In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that mankind’s problem is not necessarily “suffering itself” but “instead the fact that there was no answer to the question: ‘Suffering for what?’” Leaving the Harold Pinter Theatre after three hours and 40 minutes of A Little Life, I found myself internally screaming that exact same question. With no moral lessons that I could discern, no Greek catharsis, and very little aesthetic pleasure for its own sake, I had to wonder why anyone would bring this novel to the stage?
Of course, commercial motivations may account for it. Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 Booker-nominated epic is a million copy bestseller, a ‘cult classic’, and was even toasted by Garth Greenwell in The Atlantic as the “great gay novel”. This was not met without objection. Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books wrote that the novel “revives a pre-Stonewall plot type in which gay characters are desexed, miserable, and eventually punished for finding happiness”, and reads like “the projection of a regressive and repressive cultural fantasy from the middle of the last century.”
