In Which We Remain As Sympathetic As We Have Always Been

No Tragedy

by TAYLOR HINE

A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Doubleday, 720 pp.

I read the first few pages of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life on Sunday afternoon. I remember the day being overcast, but that may be just an after-effect of reading the novel. The cover beckoned me over to the “staff picks” table – was the man about to cry from pain or from having an orgasm? Will this book really be as wonderful as everyone says it is?

This is what A Little Life is about: four friends, but mostly just one of those friends – the one, we’re supposed to think, whose experiences matter most in the group. Jude St. Francis is an orphan of unknown ethnic origin who was found either in or next to a trash can in an alleyway as a baby and raised by a coterie of monks who all happen to be terrible people. The other three have their own problems: drug addiction, struggling for art, working jobs that don’t pay enough, finding a halfway decent roommate. The novel opens with two of the friends, Willem and the aforementioned Jude, being chastised by an apartment agent for not being able to afford the place she’s showing them. A Little Life, then, is a novel like many others: it’s about going home. In Jude’s case, it’s about finding a home: the first sentence reads, “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.”

A Little Life is probably supposed to appeal to me – after all, it’s about a group of twenty-somethings precariously navigating the post-college adult world. It’s a very New York novel, which suits, naturally, most of its reviewers and friends of mine who live there. There are no references, however, to 9/11 or any current events or political movements that might set the novel in a given time period. One reviewer argued that this is to make the novel timeless, but I’m more inclined to think that the characters in the novel just don’t have much time to think about it.

The first third of the novel is spent explaining the stories of how each of the four friends – JB, Malcolm, Willem, and Jude – ended up in New York City. There are arguments about race and homosexuality and other categories and labels. As it turns out, Jude can’t be categorized. His friends call him “The Postman” because he’s uncomfortable with divulging his life story, which is what really sets him apart from his three friends: “We never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him…[He’s] post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.” They find him fascinating. The more anyone finds out about him throughout the novel, though, he becomes someone to feel sorry for rather than an intriguing, mysterious person: someone they try desperately to help in whatever ways they can.

The rest of the novel is deeply troubling. Jude’s story is nothing more and nothing less of abuse. He defines his life by it; his suffering is the beginning and end of his character. A new maxim is presented: things only get worse; they don’t get better. It’s like the film version of The Shining: “All [Jack Torrance] does is get crazier,” King said in a recent interview. “In the movie, there’s no tragedy because there’s no real change.” Peppered with flashbacks to Jude’s sexual and physical abuse in childhood and adolescence are depictions of the various ways he tries to cope: he maims himself, avoids the questions and concerns of his friends, and balks at the idea of anyone being able to love a man in a wheelchair.

Jude gives up on his life by the end of the novel. After one suicide attempt earlier on, Willem moves in with Jude – after a short while, they begin a romantic relationship. It’s a troublesome relationship for Jude, despite finally being with someone who treats him well. The one aspect of it he can’t handle is sexual intimacy. Instead of telling Willem as much and to avoid hurting his feelings (in other words, to avoid confrontation of any sort, even though Willem would be just as understanding and as sympathetic as he’s always been), he maims himself more than ever.

Before picking up A Little Life, I thought the saddest story ever told was that of Job’s inexplicable suffering. Job’s story, however, has a message that can be taken away from it: Sometimes we suffer, and we don’t know why. Nobody earns whatever suffering befalls them – justice isn’t that simple. The punishment doesn’t always fit the crime; there doesn’t even have to be a crime. Despite this meager ultimatum, or because of it – whichever you prefer – what matters, I think, is how we carry ourselves during those times of suffering. We can choose to give up, or we can try not to. A Little Life is a depiction of what the limits of that suffering can look like, a treatise on just how much one person can take. At one point, Jude “prays to a god he doesn’t believe in,” indicating that the blame in fact could lie outside of himself, even though he never says so outright. In fact, he spends most of the novel believing he brought all of his suffering upon himself, with increased paranoia and regression over time as a result.

