“A Little Life”
Hanya Yanagihara
Doubleday, $30

When Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life” came out earlier this year, it was praised for its masterful storytelling and an emotional complexity that dealt with trauma and friendship in powerful and unsettling ways. The accolades continue for the New York writer and magazine editor, who was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Honolulu, graduating from Punahou School in 1992.

This second novel by Yanagihara (“The People in the Trees” came out in 2013) has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (the winner will be announced on Tuesday) and named a finalist in fiction for the Kirkus Review award.

The story of “A Little Life” is a simple one: Four friends, all male, all attractive and overly ambitious graduates of a liberal arts college in New England, head to New York City to find jobs and build a not-so-little life. There’s compassionate Willem, a ranch hand’s son from western Wyoming who is an aspiring actor; ironic and irritating J.B., short for Jean-Baptiste, an artist coddled by his Haitian mother and aunts; obtuse Malcolm, a would-be architect and the most well-off of the group who still bunks at his parents’ place on Park Avenue; and beautiful and brilliant Jude St. Francis, with a mysterious past that he masks with a razor-sharp intelligence that propels him into the city’s top law firm and a SoHo loft worthy of Architectural Digest.

There’s an expectation — a promise, of sorts — that each of these rising stars will get equal time over the course of 720 pages, and initially Yanagihara delivers, sketching out their inner and outer lives with an economy and wit. We know these men, or people like them, and we mostly like (and sometimes loathe) them. But by chapter 2 the focus shifts, narrowing to a pinprick of light shining on Jude, whom J.B. calls The Postman: “We don’t know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-post.”

His friends, for the most part, will remain in the dark, but the revelations begin and never end for the reader, as Yanagihara spools out in deeply chilling ways the narrative threads that tie Jude to his painful past, filled from the start with abandonment, beatings, sexual abuse and prostitution, all at the hands of adults responsible for his care.

There’s been a misperception that the book is about New York City during the AIDS crisis, but that isn’t the case. Yanagihara has said the time period of the novel is “undated” and that seems true for the most part. Her descriptions of the city are precise and knowing; Jude loves to take long walks, and the writer is at her most lyrical describing the memories he conjures as he passes through Manhattan neighborhoods and outer boroughs on his “Sunday morning at 10” ritual.

In less skillful hands, a lot of the tough material Yanagihara weaves into her story would be punishing to read, and in truth, the multiple layers of abuse and abusers Jude encounters feels excessive, repetitive and almost prurient on the author’s part. But the writing in “A Little Life” makes it affecting, as she meticulously lays out her characters’ inner dialogue, mirroring what we all face in trying to understand and love the people in our lives. We may not relate to the horrors Jude has experienced, but we can relate to his struggle. We think deeply about whether or not friendship, loyalty, work and love — all of those things that should make us feel better, but may not — can heal the traumas of our life, as we live it.

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Donna Bulseco is managing editor of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.