on the life of Jude St. Francis. While the friendship of the four men begin at college in Boston, Jude is followed more or less from birth, through life at a monastery, life at a boy’s home, as a emancipated teen, and then connecting with three college friends that will become life long companions. 

      I may have described the plot, but it is certainly not how to describe the narrative flow. The novel actually begins with the four friends in college. Jude’s life is seen in flash backs and through much of the first half of the novel you see this mysteriously broken character with amazing talents that you, the reader, are left trying to place the pieces together.  Eventually you learn that Jude was abandoned as an infant, placed in a roman catholic monastery where he is repeatedly abused. Escaping with one of the monasteries’ brothers who he believe will save him, he learns instead the man simply wanted to use Jude for his own sexually selfish desires.   Throughout the book there are continuos accounts of Jude trusting, and opening up to people only to be hurt. 

  This book would be twice as dark as it already is if not for the friendships Jude has with JB, Malcolm and Willem.   It is through them that he has any form of human connection.  It is through their encouragement that he is able to have anything of a parental relationship with one of his professors. But again, what makes this novel so sad and at the same time beautiful in its own way, is how Jude can’t quite understand, comprehend or come to terms the love of these friends. He believes so certainly that he is bad, broken, diseased and that he can not truly or fully be loved.  Even as his closest friend, Willem, who [spoiler alert] turns out to be his gay partner when they are older, and loves him with near superhuman effort, Jude cannot fully let down the emotional walls that separate him from the rest of the world, or just this one individual.  Paradoxically Jude is devastated when the love, the relationship with Willem tragically ends. He feels that he cannot be loved, nor can he go without being loved.   In one sense this novel tells the story of how we isolate ourselves from each other.  In another sense A Little Life tells the story of how each human being, broken by life and relationships can never fully be restored, that there is no hope in our own efforts at restoration, or our efforts to heal someone we love.  As a man of faith I could help feel the anguish and sorrow for a fictional character that would never know divine perfect love.

I could not write enough describing how well this story is written, how each character is drawn with an amazing pallet of colors and textures. There are lines in the narrative that both disturb as well as paint a perfect picture of what is attempting to be expressed, lines like “Hyenas of past memories.”  How with every new and disturbing revelation and action you feel in your gut the horror of consequences.  This book presents the gay life style as just another normal path one might choose for oneself. Religion, faith is mocked and scorned, ultimately destructive to individual’s free will. God is nowhere to be found in this novel. Jude and the rest of humanity is left to themselves. Alone.  The only hope for life,  or reason to live is to be found in the stories you tell yourself. It is as heartbreaking as it is genuine and vivid. 

As a theologian with a bent to theological thinking on the arts, one of my core convictions is that great art is beautiful in part because it gets to the truth of God’s creation and nature. It does not matter if the artist believes in the same God I do, his or her work as it is beautiful, and truthful will in ways the artist may not even understand and recognize reveal the triune maker of the universe. The more beautiful the work the more true it will be.  In Christian theology we have the concept of natural revelation. The idea that in the world, God’s hand and God’s law are visible in the midst of God’s creation even in its broken state. As such there is also the related notion within Christian theology of common grace.  God is present in the creation he loves and shares his grace on all of humanity, this grace will not save a person, but it nonetheless is God’s unmerited favor on all people. Both of these concepts are on full display in this novel. One of my favorite lines comes toward the end of the book,  “All of friendship is a miracle.” As a Christian, as a human being, I can completely understand the truthfulness of that statement. So, if you have the emotional will power and the thick skin for a read like A Little Life  I would recommend you give it a try. For pastors for professional counselors it is an amazing portrait of the brokenness of the human heart. You will learn much of the need for care and patience in loving people who feel themselves unloveable.

Authentic Beauty

As a husband I am pretty confident that every man in America who has a girlfriend or a wife is on the hook every Valentine's day for a gift.  It is on the men in America to provide our better halves with a token on our love and affection.  Consider if you will how your other half might react to you if you chose to go to Hobby Lobby and while there purchase a bouquet of plastic roses.  Or if you take your significant other to the local Sonic Drive-in for Valentine’s dinner. Does anyone doubt that it would be taken as a less than an authentic expression of  a man’s devotion?  

    For our wives or girlfriends only the real, authentic rose would do. It is in the real stuff, the rose that feels, smells, and looks like a rose that will communicate to her our genuine authentic feelings toward her.  No matter how well meaning the bouquet of fake flowers is, no matter how sincere your feelings toward your spouse or girlfriend is, providing something fraudulent is going to insult her. 

  The same goes for the world of art and beauty---authenticity is a necessary component to faithful expression of beauty and feeling.  There is no more obvious place where this is on display then when it comes to Christian film making.  I feel very strongly that one of the reasons Christian films so often fail as a matter of story telling is that they are inauthentic, with inauthentic characters.  Madeline L’Engle the author of  A Wrinkle in Time stated “Non-fiction may write what it true but fiction is about truth.” Christian films put sentiment, and strict adherence to what maybe called a “good conduct code” ahead of presenting something first and foremost that is real and genuine. 

Allow me to give you two examples of what I mean by genuiness. One of my favorite novels is called Glittering Images by Susan Howatch, by the way it is another book I would recommend you place on your to-read list.  It is the story of a scholar-priest, Charles Asworth, set in the 1930’s, Dr. Charles is sent to spy on the bishop of the fictional city of StarBridge by the ArchBishop of Canterbury.  Dr. Asworth soon discovers a scandal, a sexual Ménage à trois between the bishop, his personal assistant, and the bishop’s wife.  But his discovery brings about in this scholar-priest his own psychological break as he confronts the sexual secrets of his own family.  The political shenanigans and jealousy of the Archbishop, the sexual failings of the bishop of Starbridge and the mental breakdown of the main character would all be non starting points in any novel on the shelves of Life Way Christian bookstore. However, Glittering Images is a powerful cautionary tale that secrets in our lives have a way of getting out no matter how desperate we are to hide them. 

The second example is probably more familiar to us, Steven Spielberg’s  Schindler’s List.  This movie justifiably received the Oscars it did, including best picture, because it took an authentic and unflinching look at the moral ambiguity and dehumanizing actions of the holocaust.  Can you imagine how that film would have been if it had stuck to the no nudity, no violence, no moral complexities that most of our Christian films take? The brokenness of the characters, both good and bad reveal something truthful about the gospel no Christian film would dare tackle. 

In both examples it is the darkness, depravity, and honesty that help communicate something truthful.  Genuine characters, situations and reactions to events are analogous to real roses on Valentines day. The more real these elements of your art the the more that they help communicate your respect and even love for the audience of your art as an artist who claims the name of Christ.