Summary:
After first meeting
as college roommates, Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm make their way through college
and then onto New York City to pursue career interests. We follow them through
the subsequent decades as Jude becomes a highly effective attorney, Willem a
famous actor, JB an acclaimed artist, and Malcolm a prize-winning architect.
What starts as a
cluster of four eventually separates into an orbit of Willem, JB, and Malcolm
around Jude at the center. The gravitational force pulling the three others
towards Jude is the fidelity that can form among college roommates and a love
that has bonded them together even more. But, there is also a strong sense among
the three that Jude needs them for both physical and emotional support. At
first, and for a good long time, it’s just a sense, but they later come to
learn that their intuitions are right, that Jude does indeed need them and why.
Over the years covered in the novel, a second orbit forms around Jude
comprising a surgeon-cum-close friend, adoptive parents, a work colleague, and
a neighbor. They, too, know Jude needs them, but only learn why late into their
relationships. Until then, they are alternatively and often simultaneously
worried, angry, flummoxed, and stymied about what’s at the root of his ambulatory
limitations and severe leg pains, and why he cuts himself with terrifying
frequency.
Through a fractured
narrative sprinkled with artfully-constructed subliminal hints, Yanagihara
reveals Jude’s life before he arrived at college. She tells of Jude’s
beginnings as a foundling taken in at a monastery. This hopeful start for Jude,
however, becomes a childhood and adolescence of unrelenting, horrific, sexual
assault and torture—when at the monastery, when on the road after being
kidnapped by a monastery brother, when in protective custody, and even when he
is able to escape. He arrives at college bearing the psychological and physical
consequences of these experiences, but not openly displayed to a degree that
yields more than a few hints of a traumatic past. With the support of the
people surrounding him in his
adult life, he is able to become a highly accomplished attorney, and to achieve
some measure of ease and happiness from time to time. The support he receives,
however, is not enough to protect him from the consequences of further
psychological and physical assaults, including his self-mutilation practices,
and tragic losses. Ultimately, Jude engineers his own final tragedy.
Some of the people left behind suffer from
more than Jude’s loss. His friend the surgeon wonders whether he enabled Jude’s
self-cutting by always patching him up and never committing him to an inpatient
psychiatric unit. Jude’s adoptive father relives the loss of his first son at a
very young age to a rare, degenerative, neurological disease. Nearly all the
figures in this novel experience suffering in some form or another, but this is
more the story of Jude; how the people around him tried to get him past the
horrors of his childhood and adolescence, but eventually and sadly to no avail.
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