Audio-book Review
By Chet Yarbrough
(Blog:awalkingdelight)
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
A Little Life: A Novel
Written by: Hanya Yanagihara
Narration by: Oliver Wyman
“A Little Life” is about the difference between coping and overcoming. Hanya Yanagihara writes of a boy growing to manhood. Though the story is about a boy, it is a universal and gender-less story about child abuse.
Yanagihara draws one into a story like John Irving lures one into “A Prayer for Owen Meany”. One feels captured in a quicksand of feeling and thought about an enigmatic character. Yanagihara creates Jude, an extraordinarily handsome and intelligent man who secretly mutilates unseen parts of his body. The story drags a listener’s thoughts into a dark place. Why is this extraordinary person cutting himself with razor blades? The reader turns a page; the listener listens to the next paragraph; needing to know the answer. Yanagihara slowly develops a backstory that explains something about human nature and why one chooses to punish themselves.
Jude is an abused child, raised in an orphanage run by priests. At 8 years of age, Jude is pimped out by a pedophile, a felon who parades as a priest. His name is Father Luke. This false man-of-God kidnaps Jude and pimps him out as a prostitute while making him believe he loves him and protects him from harm.
Yanagihara’s horrific story is revealed in flashbacks as Jude grows into a successful career as a lawyer. One begins to feel this is a story about many lost boys and girls abused by adults. It is an abuse founded on betrayal of purported guardians’ trust, and exploitative adult motives. But Yanagihara offers more.
Most children suffer from remembrance of things past. Every life copes with intentional, unintentional, true, and false hurts from childhood. Yanagihara fictionalizes a person’s life story to show how extreme those hurts can be. She offers slender hope that someone will cast a line that will rescue them from their sinking despair. The slenderness of hope is inferred by the extra-ordinariness of her main character.
A criticism of “A Little Life” is that the story is too long. It offers revelation but its insight is too long in the making. A most over-used phrase in “A Little Life” is “I am sorry”, a refrain that becomes cloying by the end of the story.
Yanagihara suggests there is a chasm between coping and overcoming life’s hardships. Yanagihara infers most of life is coping with hardship rather than overcoming real or imagined hurt. Friends, lovers, psychiatrists, and physicians can help one cope with real and imagined hurts; but true overcoming lies in the mind of the traumatized.
What Yanagihara makes blindingly clear is the ugly truth of pedophilia and how sex-trafficking scars children for life. This is a story that needs to be told and understood, but not in so many words. For that criticism of the author, “I am sorry”. 
LAS VEGAS REVIEWS AND VIEWS 
One thought on “CHILD ABUSE”