Somewhere in the middle of this long novel, there is a sentence: ‘The hardest part isn’t finding the knowledge; the hardest part is believing it.’
A substantial amount of who you are, how you behave, or how your life is, depends on your childhood years. This ‘knowledge’ has come to be repeated ever so often in my readings and exploring the internet. Both the sciences and religion back this fact. Yet still, it remains quite hard for me to link everything that I am now to a childhood I hardly remember. True, I’ve some semi-formed memories of my childhood, and quite a few stories that I hear from my mother and her sister, but still I find it difficult to believe either my unconvincing memories or the single stories from my mother. For there are some very difficult and complex behaviors that I tend to repeat that are challenging for me reckon with, and more challenging to link them to a distant past that I cannot recall.
The fact that I easily find myself drifting into depressive episodes, or that I begin, when in pain, self-hurting soliloquies where I imagine the cruelest of scenarios for myself, or that I fail to be compassionate with myself around loneliness, heart-breaks, or failures, or the fact that I’m a ‘sad person’ – I cannot just transfer the burden to a difficult childhood, and be done with it.
Nevertheless, I know it to be true. Although I am deprived of knowledge about my own childhood and assessments of it, I’ve seen other childhoods unfold before me and see their consequent effects in the personalities of those individuals.
‘Entitlement’ is a common one: growing up believing that everything one desires should come true, makes for a sense of entitlement about oneself later in life. Fairness, facilities, love, clean roads, good education, a life of ease – these things for an entitled person aren’t only a common reality and taken for granted, but their deprivation makes them highly miserable and frustrated. Flip the coin, and the opposite reality is one of mankind’s absurd predicaments.
The axiom of deserving dictates how a life should be, regardless of how it is. The factual realities of life hardly have any effect on one’s sense of ‘deserving’. To measure and value what one deserves is to define oneself, a life, and how it should be lived. On the opposite end of ‘entitlement’ is the ‘entitlement of torture’. Those with traumatic levels of childhood end up hating something deep inside them, and a continuous and intensifying self-punishment is the only thing they deem themselves worthy of – both in the sorrows and the joys of life. You hurt yourself when you are faced with pain, sadness, or failure, because you punish yourself for being who you are; and you hurt yourself still in happiness because you believe life is playing fool with you. Joys, for a self-hating person, carries more weight than sorrows: for it is novel, horrifying, and something completely undeserving.
Yanagihara’s long, highly acclaimed, and widely read novel is about four friends, living their lives in New York; starting in their late-twenties, all the way up to old age and death. Malcolm is the black Architect; JB is the artist from a rich family; Willem is the actor who’ll become plenty famous; and Jude is the brilliant lawyer and with a most brutal childhood. The novel opens when these four men are about to start on their careers, often kept into pairs of Malcolm, JB and Willem, Jude.
From then on, this novel shifts and travels, back and forth, recent and forward, following their lives in its multitude: their childhood, family life, early friendship, careers, love lives, and so on. It is a character-driven novel without much of a plot, except for the unfolding of their individual and shared lives.
Jude could be named the protagonist of this novel since everything is either about him or related to him. The whole book tries to explain and understand his life: an orphan child with a grotesquely unfortunate upbringing, and later a young man unable to stop punishing himself in light of it.
It’s a book about an unforgivingly brutal story:
sad but more horrifying; tendering but more shocking; beautiful yet pretentious.
I loved it for its patient portrayal of friendship over a lifetime, and felt
let down by its stubbornness in forcing its way to appear tragic.
Rating: 4/5 **** September 5,
2022_