Eleanor's Reviews > A Little Life

I was somehow reminded of a line from that great 1950s film "All About Eve": when Eve was telling a horrified group about all the terrible things that had happened to her, Birdie's response was "What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snapping' at her rear end."

Despite all the reviews saying how wonderful, moving and generally fantastic this book was, I thought it was horribly manipulative in the way it drip-fed titbits of information about Jude's terrible abuse, so that the reader was left wanting to know more.

I do not deny for a moment that there are people like Jude who struggle to live with terrible things that were done to them in their childhood. But I'm a bit doubtful that a person who is such a psychological mess would also be a terrific hot-shot lawyer, and so brilliant that he did a Master's degree in Pure Maths just for the heck of it. Of course he's brilliant at everything else too: a wonderful pianist who (apparently without ever needing to practise) sits down at his piano and tosses off Bach Partitas or Schumann's Fantasy in C. If he could play things like that, he was no slouch as a pianist. (If you are interested, here it is, played by Yevgeny Kissin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDlft... )

He can sing beautifully, he can cook wonderfully, and despite being full of self-loathing, he somehow manages to have everyone who knows him love him to bits. Really?

And then there's the fact that the book covers several decades. We are told from time to time that someone was now 40, or 48 or 52, but none of them seemed to change and learn. There is quite a large cast of characters, but nearly all of them are just names: people coming to a birthday dinner or going to an art exhibition. And they are all so self-absorbed that we have no idea of the outside world at all. Even cataclysmic events such as 9/11 get no mention, despite the fact that they all live in New York. Apparently they didn't notice.

Jude and his three close friends (why are they friends by the way - just because they roomed together at college apparently) are all stunningly successful. An acclaimed artist, who seems to keep on churning out the same paintings of his friends (done from photographs) over the decades; an actor who becomes a famous star without any difficulty at all it seems; and a brilliant architect designing houses, museums and who knows what in America and overseas.

I feel I'm being extremely generous in giving this book two stars. I only kept reading it to see if it got better or more plausible. It didn't.