Not quite a third of the way into A Little Life, one of this year’s most divisive novels and hotly tipped to win the Man Booker Prize, Jude St Francis is given a present by Harold Stein, once his law professor and now his great friend and protector. It’s a “small leather box, about the size of a baseball”, inside which is a watch that has until that moment belonged to Harold and, before that, to his father, changing hands when Harold turned 30. Harold might have given it to his own son but he died of a rare and horribly painful illness that incrementally robbed him of his faculties when he was a small child. Now, Harold is adopting Jude, who is himself 30, “so at least I haven’t messed up the symmetry of this”. But it is asymmetry and suffering that are A Little Life’s main tropes.
Such an overtly meaningful gift might throw anyone off course and Jude’s reaction is not an especially odd one: “He runs his thumbtip lightly over the initials. ‘I can’t accept this, Harold,’ he says, finally.” But that moment seemed to me a synecdoche of the book. It proceeds by the drip-drip distillation of intense emotion but it also veers dangerously into cliché. Does anyone ever actually say the words “I can’t accept this” in such circumstances? Or, rather, anyone who has ever seen a film?
Content from our partners
