The Edit
I mastered the art of subway reading in my second month of living in New York, having discovered early in life that there is no better way to avoid eye contact than by burying oneself in a book. These days, on the 40-minute ride from Jackson Heights to the Upper East Side, I am nose deep in A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. I generally refrain from offering opinions on books before I have finished them, lest my latest fancy take an Interstellar-esque turn at the eleventh hour (perplexing at best, disastrous at worst). But apart from overstuffed patient records and guidelines on arteriovenous fistulas, A Little Life is by far the best thing I’ve read all week, all month, all year.
It is about a group of friends—which I normally avoid, preferring my own group of real live friends, who complain just as much but are exceedingly entertaining—in New York City—which I also avoid, to bolster my commitment to reading as an act of escapism. I chose the book on the basis of a single recommendation: my roommate stayed up three nights in a row to finish it. “I feel empty,” he told me, after 814 pages. “Great,” I said. “Can borrow it tonight?”
A Little Life is bursting with emotions so minute that I never knew they existed until someone put them to words. It reminds me of a theory of literature in which writing is fundamental to the pursuit of ideas. I write, therefore I am—as if syntax not only conveys but constructs logic. Words denote people and places and things yet also, irreducibly, contain them. I once was frustrated that a single stroke spelled the difference between words and worlds, but the more I think about it, the more fitting it seems. Every book is a world unto itself. Of course, I realized a hundred pages in, there is no better stage than New York City for the juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty, trauma and gripe.
A Little Life is also bursting with all the words I never knew. Amanuensis. Dirigible. There is a subway poem, whose title I cannot remember, in which Eve goes around naming every animal then wishes someone would name her. Carapace. Uxorious. Suet. Reading Yanagihara is like removing a cataract: suddenly the world is bright, beaming, technicolor. I cannot remember the last time I savored a book, especially one of this length, but already I feel a part of me hoping it will never end, fearful of the void that will take its place.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I have 342 pages to go. A lot can happen.