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'a little life': an unforgettable novel about the grace of friendship.

John Powers

A Little Life

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America is hooked on stories of redemption and rebirth, be it Cheryl Strayed rediscovering herself by hiking the Pacific Trail or the late David Carr pulling himself out of the crack-house and into The New York Times . We just love tales about healing.

But how far should we trust them? That's one of the many questions raised by A Little Life , a new novel by Hanya Yanagihara, whose acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , came from seemingly nowhere 18 months ago. This new book is long, page-turny, deeply moving, sometimes excessive, but always packed with the weight of a genuine experience . As I was reading, I literally dreamed about it every night.

The book follows three decades in the life of four friends from a posh college. There's the kindhearted actor, Willem, and the self-centered artist, JB, of Haitian stock. There's the timorous would-be architect, Malcolm, born of a wealthy, mixed-race family and the handsome, lame Jude, a brilliant attorney addicted to cutting himself. As the book begins, they've moved to New York to make their fortune, and over the next 700 pages — yes, 700 — we watch them rise, lose their bearings, fall in love, slide into squabbles and wrestle with life's inevitable tragedies.

Yanagihara has a keen eye for social detail, and reading her early riff on actors like Willem who work as waiters, you may think she's offering something familiar — a generational portrait like Mary McCarthy's The Group or the witty, emblematic realism of Jonathan Franzen. In fact, the book's apparent normalcy lures you into the woods of something darker, stranger and more harrowing. Turns out that everything largely orbits around one of the four, Jude, whose gothic past Yanagihara slowly reveals.

For those who want trigger warnings, consider yourself warned — Jude's tale has enough triggers for a Texas gun show. The poor guy may endure the harshest childhood in fiction, one that's equal parts Dickens, Sade and Grimm's Fairy Tales . Evidently named for the patron saint of the hopeless and despairing, Jude is treated so badly that I flashed back to my mom reading me the book Beautiful Joe , about a dog so cruelly abused that I melted into inconsolable weeping.

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago. Sam Levy/Courtesy of Doubleday hide caption

Hanya Yanagihara's acclaimed debut, The People in the Trees , was released 18 months ago.

Yanagihara writes with even more trenchant precision about the scars on the adult Jude's soul — the self-hatred and self-destructiveness, the yearning for love laced with utter mistrust, the baroque defense mechanisms he erects to keep anyone from learning who he really is. He struggles again and again, in long frustrating detail, to recover from his past, along with support from his friends, his doctor, Andy, and his law-school mentor, Harold, who becomes a father figure.

Now, I should also warn you that these struggles become too much, as sometimes happens with a John Cassavetes movie. Readers will be ready to move on, even if Jude is not. Then again, the book's driven obsessiveness is inseparable from the emotional force that will leave countless readers weeping.

Besides, Jude's condition is Yanagihara's way of exploring larger issues. Even as the book pointedly challenges the neat, happy arc of popular redemption stories — "People don't change," Jude decides — it calls on our imaginative sympathy. Yanagihara is fascinated by how we understand minds very different from our own. Here, Jude's ghastly history puts him in a mental universe that his friends — and readers — must work to enter. Not that this is impossible, mind you. He's no alien. Jude's guardedness makes him the heightened embodiment of the secret private self we all have, with our own calming rituals, mental hideaways and escape hatches.

While A Little Life is shot through with pain, it's far from being all dark. Jude's suffering finds its equipoise in the decency and compassion of those who love him; the book is a wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. With her sensitivity to everything from the emotional nuance to the play of light inside a subway car, Yanagihara is superb at capturing the radiant moments of beauty, warmth and kindness that help redeem the bad stuff. In A Little Life , it's life's evanescent blessings that maybe, but only maybe, can save you.

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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara review – relentless suffering

Hanya Yanagihara ’s second novel, A Little Life , was garlanded on its US release with the kind of fervid encomia that are the speciality of peppy American book reviewers. It has been longlisted for the Man Booker and is already 2-1 favourite to win the prize come October. The novel takes us on a 700-page tour of the life of an emotionally and physically damaged man, Jude St Francis, and the friends who try to stand between him and the demons (or “hyenas”, as he sees them) that torment him. It is a book about the limits of friendship, about the depths of pain and shame that a human can endure about the unending legacy of abuse.

Reading the novel over an intense three-day period this summer, I was struck by an eerie sense of déja-lu. Not that it is derivative, exactly, but rather that A Little Life feels snatched from another time, specifically the 1990s. It is partly the resemblance to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History , which is a clear precursor, but also that the book’s introspection, its focus on individual suffering, abuse and self-harm seemed to draw upon a peculiarly 90s obsession that stretched from A Child Called It to Richey Edwards of Manic Street Preachers and Marilyn Manson cutting themselves on stage to Girl, Interrupted and The Virgin Suicides . It is a serious book, taking itself seriously in what seems to me a very American, very 90s manner.

It is also – and this has occasioned some teeth-sucking on the other side of the Atlantic – that the novel is stridently ahistorical. Despite spanning some 60 years, A Little Life is set in a perpetual almost-now, where the characters have email and mobile phones, but where 9/11 doesn’t seem to have happened and the only politics that are allowed to intrude into the lives of Jude and his friends are personal politics. The world outside the affluent north-eastern US only exists to provide locations for films or destinations for travel. It is as if Francis Fukuyama were right all along and, at least in the world of this novel, history has ended. Carol Anshaw, writing in the New York Times chided Yanagihara for writing a novel that “almost seems allegorical” . She has, and it makes for a far more interesting read than some tired, realist Bildungsroman with pious nods to the great absence of the Twin Towers.