A Little Life left me with little more than frustration when I finished it. It’s an utterly hopeless novel, unlike any other I’ve ever read. They were right in saying that you shouldn’t pick up A Little Life if you’re feeling sad, that it would only make you feel sadder. Now to that, I agree.

Taylor Hine is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Asheville.

"I Want You" - Anthony Hamilton (mp3)

In Which Will Arnett Creates An Entirely New Identity For Himself

Whatever Happened to Baby Gob?

by TAYLOR HINE

Flaked
creators Will Arnett & Mark Chappell

The reasons that people choose to live where they do never fail to interest me. Often, it can be about growing out of one place and into a new one. Perhaps even more often, people think that a change of scenery is absolution — that escaping a place is as simple as leaving it.

It’s a bit more complicated than that for Chip (Will Arnett), the protagonist of Flaked, the new Netflix series co-written by Will Arnett and Mark Chappell and produced by Mitch Hurwitz.

“I moved to Venice by accident,” Chip says during an AA meeting in the first episode. “Let me rephrase that. I moved to Venice because of an accident.” You guessed it: Chip killed a man while driving drunk.

Venice, California, appears to be a great place to escape to, recovering alcoholic or not: it’s a small beachside town whose alleyways are framed by palm trees, white fences, and flowering bushes of pink azaleas; you can walk or bike anywhere; the sun is pretty much always out; the guy who owns Free Coffee will probably give you free coffee. It’s here that Chip owns an odds and ends store, in which he purports to build three-legged stools. He lives with his best friend, Dennis (David Sullivan), a wine distributor and fellow recovering alcoholic from whom he steals wine and girls.

When a new girl comes to town, she expresses more interest in Chip than in Dennis, and for good reason: she’s the sister of the man Chip killed, and she’s come to Venice to find him. London (Ruth Kearney) falls in love with Chip, having postponed her wedding to a fiancé that Chip knows nothing about. London must have been very, very compelled by the fact that Chip wouldn’t let a potential dot com millionaire sponsor for his store, Topher (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), take advantage of her as part of the deal.

It could also be that she’s forgiven him for what happened. I wonder how she’ll react when she finds out that he’d actually taken the blame for the accident caused by his soon-to-be ex-wife, Tilly (Heather Graham), to keep her career from being jeopardized.

What compelled me to watch the whole show in one sitting, besides the great soundtrack (composed by Stephen Malkmus), and besides the slow reveal of secret after secret, was Chip’s ability to be good, even when those around him didn’t have much faith in him. They had reason, of course — but this made Chip’s right decisions all the more powerful.

Flaked is a compelling character study of a man who creates a new identity for himself in a town that’s suited for him. Don Draper did essentially the same thing in Mad Men, only he wanted to escape his downtrodden home and family. Chip damaged his reputation in the process of taking the blame for his wife, so moving to a new town would make sense. Of course, his lie catches up with him when London comes into the picture, but at least there’s forgiveness at the heart of their interactions; it would be a shame, not to mention boring, if she sought to take revenge on him.

As it is, London’s seeing him as a human trying to better himself after what he did, even admiring him for it — even though it’s a lie, even though he didn’t actually kill anyone, the capacity to forgive is itself an admirable trait, even if she isn’t who she says she is, either. Forgiveness is redemptive because it entails giving someone a second chance. Flaked is a show about forgiving people who might not necessarily deserve to be forgiven — though isn’t that what makes it so redemptive?

The season ends with Dennis having found out about Chip stealing his wine and having hidden the truth about the accident from him for a whole decade. Their friendship is left unknown; where Dennis leaves Chip on a street corner, London appears, taking Chip’s hand and walking with him down a sidewalk lit by shop windows toward an unknown future. What we’re left with is a glimmer of hope that Venice will treat them well.

