A Little Life (2015) is set in New York in contemporary times.
As they turn twenty-ish and leave college, four male friends move to New York to begin their work lives. Willem wants to be an actor; J.B. wants to be an artist; Malcolm wants to be an architect; and Jude, well, he has legal aspirations.
From different backgrounds, and broke, their deep college friendship is tested when, in their working lives, they strive to keep themselves financially afloat.
All have distant, difficult, or dead parents, except for J.B. who had a ‘truly wonderful’ family. Jude still has the physical and mental scars from his childhood, and carries a crutch for the intense pain in his legs. Willem had experienced death in the family and Malcolm will one day inherit money, making him lazy now: ‘when …. the group of them burrowed deep into their own ambitious dream-structures … Malcolm was doing nothing.’
On reaching thirty, Malcolm finally discovers postmodernism, and the others joke about their past: they are all now ‘post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past …’ Fifteen years after moving to New York, Jude has forgone his crutches for a wheelchair, Willem has bought an apartment, and Malcolm was meant to be renovating it.
Willem contemplates their friendship: ‘Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs.’ J.B. is really trying to stop doing drugs, and contemplates success: ‘the real thing that distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment.’
At forty, amid relationships and their infrequent contact with each other, they are philosophical, contemplating the axiom of equality, the axiom of the empty set, the axiom of zero: the concept of nothingness.
And so the years continue: love, separation, loss, and death – and reflections on whether people change, and whether their lives turned out as planned.
Long, epic, with slowly developing characters, thought-by-thought this compelling story reveals ambitions, distractions, relationships, body image, the meaning of success, pride, maintaining standards, interests, motivations, and all the while, managing friendships. The main motif is not friendship though, but sorrow. In my head, the whole time, was David Bowie’s song ’Sorrow.’
Although as flawed as its characters, the writing is bad but addictive. I wanted to stop because it’s not good, and I think I can stop at any second of this 700+ page novel, and yet I continue. Because it reads visually, like a movie: a darkly beautiful, profound, contemplative, mesmerising movie.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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