We first meet Jude and his impossibly bright friends in New York. They have finished studying at an unnamed university (seemingly Harvard) and are setting out on their professional lives. Willem is a dishy actor of Icelandic/Swedish descent (soon to win wild success and Oscars); Malcolm is an architect, son of a fabulously wealthy African-American financier; Jean-Baptiste (known as JB) is a gay Haitian painter whose figurative artwork centres upon his friends. They are godless (god is left uncapitalised throughout the novel) and postmodern – “Ambition is my only religion,” says JB – and live in a giddy whirl of parties and erudite conversation. They also exist in a kind of utopia of alterity where, at least in hipster New York, everyone is a minority – usually several minorities at once – and revels in his (and it is almost always his – Yanagihara often seems like the only woman involved) otherness. Jude’s race is unclear, his sexuality muddled or nonexistent, but rather than these being “issues”, his difference is celebrated, nurtured, accepted. JB calls Jude “the Postman … post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.”

Increasingly, the novel winnows down to focus on Jude and Willem. JB and Malcolm appear largely off stage, making their own rather unlikely leaps towards the American Dream, but we come to realise that the little life in question is Jude’s and that Willem will play a leading role in it. We are drawn a layer deeper into Jude’s misery – we see him cut himself, we trace scars on his back, we understand that there was an accident many years ago that has left his legs badly damaged – and we recognise that the mystery of his life is the narrative engine that drives the novel. Late on in the book, we are told of the friends: “When they were young, they had only their secrets to give one another: confessions were currency and divulgences were a form of intimacy.” Yanagihara expertly drip-feeds us confessions and divulgences about Jude’s life – flashbacks (so discouraged by creative writing courses) that electrify as they horrify. There have been too many superhero origins films colonising our cinemas recently, but Jude’s story is exactly that. His superpower? Merely enduring.

I spluttered often while reading A Little Life – it is a book that teeters regularly over the abyss of ridicule. The friends’ successes are the absurd dreams of a teenager; the quality of the writing is decidedly mixed, with many an ugly sentence; it is a humourless novel, even when it tries to be funny.

There is also something chillingly relentless about the way that Yanagihara subjects the reader to Jude’s suffering. It is unremitting and it is ghastly, and I had to put the book down several times when I was reading it. Here, for instance, she is describing Jude’s ruined legs: “Wounds open overnight: the suppuration, the sick, fishy scent, the little gash, like a foetus’s mouth, that would appear burbling viscous, unidentifiable fluids.” In The Body in Pain , Elaine Scarry talks of the way that “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it”; Yanagihara gives Jude’s pain intimate, visceral voice.

In the end, though, it is the very relentlessness that makes this a book unlike any other I’ve read. The novel is brilliantly redeemed by Yanahigara’s insistence on Jude’s right to suffer, her unwillingness to embrace the approved message that we get from Dave Pelzer et al (“Even in its darkest passages, the heart is unconquerable,” Pelzer writes in A Child Called It ). A Little Life asks serious questions about humanism and euthanasia and psychiatry and any number of the partis pris of modern western life. It’s Entourage directed by Bergman; it’s the great 90s novel a quarter of a century too late; it’s a devastating read that will leave your heart, like the Grinch’s, a few sizes larger.

A Little Life is published by Picador (£16.99). Click here to order it for £11.99

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

GENERAL FICTION

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by Hanya Yanagihara

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PERSPECTIVES

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

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by Harper Lee

SEEN & HEARD

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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by J.D. Salinger

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A Little Life is the best novel of the year. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

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"Be quiet! Don't cry!  Shhh. "

I cried my way through Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life. Critics have called it "exquisite," "a masterwork," and "a tour de force" ; Garth Greenwell describes it as "the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years." The novel — Yanagihara's second, after The People in the Trees —chronicles the relationships of four college buddies over three decades: JB, an artist; Malcolm, an architect; Willem, an actor; and Jude, a lawyer. Yanagihara records their peaks — all four achieve professional success — but dwells longer in their emotional and psychological valleys.

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I'd give A Little Life all of the awards. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (it lost to Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings ) and has been longlisted for the National Book Award for fiction. Yanagihara's prose is occasionally so stunning that it would stop me, pushing me back to the beginning of a paragraph for a second read. It's particularly dazzling when she visits the complicated mind and spirit of Jude, who becomes the axis on which the book's world turns. Indeed, A Little Life may be the most beautiful, profoundly moving novel I've ever read. But I would never recommend it to anyone.

Jude suffers childhood abuse, the details of which Yanagihara slowly reveals via flashback. It seems at first extensive, then almost endless. Some reviewers have questioned how realistic Yanagihara's depictions of the abuse and its aftereffects could be. But no book I've read has captured as perfectly the inner life of someone hoarding the unwanted souvenirs of early trauma — the silence, the self-loathing, the chronic and aching pain.

"For many years," Yanagihara writes, Jude "had envisioned (unimaginatively) a vault, and at the end of the day, he would gather the images and sequences and words that he didn't want to think about again and open the heavy steel door only enough to hurry them inside, closing it quickly and tightly."

When I read that passage, I thought: I know that feeling.

"Be quiet! Don't cry! Shhh."

My grandmother, whom I loved more than anyone in the world, would whisper-shout this to me in Cantonese when I was a kid. This was the only thing that she, a retired Bible teacher, ever said to me in her corrective, classroom voice. When I was 4, 5, 6, I was a crier, so she repeated this lesson over and over and over.

Who was I to argue? I was reared on stories of her suffering. As the Japanese army swept through China in the early 1940s, she, my seminary professor grandfather, and their two young kids sprinted ahead of the soldiers. She also had to care for about 20 of my grandfather's students, who accompanied them. During those refugee years, my grandmother gave birth to three more children. Two lived.

More than 10 million Chinese civilians were killed during the war. My grandparents survived, but not without cost.

Mostly I saw it in Grandma's behavioral quirks — the milk jugs of pennies banked under the bathroom sink, just in case; $20 bills at the bottom of her yarn box, just in case; the molding food in the fridge that she couldn't throw away, just in case. But I also felt it in her tense silence whenever arguments erupted in our family. And I heard it in her admonitions whenever she sensed my oncoming tears.

