Review | Book review: Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life succeeds despite flaws

Hanya Yanagihara's first novel, The People in the Trees, deserved a wider audience than it found: the self-justifying memoir of a prize-winning, pioneering scientist who took boys from a remote Pacific island culture back to the US, where he raised and abused them, it is linguistically and psychologically complex, stylistically elegant, dark and chilling - but few readers noticed. Now, with A Little Life, Yanagihara has reversed the proposition, telling the story of a boy who is chronically, outrageously abused, and his struggles to forget the nightmare of his childhood. This time everyone has taken note, including this year's Man Booker judges, who have selected it for their longlist.

At first A Little Life reads like a male version of Mary McCarthy's The Group, as four university friends navigate the wider world. Malcolm, J.B., Willem and Jude, randomly assigned as college roommates, become best friends. Bright, ambitious and talented, they all move to New York, pursuing different careers: handsome Willem works as a waiter while auditioning as an actor; J.B. creates trendily experimental art while dreaming of fame as a representational painter; Malcolm comes from a wealthy, demanding family and worries that his architecture career will not impress his father; Jude is a young lawyer, working for the public defender's office. The reader predicts that some will succeed, some will fail; some will build happy relationships, some won't; tragedies will strike and be overcome. The reader is quite mistaken, however: before long, all four friends are blessed with immoderate professional success, then two of them rapidly recede into the background, with Jude St Francis emerging as the novel's protagonist.

This choice has several consequences, most of them infelicitous. It increasingly reduces other characters to plot functions or representative types, while transforming a refreshing take on friendship, loyalty and sympathy into a more customary chronicle of suffering and a survival that is hard-earned and always contingent.

Jude closely guards his secrets, but 70 pages into this 700-page novel he reveals to Willem, his best friend, that he habitually self-harms, while the reader learns that a brutal childhood is behind his cutting. Gradually Yanagihara discloses the specifics of the abuse, while Jude's relationships with Willem and with the law professor, Harold, who becomes a surrogate father to him, eventually claim the book's attention.