My friend Jennifer Miller and I share a love of deep reading. Big long books that we read closely, over a week, so intimate they become part of us. Think Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, most Tom Wolfe, any Dickens’.
We both loved Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and for the National Book Award, but won neither, which left us flummoxed. Here’s a book that made Jen weep for the first time since she read Anna Karenina. (I cry over Master Card “Priceless†commercials, so my tears mean little in this category.)
Yanagihara’s story is heartbreaking, but that’s not why we’re naming it to the first ever Milller-Moore Prize, for the best read of the year. It is worthy for breadth of story, well-drawn characters, seamless situations, unfussy writing. More than any other read this year we were besotted.
The story begins tamely, following four college friends, each ambitious in a different field, living in New York City. One is an architect, another an actor, a third is a painter and the fourth — the story’s main character — is an attorney with a crippled body and mind.
His is the story of the novel: how Jude St. Francis went from an abandoned infant to a successful lawyer. The reader learns of Jude’s harrowing youth — sex slave, hustler — but his friends, family, doctor, lovers do not, and puzzle over his self-destructive ways. (He’s a cutter, anorexic, failed suicide.)
Difficult reading, yes, but we’re invested in Jude. Can he love? Can he bear loss? Will he survive?
Once hooked by her characters there’s no giving them up. Bravo to our prize winner, Hanya Yanagihara.