Taylor Hine is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Asheville. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"A Part of You" - Ocean Jet (mp3)

"Breaking the Stones" - Ocean Jet (mp3)

In Which We Have Shed All Of This Dead Weight

Tinted with Pastels

by TAYLOR HINE

Diary of a Teenage Girl
dir. Marielle Heller
102 minutes

I’ve never owned a Polaroid camera. At thirteen or fourteen, I briefly toyed with the idea of buying one and pursuing what I thought would be “authentic” photography until I got an iPhone. I snapped a few photos of standard things — the tops of buildings and trees against clear blue skies, myself posed in mirrors and outdoors — and made them dusky and hazy, with vague lines and muted colors. Naturally, they looked even more amateurish than they already were.

I’d tried to hearken back to a time well before I was born when photos often fell out of thin slits and had to be shaken out vigorously in broad daylight to be fully seen. Photos like that had seemed more original to me than our own digitally clear and sharp ones; they were tangible tokens of living “in the moment,” without the ability to be altered. There were no “filters” — there was only the quality of light.

Luckily, I was able to simply tap “revert to original” and start over.

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The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a film set in mid-1970s San Francisco. Fifteen-year-old Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley), a fledgling cartoonist, tells the story of her first sexual encounter (and her first love), which happens to be with her mother’s 30-something boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård).

Diary, based on a graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner, is not only about first love, but about how we capture first love. The first time Minnie has sex, she begins telling her story into a tape recorder. Throughout the film, her voiceover musings are accompanied by her own illustrations: pink hearts float to the surface of her bathtub and pop like bubbles; flowers bloom and birds circle around Monroe’s face in her mind. Minnie hangs her first post-coital Polaroid on her mirror to remind herself of her newly acquired adulthood, and their whirlwind romance of them versus the evil monster — her largely absent, coke-addled mother, Charlotte (Kristen Wiig).

Ascribing labels to the people in Minnie’s life would detract from the meaning of the film. The thrills aren’t supposed to come from Monroe being a “predator” or Charlotte being an “addict,” because they aren’t just stereotypes. Minnie and her friend Kimmie (Madeleine Waters) could be your typical teenage girls, but not every pair of girlfriends is able to say they were in a threesome together. They are only typical in their naïvete, largely unaware (or ignorant) of the existence of emotional consequences.

When we look back on fond memories of someone we used to love, they often, if not always, aren’t exacting. They’re softened, sometimes tinted with pastels — even the arguments and the despair are coated in sunlight or the brightness of rain-soaked things. Diary is a veritable storybook; at one point, Minnie’s favorite comic book writer, Aline Kominsky (an underground comic artist of the era), takes shape in a diner booth, all shaky lines and bright watercolors, contentedly sketching her next project alone, smiling. This phantom stands out against the muted haziness of Minnie’s existence as her only mentor–through letters, too, Aline encourages Minnie to keep practicing her art.

Had Diary been told in retrospect, it would have held a kind of beauty that would have been less immediate and almost ineffective. Part of what captivates us about first love is how out of focus and rose-colored it looks in the moment, not just in memory. Watching Diary was way more fun than the idea of rereading my own high school diaries. Fortunately for me, I shredded the pages of those diaries and had them recycled to give them a practical use – they were dead weight, recollections of boys and other letdowns, and of no use to me as the writer I wanted to become.

The most significant details, though, have never left me, and they’re the details that make my story especially mine. This is less of a surprise and more of a blessing. Minnie’s recordings are what get her in trouble in the end, and the miracle is that that doesn’t stop her. Instead she channels her story through her art and shares it with whoever might want a part of it — even Monroe, who happens to be jogging by as she peddles miniature sketches on the beach.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl is exactly what its name suggests, only better. It’s a brutally honest — and in no way contrived — presentation of first love, and all of the splendor and self-doubt that accompany it. It’s about speaking up for yourself, even if no one, not even your mother or your best friend, wants to hear what you have to say.

Taylor Hine is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Asheville. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing for This Recording here.

"Wolves" - Kanye West (mp3)

"Ultralight Beam" - Kanye West (mp3)