I learned well. So: I was quiet and didn't cry when Mac, my fifth-grade bully, repeatedly mocked my slitty eyes and my coarse hair and told others that if they spent time with me, they'd get eyes and hair like that too. I was quiet and didn't cry when an HR guy outed me to colleagues while recruiting donors for an office blood drive. "Well," he said, "obviously Jeff can't do it."  I am quiet and don't cry when the brothers of one of my dearest friends joke that I eat dog, as they have every time they've seen me for more than 15 years.

I most regret being quiet and not crying the summer I turned 15. We were living in Miami then, for my dad's job, but when school let out I'd return to my native California to stay with my grandparents in Berkeley. Some afternoons, I'd spend hours nesting amid the stacks of its used bookstores. Others, I'd sneak a movie, hoping Grandma wouldn't ask where I'd been, because she'd remind me films were "of the devil." (Why couldn't I be quiet when she asked that? Why didn't I just invoke my teenager status and not answer? I don't know.)

Occasionally, when I was feeling especially rebellious, I'd bum cigarettes from strangers.

I know that memories do more than just seep out. They morph, and they turn, and sometimes they turn on you. One day I saw a guy smoking in the courtyard of a small shopping center. He worked at the photo store. We made awkward small talk while we smoked.

I needed to pee, so I asked if he could unlock the shopping center's bathroom. He did. Then he followed me in and began to touch—

Then he walked me to his store and into the back room, where he—

I remember shivering — Fuck. I'm shivering now.

And then he pushed me down on my—

The only thing I remember him saying was, "Doesn't it feel good?"

Why didn't I say no? Why did I bum that cigarette? It was only five blocks away — why didn't I just go home to pee? Why didn't I shout? Why didn't I run?

"Be quiet. Don't cry. Shhh."

I didn't tell anyone what had happened, not for 12 years. When, finally, I began to tell the tiniest bit of the story, I called it molestation —an ugly word, but not the ugliest. Is it strange to say that Jude's story gave me new vocabulary — or permission? After A Little Life, I named it honestly for the first time: rape.

The best novels point us back to something real — sometimes physical, but more often intellectual or emotional or even visceral. As I've read reviews of A Little Life, I've been puzzled by the clinical way in which some critics address the trauma Jude suffers as a child and its echoes in his adulthood. Don't they have their own memory vaults? Or are they just more secure?

Sarah Churchwell, in an exasperated, empathy-deficient review in the Guardian , questions Yanagihara's decision to write about Jude in the third, not first, person: "This is not thought: it is voiceover," Churchwell writes, "Such narration is distancing: it leaves us watching what Jude feels, rather than actively sharing in his confusion, pain, suffering." But first person or third, narration is still narration. It isn't "actively sharing" in trauma or its consequences. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Watching Jude, not being Jude, reflects wise editing, because Jude is a spectator too. He cannot control his memories — they control him. His vault is porous. His strategy for containing the past "wasn't effective," Yanagihara writes. No matter his efforts, "the memories seeped out."

I know that memories do more than just seep out. They morph, and they turn, and sometimes they turn on you. Absent the original perpetrator (Jude's dies, mine disappears), you assume that role. You play both parts — attacker and attacked, punisher and punished — in a twisted drama of substitutionary atonement. You seek but never find absolution for something you didn't do, for something that was done to you. Sin is sin. Someone has to pay, right?

Jude bleeds all over A Little Life — he's a cutter. It makes for difficult reading, but I bristled when Stephanie Hayes, writing in the Atlantic , describes Jude as "an alien other, haunting readers with his ordeals." Yanagihara illustrates the internal processes that inspire Jude's self-harm by creating a menagerie: His self-loathing is an uncaged "beast," his memories prowling "hyenas." Hayes dismisses this as "surreal and relentless imagery, almost as if to deflect humanizing sympathy for his struggles."

Alien? Surreal? No. Yanagihara's descriptions embodied my feelings — and reactions like Hayes's eye-rolling and her "don't be so dramatic" condescension are what I fear. Because this is my daily litany: I pierce myself with self-criticism until I reach numbness. I surgically examine my friendships to see what others could possibly want of me, and then drain them of their lifeblood: love. If my friends knew what's been done to me, and what I've done since, these relationships would never last anyway. If I shared my story, you'd walk away. If you knew the truth, you'd disappear —or worse, you'd stay to mock me.

"At night," Yanagihara writes, "he prayed to a god he didn't believe in — and hadn't for years: Help me, help me, help me " So I've sought extra locks for my vaults. Yet the memories still seep out, especially when other people are around. At parties, I escape repeatedly to the bathroom to splash water on my face. I preemptively try to run away from reincarnations of Mac, my fifth-grade bully, who returns to comment on my eyes, still slitty, or my hair, still coarse. I imagine men chewing over the best joke about what pets I may or may not eat. Summer can be the worst. I almost never wear shorts in public because the photo shop guy did that day, and when I see a particular stocky build and muscular calf—

"Be quiet. Don't cry.  Shhh."

The relationship that matters most in A Little Life isn't between Jude and Willem, or Jude and Malcolm, or Jude and JB — it's between Jude and Jude. This book is about internal warfare: Does he live alone with his festering hurt, or does he risk trusting others with his secrets? This book is about love: If perfect love casts out fear, perfect fear must block both the giving and receiving of love, and Jude's inability to love himself prevents him from feeling the embrace of the patient, kind love of those around him.

"At night," Yanagihara writes, "he prayed to a god he didn't believe in — and hadn't for years: Help me, help me, help me, he pleaded. He was losing himself; this had to stop."

I've prayed that same prayer many times, more vigorously in recent months than ever. I'm not quite Jude; I guess I do believe in God. I want to believe that my prayer is being answered. Last winter, inexplicably, I started to cry again with some regularity. And though I rarely read fiction, along came A Little Life, which I picked up though I had no idea what it was about.

At its best, storytelling is communion. Human experiences converge, and isolation withers at the intersection. I read A Little Life when I wasn't ready to talk about trauma or even to hear about it. But Jude's inability to address his wounds compelled me to begin to address mine. His struggle to find his peace emboldened me to try to find mine.

