This book is about the friendships and relationships between four men: four college classmates, starting from when they decided to move to New York City with not a lot of money in their pockets. The book follows them over the years, and even though various aspects of their friendships are touched upon, eventually the focus is on one of them, the enigmatic Jude St. Francis, who has undergone severe unspeakable childhood trauma. This book deals with difficult subject matter, and I have to say, it's not for the faint of heart. However, I definitely am glad to have read it and this is one of those novels that I would remember for years to come. It definitely is an epic study of trauma and friendship, as one reviewer has said.
I won't even attempt at a summary or synopsis. If you want something like that, go and read the Wikipedia article. What I want to highlight here is how the book affected me, as well as the thoughts that I had while reading it. First of all, I think this book validated my formula for relationships. Many years ago, I had numerous conversations with people about how we categorise our relationships, whether there are several categories: one for platonic ones, another for romantic ones, etc. Or whether there is really just one category, and everyone is just lined up in this spectrum, with the closest to you eventually being your lover. I tend to believe in this single spectrum view, and what makes a person go up and down this spectrum is the amount of information about you that you want to share to this person. Your partner perhaps is the person that you share the most (not necessarily all) information with. Your close friends receive much information about you as well, but most likely less in comparison to your partner. And as you go down this spectrum, there would be acquaintances, and of course, strangers. Note that I do not assign a higher preference to the type of information: one can have a person that is eventually a friend-with-benefits, where you simply share sexual information, but not much else.
I thought that this view was somehow validated by the relationships that have been depicted in this novel. Jude St. Francis is a character that never shares information about him, and so as a result, he doesn't have a wide set of friends. His friends have a hard time figuring out what to do with him, given that he's essentially unreadable. And only over the years did some of them eventually stick around, since one way or another, Jude starts sharing, at times he was even forced to.
I also find it fascinating to read a book where a main character doesn't get better. If you think Jude's situation couldn't get worse, well, it can. I read some articles regarding how Yanagihara conceptualised this book, and one of these interviews mention the concept of an ombré cloth, where the shading of colour goes from white to black, or vice versa. In the novel's case, it has a plot that eventually evolved, from a bright post-college-in-the-big-city genre, to mental illness, trauma, and death. Like I said, this book was painful to read.
In relation to the above point, one other observation I had while reading was the realisation that one's childhood upbringing has significant impact on one's adulthood. I keep on coming back to the image of a duck hatching, who if it sees a human move around it, then it would think that the human is the mother, and would keep on following the human. Sometimes, there are just things that happen during one's formative years, and it would mould you in a particular way, and it would be very hard to correct. I argued back and forth within my head regarding how I feel about Jude, because not only did he not become better, but he also didn't want to get better. This is sick, of course, but then if you realise the historical background why Jude acts and thinks like the way he does, then he's actually a very rational character. It just happens that the foundations of his logic are different from the majority of us, due to the traumatic experiences that he has had during his formative years.
Overall, as I said this is a painful book to read, but it is also one that touches the reader tremendously. The book's length is rather long, but for me, the pages flew. It was just absolutely captivating that it wasn't a dragging experience at all. And in the end, I realised how fortunate I am: even though sometimes I would say that I wish I had a different childhood, overall I think I still turned out alright. And more importantly, the people I have around me which I consider my close friends are all relatively normal, and not a social outlier like Jude.
I definitely would give this book 5 out of 5 stars. Definitely put this in your readiing list.
See my other book reviews here.
