Fair warning: this is a long book about suffering. It runs over 700 pages and it does not spare the reader. If you are looking for something light, this is not it.
The novel begins with four friends who have just graduated from a small Massachusetts college and moved to New York. Willem is an aspiring actor. JB is an artist. Malcolm is an architect. Jude is a lawyer. Over the next several hundred pages, their lives unfold across decades, and while all four are developed, the book increasingly belongs to Jude.
Jude’s childhood was catastrophic. Yanagihara parcels out the details slowly, across the entire novel, so that what the reader knows at page 100 is different from what the reader knows at page 400. The abuse he suffered as a child has left him physically damaged and psychologically fractured in ways that do not heal as he becomes more successful. He becomes a brilliant litigator at a top firm. He lives in a beautiful apartment. He is surrounded by people who love him. None of it is enough to undo what happened.
Yanagihara has been open about her intentions. She wanted to write a novel about male friendship and male vulnerability, and she wanted to test how much suffering a novel could contain before it became something else entirely. Some critics have argued that she went too far, that the accumulation of trauma becomes numbing rather than illuminating. Andrew Solomon, in The New York Times, praised the book’s ambition. Others have called it trauma pornography.
The reading experience is genuinely divisive. Some people describe it as one of the most affecting novels they have ever read. Others find it manipulative. Both responses are legitimate. Yanagihara writes beautiful sentences and creates characters you feel bonded to, which is what makes the violence of the book so hard to sit with.
The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Man Booker Prize. It has sold millions of copies worldwide and become something of a cultural phenomenon, passed between readers with the same warning: this one will wreck you.
It is 720 pages long and demands a commitment. If you read it, you will probably not forget it.