I don't know what healing might look like. But admitting to my husband that I believe I'm damaged goods — that's something. To let my closest friends see some of my deepest wounds — that's something. Acknowledging and apologizing for the ways in which I have, in my silence and fear, rejected others' kindness and dishonored their friendship — that's something. I've still never told anyone the whole story — not my husband, nor my therapist — and maybe I never will. But being able to say that I'm not a lost cause, and to believe it (mostly) — that's something too.

My grandmother has been dead 20 years, but sometimes she still whisper-shouts in my head. At last, I am ready to whisper-shout something back: "Be quiet, Grandma. Shhh. "

Jeff Chu is a contributing writer at Fast Company and the author of Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America . He lives in Brooklyn.

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clock This article was published more than  9 years ago

Book Review: ‘A Little Life,’ by Hanya Yanagihara, inspires and devastates

Hanya Yanagihara's new novel, " A Little Life ," is a witness to human suffering pushed to its limits, drawn in extraordinary detail by incantatory prose.

At the opening, four young men move to New York City after having finished college. They are devoted to one another, each with bright paths glimmering before them: JB, a gay, brilliant and arrogant figurative painter, is the only one of the four sure of his inevitable success; Malcolm, an architect, is a disappointment to his high-income parents, unsure of his sexuality and perplexed about his “insufficient blackness”; Willem, a handsome, unambitious actor, works as a waiter while being desired by men and women alike; and Jude, an orphan with a mysterious past, is an assistant prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Despite the brothers-in-arms setup, however, the narrative quickly concentrates on Jude. “As long as they had known him,” Willem observes, “they had known he had problems with his legs,” and despite gentle prodding from his friends, Jude never attempts to share his secretive past, prompting JB at one point to call him “post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.” What remains unspoken to the boys, however, remains agonizingly, self-destructively clear to Jude, and it’s his desire to maintain a veneer of control despite his past physical and sexual trauma that creates the major dramas in the narrative.

Throughout the novel, Yanagihara, an editor-at-large with Condé Nast Traveler, evokes New York’s subcultures and socioeconomic groups, rather than any particular time period. Those who have trod similar paths will be familiar with the phase of dividing a meal in Chinatown “to the dollar,” followed by the wandering period before people’s careers and lives begin to take their various turns.

This timelessness also allows Yanagihara to maintain a tight focus around the effects of Jude’s sexual abuse. As he progresses through life — eventually being legally adopted by a kindly law professor — Jude, as many victims do, retreats to self-harm.

“You have to talk about these things while they’re fresh. Or you’ll never talk about them,” says a social worker who cares for him early on. “It’s going to get harder and harder the longer you wait, and it’s going to fester inside you, and you’re always going to think you’re to blame.” As Jude rejects his friends’ attempts to intervene, this prediction sadly becomes more and more realized.

As Yanagihara paints it, however, his friends’ love — real, selfless love — is the thing that could save him, if only he would let it. When he eventually falls into a romantic relationship with Willem, there’s a hope that his life will turn out after all. But sometimes people are beyond repair.

“I don’t think happiness is for me,” Jude says during a drunken session with Willem. As upsetting as that is to hear, the implication is clear; and when further gutting losses come — and come they do — it’s impossible not to look back and wish that earlier on there had been a tithe more care for Jude.

Through insightful detail and her decade-by-decade examination of these people’s lives, Yanagihara has drawn a deeply realized character study that inspires as much as devastates. It’s a life, just like everyone else’s, but in Yanagihara’s hands, it’s also tender and large, affecting and transcendent; not a little life at all.

Nicole Lee is a writer based in New York.

A LITTLE LIFE

By Hanya Yanagihara

Doubleday. 720 pp. $30

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The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life”

By Jon Michaud

At the beginning of Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, “A Little Life,” four young men, all graduates of the same prestigious New England university, set about establishing adult lives for themselves in New York City. They are a pleasingly diverse crew, tightly bound to each other: Willem Ragnarsson, the handsome son of a Wyoming ranch hand, who works as a waiter but aspires to be an actor; Malcolm Irvine, the biracial scion of a wealthy Upper East Side family, who has landed an associate position with a European starchitect; Jean-Baptiste (JB) Marion, the child of Haitian immigrants, who works as a receptionist at a downtown art magazine in whose pages he expects, one day soon, to be featured; and Jude St. Francis, a lawyer and mathematician, whose provenance and ethnic origins are largely unknown, even by his trio of friends. Jude, we later learn, was a foundling, deposited in a bag by a dumpster and raised by monks.

For the first fifty or so pages, as the characters attend parties, find apartments, go on dates, gossip, and squabble with each other, it is easy for the reader to think he knows what he’s getting into: the latest example of the postgraduate New York ensemble novel, a genre with many distinguished forbears, Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children” among them. At one point, after his acting career takes off, Willem thinks, “New York City … had simply been an extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower Manhattan and outer Brooklyn.” Yanagihara is a capable chronicler of the struggle for success among the young who flock to New York every autumn, sending up the pretensions of the art world and the restaurant where Willem works, which is predictably staffed by would-be thespians. “New York was populated by the ambitious,” JB observes. “It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common…. Ambition and atheism.”

Yet it becomes evident soon enough that the author has more on her mind than a conventional big-city bildungsroman. For one thing, there’s the huge hunk of paper in the reader’s right hand: more than seven hundred pages, suggesting grander ambitions than a tale of successful careers. There are also curious absences in the text. Yanagihara scrubs her prose of references to significant historical events. The September 11th attacks are never mentioned, nor are the names of the Mayor, the President, or any recognizable cultural figures who might peg the narrative to a particular year. The effect of this is to place the novel in an eternal present day, in which the characters’ emotional lives are foregrounded and the political and cultural Zeitgeist is rendered into vague scenery.

