A Little Life

1

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 realized that there was something amiss about two men in their twenties who were not a couple and yet were trying to rent a one-bedroom apartment on a dull (but still expensive) stretch of Twenty-fifth Street. Do you have anyone who can sign on as your guarantor? A boss? Parents?

Our parents are dead, said Willem, swiftly.

The agent sighed. Then I suggest you lower your expectations. No one who manages a well-run building is going to rent to candidates with your financial profile. And then she stood, with an air of finality, and looked pointedly at the door.

When they told JB and Malcolm this, however, they made it into a comedy: the apartment floor became tattooed with mouse droppings, the man across the way had almost exposed himself, the agent was upset because she had been flirting with Willem and he hadn t reciprocated.

Who wants to live on Twenty-fifth and Second anyway, asked JB. They were at Pho Viet Huong in Chinatown, where they met twice a month for dinner. Pho Viet Huong wasn t very good--the

Hanya Yanagihara

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST   MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST   WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times The Washington Post The Wall Street Journal NPR Vanity Fair Vogue Minneapolis Star Tribune St. Louis Post-Dispatch The Guardian O, The Oprah Magazine Slate Newsday Buzzfeed The Economist Newsweek People Kansas City Star Shelf Awareness Time Out New York Huffington Post Book Riot Refinery29 Bookpage Publishers Weekly Kirkus

Astonishing. The Atlantic

Deeply moving. . . . A wrenching portrait of the enduring grace of friendship. NPR
 
Elemental, irreducible. The New Yorker

Hypnotic. . . . An intimate, operatic friendship between four men. The Economist
 
  Capacious and consuming. . . . Immersive. The Boston Globe

Beautiful. Los Angeles Times

Exquisite. . . . It s not hyperbole to call this novel a masterwork if anything that word is simply just too little for it. San Francisco Chronicle

Remarkable. . . . An epic study of trauma and friendship written with such intelligence and depth of perception that it will be one of the benchmarks against which all other novels that broach those subjects (and they are legion) will be measured. . . . A Little Life announces [Yanagihara] as a major American novelist. The Wall Street Journal

Utterly gripping. Wonderfully romantic and sometimes harrowing, A Little Life kept me reading late into the night, night after night. Edmund White

Spellbinding . . . . An exquisitely written, complex triumph. O, The Oprah Magazine
 
Drawn in extraordinary detail by incantatory prose. . . . Affecting and transcendent. The Washington Post

[A Little Life] lands with a real sense of occasion: the arrival of a major new voice in fiction. . . . Yanagihara s achievement has less to do with size . . . than with the breadth and depth of its considerable power, which speaks not to the indomitability of the spirit,