The lonely struggle of Jude the obscure

Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist Hanya Yanagihara has announced a new shift in consciousness. Jude, the lead character in A Little Life, is known to his friends as the Postman, ‘post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past’. The obscurity of his origins (left at birth in a rubbish bin) and a childhood of horrific abuse mean he is determined to draw a veil over his past, making him the most mysterious of the four male New York friends at the heart of Yanagihara’s story.

However, his condition is only an extreme — and negative — version of the ambiguity that characterises all the people around him, among whom identity is continually in flux. When one friend, Malcolm, declares that he is not black, and another, Willem, that he is not gay, it is not because they are ashamed of being either, but because they are insisting on a complexity these terms do not allow. The past still infects them (a third friend, JB, paints himself as Steppin Fetchit and ridicules Malcolm as an Uncle Tom), but in the main they have unparalleled liberty to create themselves as they wish, embodying a new kind of self, one with more freedom than ever before.

Some American critics have hailed A Little Life as a great gay novel, pointing to how its melodrama fits the tortured sensibility of much queer literature, and how its portrayal of isolation, fear and shame, but also of enduring friendship, reflects the experience of many gay men, particularly those who have lived through the Aids crisis. But gays are just the advance party for the culture that Yanagihara describes here, their networks of co-operation now the organising principle of many urban lives in which traditional structures of support have collapsed or been jettisoned.