But the clearest sign that “A Little Life” will not be what we expect is the gradual focus of the text on Jude’s mysterious and traumatic past. As the pages turn, the ensemble recedes and Jude comes to the fore. And with Jude at its center, “A Little Life” becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery. And having upset our expectations once, Yanagihara does it again, by refusing us the consolations we have come to expect from stories that take such a dark turn.

The first real hint of what we’re in for comes on page 67, when Jude wakes Willem, his roommate, saying, “There’s been an accident, Willem; I’m sorry.” Jude is bleeding profusely from his arm, which is wrapped in a towel. He is evasive about the cause of the wound and insists that he doesn’t want to go to a hospital, asking instead that Willem take him to a mutual friend named Andy, who is a doctor. At the end of the visit, having sewn up Jude’s wound, Andy says to Willem, “You know he cuts himself, don’t you?”

The cutting becomes a leitmotif. Every fifty pages or so, we get a scene in which Jude mutilates his own flesh with a razor blade. It is described with a directness that might make some readers queasy: “He has long ago run out of blank skin on his forearms, and he now recuts over old cuts, using the edge of the razor to saw through the tough, webby scar tissue: when the new cuts heal, they do so in warty furrows, and he is disgusted and dismayed and fascinated all at once by how severely he has deformed himself.”

The cutting is both a symptom of and a control mechanism for the profound abuse Jude suffered during the years before he arrived at the university. The precise nature of that suffering is carefully doled out by Yanagihara in a series of flashbacks, each more gruesome than its predecessors. Jude was taught to cut himself by Brother Luke, the monk who abducted him from the monastery. Initially, Brother Luke appeared to be Jude’s savior, spiriting him away from an institution where he was regularly beaten and sexually assaulted. Brother Luke promises Jude that they will go and live together as father and son in a house in the woods, but the reality of their years on the road is much, much grimmer. Eventually, Jude is liberated from Brother Luke, but by then he appears to be marked for sexual violation. “You were born for this,” Brother Luke tells him. And, for a long time, Jude believes him.

The graphic depictions of abuse and physical suffering that one finds in “A Little Life” are rare in mainstream literary fiction. Novels that deal with these matters often fade out when the violence begins. The abuse in “Lolita,” for instance, is largely off camera, so to speak, or wrapped complexly in Nabokov’s lyrical prose. In Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” the child narrator is banished to the closet while his mother is raped by their captor. You are more likely to find sustained and explicit depictions of depravity in genre fiction, where authors seem freer to be less decorous. Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story,” Steig Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” and the torture of Theon Greyjoy in “A Game of Thrones” all came to mind when I was reading “A Little Life” (though the torture of Theon is more explicit in the HBO series than in George R. R. Martin’s books). Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character.

One of the few recent novels that’s comparable to “A Little Life” in this respect is Merritt Tierce’s “Love Me Back,” a fierce book about a self-destructive Texas waitress who cuts and burns herself, abuses drugs, and submits herself to debasing sexual encounters. But that novel, at a mere two hundred pages, is a slim silver dagger, not the broadsword that Yanagihara wields. And unlike Tierce’s book, in which there is little reprieve for the reader, Yanagihara balances the chapters about Jude’s suffering with extended sections portraying his friendships and his successful career as a corporate litigator. One of the reasons the book is so long is that it draws on these lighter stretches to make the darker ones bearable. Martin Amis once asked, “Who else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?” And the surprising answer is that Hanya Yanagihara has: counterintuitively, the most moving parts of “A Little Life” are not its most brutal but its tenderest ones, moments when Jude receives kindness and support from his friends.

What makes the book’s treatment of abuse and suffering subversive is that it does not offer any possibility of redemption and deliverance beyond these tender moments. It gives us a moral universe in which spiritual salvation of this sort does not exist. None of Jude’s tormentors are ever termed “evil” by him or anyone else. During his years of suffering, only once are we told that Jude prays “to a god he didn’t believe in” (note the lowercase “g_”_). Though he is named after the patron saint of lost causes—the name given to him by the monks who raised him—what’s most obviously lost here is the promise of spiritual absolution or even psychological healing. In this godless world, friendship is the only solace available to any of us.

Of course, atheism is not uncommon in contemporary literary novels; with notable exceptions, such as the works of Marilynne Robinson, few such books these days have any religious cast. But perhaps that is why they rarely depict extreme suffering—because it is a nearly impossible subject to engage with directly if you are not going to offer some kind of spiritual solution. “God whispers to us in our pleasures … but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” C. S. Lewis wrote, in “The Problem of Pain.” In “A Little Life,” pain is not a message from God, or a path to enlightenment, and yet Yanigihara listens to it anyway.

In addition to his law degree, Jude pursues a master’s in pure mathematics. At one point, he explains to his friends that he is drawn to math because it offers the possibility of “a wholly provable, unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable absolutes.” For Jude, then, mathematics takes the place of religion, in a sense. Later, during one of his worst episodes of suffering, Jude turns to a concept known as the axiom of equality, which states that x always equals x .

It assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality … but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

Yanagihara’s novel can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life. Like the axiom of equality, “A Little Life” feels elemental, irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it.

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A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

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• Literary Fiction
• New England, USA
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• Contemporary
• Coming of Age
• Mid-Life Onwards
• Dealing with Loss
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About this Book

Book summary.

Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement - and a great gift for its publisher. When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever. In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.

The eleventh apartment had only one closet, but it did have a sliding glass door that opened onto a small balcony, from which he could see a man sitting across the way, outdoors in only a T-shirt and shorts even though it was October, smoking. Willem held up a hand in greeting to him, but the man didn't wave back. In the bedroom, Jude was accordioning the closet door, opening and shutting it, when Willem came in. "There's only one closet," he said. "That's okay," Willem said. "I have nothing to put in it anyway." "Neither do I." They smiled at each other. The agent from the building wandered in after them. "We'll take it," Jude told her. But back at the agent's office, they were told they couldn't rent the apartment after all. "Why not?" Jude asked her. "You don't make enough to cover six months' rent, and you don't have anything in savings," said the agent, suddenly terse. She had checked their credit and their bank accounts and had at last ...

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"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." These memorable opening lines might belong to another brilliant novel ( The Go-Between , by L. P. Hartley) but they could well form the essential scaffolding for A Little Life , a wrenching yet illuminating exploration of how child abuse can exert a suffocating grip on adulthood... continued

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(Reviewed by Poornima Apte ).

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Beyond the Book

Novels that feature close-knit friends.

One of the many astute portrayals in A Little Life is the closely knit group of friends to which Jude St. Francis, the haunted protagonist, belongs. While the literal coming-of-age happens during the teen years, it could be argued that college, for those who attend, is the real deal. It is a transformative experience for most people, and they forge friendships that form an essential support network when they are cast out into the real world. These relationships are more than the rose-colored variety as depicted by television sitcoms such as Friends . Indeed A Little Life follows its core group: Jude, Willem, JB and Malcolm, over the course of three decades showing how the course of a life can bruise or fortify friendships. Here are some ...

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• Jan 11, 2021

'A Little Life' Review: An Ode to Friendship

Updated: Jan 24, 2021

Yes, the tissues are necessary for this one.

My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

737 pages; warning: the novel contains graphic descriptions of sexual abuse, violence and self harm.

A Little Life (2015), Hanya Yanagihara’s epic tale of friendship, trauma and loss, could be described as the older, more damaged brother of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch . The story follows four college friends who move to New York together after graduating from an unnamed prestigious New England university. It is the ‘what comes next’ of coming-of-age, as the book follows the friends from college until middle age. The book begins by presenting the early years from the perspective of three of the four friends, Malcolm, JB and Willem, each of whom come from a different cultural background but share the wide eyed dreams of young men which is common to the bildungsroman.

A unique factor of the novel is that it catalogues the insecurities and self perceptions of the men through a multiple narrative structure. The reader is given access into the minds of the three young men as they think of each other and themselves. Each character's perspective, despite being in third person, brings you fully into his mind. We see the jealousy of each of the men, and also his love and respect for his friends . It is interesting to read the thoughts of one protagonist, assume their world view is correct and then have the same assumptions discounted or contradicted in the different perspective. It feels like really experiencing what it is to be part of a friend group, where perceptions of one another are clouded by each person’s experiences and personalities.

Art Source Illustration of an early moment in the novel, where the group finds themselves stuck on the roof of their grotty New York apartment, with no choice but to jump to get back to safety.

Though the first part of the book sets up a seemingly lighthearted post-college narrative punctuated by squabbles over philosophy and descriptions of the various social lives of the men, it becomes apparent that this is merely the scene setting to the mystery of the character of Jude. Of ambiguous ethnicity, sexuality and origins, his life becomes the enigma to which the rest of the novel unfolds. He is elevated to the protagonist from the second section in the novel where his point of view takes center stage and the atrocities of his past begin to unravel. Early in the book there was a glaring lack of Jude’s narrative until ‘Part II: The Postman’ where Jude is cemented as the protagonist. (NB: this is one of my favourite chapter titles of all time. If you know, you know.) He is not named as the speaker in this section but the reader already knows so much about Jude from the thoughts of the other men, that it is clear who is speaking. Due to the preexisting narrative set up the reader immediately clocks Jude as an unreliable narrator - we know of the high regard his friends hold him in and it becomes clear that he is suffering horifically from skewed self esteem and PTSD. The narrative transitions between voices are subtle, staying in the third person until later in the book when a fifth narrative voice is introduced. I often found myself reading for several pages until I could be sure who's head we were now in. This device did help it to feel like the men were all connected.

Yanagihara’s writing style is meticulous, with a rich and extensive vocabulary which made me feel like every word had been carefully and lovingly chosen to weave the tapestry of the rich novel. The parts of the book that made it feel alive were the small, relatable moments between the friends, where it became clear that despite everything, these were men filled with optimism and love for one another, but in a way that many people can relate to where conversation is filled with small moments and sarcastic comments - and as is often true in life, intention is not always carried over from the speaker to the recipient of these comments. It is the subtleties which make the book sing. I do wish that these subtle moments had carried over to the second half of the book which did feel at points like an attack of harrowing facts revealed one after another.

There is a distinct lack of female characters in the novel. Though when they appear they are written with care, no women are ever given the three dimensional treatment that the men are given. Usually this would be a dealbreaker for me but in this instance, it is forgivable. The story is that of the unthinkable abuse Jude has suffered at the hands of men, and as he gets older, the men who help him confront his past. More than this, the male cast of characters act as a subversion on the typical mascuine friendship which we are accustomed to seeing. In modern society, men are still encouraged to swallow their traumas and insecurities. It is refreshing to see a novel where men of all ages and sexualities want nothing more than to help their friend heal through the simple but powerful act of talking about his problems.

“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?” - Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

The story has often been criticised for its gratuitous chronology of violence and abuse that Jude experiences. The events that are revealed are indeed so horrific that it interferes with the realism of the novel, however when taking into account the other parts of the book that are less than realistic - the glaring lack of reference to key moments in American history, ambiguity of time periods and locations, the unfathomable success of central characters - the book can be considered to be a parable on the power of friendship in dealing with trauma. What is important is not that Jude recovers from his past, but that he is not alone in his struggle. 'A Little Life' is extreme, gut wrenching and emotional, yes, but at its heart it is about a man who is broken to extremes but continues to fight for happiness.

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A Little Life MP3 CD – Unabridged, November 3, 2015

• Language English
• Publisher Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio
• Publication date November 3, 2015
• Dimensions 5.25 x 0.6 x 6.75 inches
• ISBN-10 1511358602
• ISBN-13 978-1511358606
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (November 3, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1511358602
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1511358606
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.6 x 6.75 inches
• #2,180 in Asian American Literature & Fiction
• #10,309 in Books on CD
• #16,781 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)

About the author

Hanya yanagihara.

Hanya Yanagihara lives in New York City.

http://instagram.com/hanyayanagihara

https://instagram.com/alittlelifebook/

https://www.instagram.com/toparadisenovel/

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Once Upon a Time, the World of Picture Books Came to Life

The tale behind a new museum of children’s literature is equal parts imagination, chutzpah and “The Little Engine That Could.”

By Elisabeth Egan

Photographs and Video by Chase Castor

Elisabeth Egan followed the Rabbit Hole as it was nearing completion. She has written about several of its inhabitants for The Times.

On a crisp Saturday morning that screamed for adventure, a former tin can factory in North Kansas City, Mo., thrummed with the sound of young people climbing, sliding, spinning, jumping, exploring and reading.

Yes, reading.

If you think this is a silent activity, you haven’t spent time in a first grade classroom. And if you think all indoor destinations for young people are sticky, smelly, depressing hellholes, check your assumptions at the unmarked front door.

Welcome to the Rabbit Hole, a brand-new, decade-in-the-making museum of children’s literature founded by the only people with the stamina for such a feat: former bookstore owners. Pete Cowdin and Deb Pettid are long-married artists who share the bullish determination of the Little Red Hen. They’ve transformed the hulking old building into a series of settings lifted straight from the pages of beloved picture books.

Before we get into what the Rabbit Hole is, here’s what it isn’t: a place with touch screens, a ball pit, inscrutable plaques, velvet ropes, a cloying soundtrack or adults in costumes. It doesn’t smell like graham crackers, apple juice or worse (yet). At $16 per person over 2 years old, it also isn’t cheap.

During opening weekend on March 16, the museum was a hive of freckles and gap toothed grins, with visitors ranging in age from newborn to well seasoned. Cries of “Look up here!,” “There’s a path we need to take!” and “There’s Good Dog Carl !” created a pleasant pandemonium. For every child galloping into the 30,000 square foot space, there was an adult hellbent on documenting the moment.

Did you ever have to make a shoe box diorama about your favorite book? If so, you might remember classmates who constructed move-in ready mini kingdoms kitted out with gingham curtains, clothespin people and actual pieces of spaghetti.

Cowdin, Pettid and their team are those students, all grown up.

The main floor of the Rabbit Hole consists of 40 book-themed dioramas blown up to life-size and arranged, Ikea showroom-style, in a space the size of two hockey rinks. The one inspired by John Steptoe’s “ Uptown ” features a pressed tin ceiling, a faux stained-glass window and a jukebox. In the great green room from “ Goodnight Moon ,” you can pick up an old-fashioned phone and hear the illustrator’s son reading the story.

One fictional world blends into the next, allowing characters to rub shoulders in real life just as they do on a shelf. Visitors slid down the pole in “The Fire Cat,” slithered into the gullet of the boa constrictor in “ Where the Sidewalk Ends ” and lounged in a faux bubble bath in “ Harry the Dirty Dog .” There are plenty of familiar faces — Madeline , Strega Nona , Babar — but just as many areas dedicated to worthy titles that don’t feature household names, including “ Crow Boy ,” “ Sam and the Tigers ,” “ Gladiola Garden ” and “ The Zabajaba Jungle .”

Emma Miller, a first-grade teacher, said, “So many of these are books I use in my classroom. It’s immersive and beautiful. I’m overwhelmed.”

As her toddler bolted toward “ Frog and Toad ,” Taylar Brown said, “We love opportunities to explore different sensory things for Mason. He has autism so this is a perfect place for him to find little hiding holes.”

A gaggle of boys reclined on a bean bag in “ Caps for Sale ,” passing around a copy of the book. Identical twins sounded out “ Bread and Jam for Frances ” on the pink rug in the badger’s house. A 3-year-old visiting for the second time listened to her grandfather reading “The Tawny Scrawny Lion.”

Tomy Tran, a father of three from Oklahoma, said, “I’ve been to some of these indoor places and it’s more like a jungle gym. Here, my kids will go into the area, pick up the book and actually start reading it as if they’re in the story.”

All the titles scattered around the museum are available for purchase at the Lucky Rabbit, a bookstore arranged around a cozy amphitheater. Pettid and Cowdin estimate that they’ve sold one book per visitor, with around 650 guests per day following the pink bunny tracks from the parking lot.

Once upon a time, Cowdin and Pettid owned the Reading Reptile, a Kansas City institution known not just for its children’s books but also for its literary installations. When Dav Pilkey came to town, Pettid and Cowdin welcomed him by making a three-and-a-half foot papier-mâché Captain Underpants. Young customers pitched in to build Tooth-Gnasher Superflash or the bread airplane from “In the Night Kitchen.”

One of the store’s devotees was Meg McMath, who continued to visit through college, long after she’d outgrown its offerings (and its chairs). Now 36, McMath traveled from Austin, Texas with her husband and six-month-old son to see the Rabbit Hole. “I’ve cried a few times,” she said.

The Reading Reptile weathered Barnes & Noble superstores and Amazon. Then came “the Harry Potter effect,” Pettid said, “where all of a sudden adults wanted kids to go from picture books to thick chapter books. They skipped from here to there; there was so much they were missing.”

As parents fell under the sway of reading lists for “gifted” kids, story time became yet another proving ground.

“It totally deformed the reading experience,” Cowdin said. Not to mention the scourge of every bookstore: surreptitious photo-snappers who later shopped online.

In 2016, Cowdin and Pettid closed the Reptile to focus on the Rabbit Hole, an idea they’d been percolating for years. They hoped it would be a way to spread the organic bookworm spirit they’d instilled in their five children while dialing up representation for readers who had trouble finding characters who looked like them. The museum would celebrate classics, forgotten gems and quality newcomers. How hard could it be?

Cowdin and Pettid had no experience in the nonprofit world. They knew nothing about fund-raising or construction. They’re ideas people, glass half full types, idealists but also stubborn visionaries. They didn’t want to hand their “dream” — a word they say in quotes — to consultants who knew little about children’s books. Along the way, board members resigned. Their kids grew up. Covid descended. A tree fell on their house and they had to live elsewhere for a year. “I literally have told Pete I quit 20 times,” Pettid said.

“It has not always been pleasant,” Cowdin said. “But it was just like, OK, we’re going to do this and then we’re going to figure out how to do it. And then we just kept figuring it out.”

Little by little, chugging along like “ The Little Engine That Could ,” they raised $15 million and assembled a board who embraced their vision and commitment to Kansas City. They made a wish list of books — “Every ethnicity. Every gender. Every publisher,” Pettid said — and met with rights departments and authors’ estates about acquiring permissions. Most were receptive; some weren’t. (They now have rights to more than 70 titles.)

“A lot of people think a children’s bookstore is very cute,” Pettid said. “They have a small mind for children’s culture. That’s why we had to buy this building.”

For $2 million, they bought the factory from Robert Riccardi, an architect whose family operated a beverage distribution business there for two decades. His firm, Multistudio, worked with Cowdin and Pettid to reimagine the space, which sits on an industrial corner bordered by train tracks, highways and skyline views.

Cowdin and Pettid started experimenting with layouts. Eventually they hired 39 staff members, including 21 full-time artists and fabricators who made everything in the museum from some combination of steel, wood, foam, concrete and papier-mâché.

“My parents are movers and shakers,” Gloria Cowdin said. She’s the middle of the five siblings, named after Frances the badger’s sister — and, yes, that’s her voice reading inside the exhibit. “There’s never been something they’ve wanted to achieve that they haven’t made happen, no matter how crazy.”

During a sneak peek in December, it was hard to imagine how this semi-construction zone would coalesce into a museum. The 22,000 square foot fabrication section was abuzz with drills and saws. A whiteboard showed assembly diagrams and punch lists. (Under “Random jobs,” someone had jotted, “Write Christmas songs.”) The entryway and lower level — known as the grotto and the burrow — were warrens of scaffolding and machinery.

But there were pockets of calm. Kelli Harrod worked on a fresco of trees outside the “ Blueberries for Sal ” kitchen, unfazed by the hubbub. In two years as lead painter, she’d witnessed the Rabbit Hole’s steady growth.

“I remember painting the ‘ Pérez and Martina ’ house before there was insulation,” Harrod said. “I was bundled up in hats, gloves and coats, making sure my hands didn’t shake.”

Leigh Rosser was similarly nonplused while describing his biggest challenge as design fabrication lead. Problem: How to get a dragon and a cloud to fly above a grand staircase in “ My Father’s Dragon .” Solution: “It’s really simple, conceptually” — it didn’t sound simple — “but we’re dealing with weight in the thousands of pounds, mounted up high. We make up things that haven’t been done before, or at least that I’m not aware of.”

Attention to detail extends to floor-bound exhibits. The utensil drawer in “Blueberries for Sal” holds Pete Cowdin’s mother’s egg whisk alongside a jar containing a baby tooth that belonged to Cowdin and Pettid’s oldest daughter, Sally. The tooth is a wink at “ One Morning in Maine ,” an earlier Robert McCloskey book involving a wiggly bicuspid — or was it a molar? If dental records are available, Cowdin and Pettid have consulted them for accuracy.

“With Pete and Deb, it’s about trying to picture what they’re seeing in their minds,” said Brian Selznick , a longtime friend who helped stock the shelves in the Lucky Rabbit. He’s the author of “ The Invention of Hugo Cabret ,” among many other books.

Three months ago, the grotto looked like a desert rock formation studded with pink Chiclets. The burrow, home of Fox Rabbit, the museum’s eponymous mascot, was dark except for sparks blasting from a soldering iron. The floor was covered with tiny metal letters reclaimed from a newly-renovated donor wall at a local museum.

Cowdin and Pettid proudly explained their works-in-progress; these were the parts of the museum that blossomed from seed in their imaginations. But to the naked eye, they had the charm of a bulkhead door leading to a scary basement.

When the museum opened to the public, the grotto and the burrow suddenly made sense. The pink Chiclets are books, more than 3000 of them — molded in silicone, cast in resin — incorporated into the walls, the stairs and the floor. They vary from an inch-and-a-half to three inches thick. As visitors descend into the Rabbit Hole, they can run their fingers over the edges of petrified volumes. They can clamber over rock formations that include layers of books. Or they can curl up and read.

Dennis Butt, another longtime Rabbit Hole employee, molded 92 donated books into the mix, including his own copies of “ The Hobbit ” and “ The Lord of the Rings .” He said, “They’re a little piece of me.”

As for the metal letters, they’re pressed into the walls of a blue-lit tunnel leading up a ramp to the first floor. They spell the first lines of 141 books, including “ Charlotte’s Web ,” “Devil in the Drain” and “ Martha Speaks .” Some were easier to decipher than others, but “Mashed potatoes are to give everybody enough” jumped out. It called to mind another line from “A Hole is to Dig,” Ruth Krauss’s book of first definitions (illustrated by a young Maurice Sendak ): “The world is so you have something to stand on.”

At the Rabbit Hole, books are so you have something to stand on. They’re the bedrock and the foundation; they’re the solid ground.

Cowdin and Pettid have plans to expand into three more floors, adding exhibit space, a print shop, a story lab, a resource library and discovery galleries. An Automat-style cafeteria and George and Martha -themed party and craft room will open soon. A rooftop bar is also in the works.

Of course, museum life isn’t all happily ever after. Certain visitors whined, whinged and wept, especially as they approached the exit. One weary adult said, “Charlie, we did it all.”

Then, “Charlie, it’s time to go.”

And finally, “Fine, Charlie, we’re leaving you here.” Cue hysteria.

But the moral of this story — and the point of the museum, and maybe the point of reading, depending on who you share books with — crystallized in a quiet moment in the great green room. A boy in a Chiefs Super Bowl T-shirt pretended to fall asleep beneath a fleecy blanket. Before closing his eyes, he said, “Goodnight, Grandma. Love you to the moon.”

Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years. More about Elisabeth Egan

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