Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character.

For the first fifty or so pages, as the characters attend parties, find apartments, go on dates, gossip, and squabble with each other, it is easy for the reader to think he knows what he’s getting into: the latest example of the postgraduate New York ensemble novel, a genre with many distinguished forbears, Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children” among them.

As the pages turn, the ensemble recedes and Jude comes to the fore. And with Jude at its center, “A Little Life” becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery.

In this godless world, friendship is the only solace available to any of us.

Like the axiom of equality, “A Little Life” feels elemental, irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it.

cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves. It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.

Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes. They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen.

And if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.

But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.

I feel like it’s actually in an idealized future because of the fluidity of their sexual path as well, especially with Willem. [Editor’s note: At the start of the novel, Willem dates women and later is in a romantic relationship with Jude.] There’s a certain flow to it where it’s less judged. The references are all dealt with in a very casual way, which is natural and how I’ve always felt about my own sexuality. I really related to that part on a personal level because, although it felt idealized, it also felt like the way that I see things.

When I was struggling with my family, I had a very complicated relationship with them, I was with a woman who was very maternal, who took care of me and taught me that family was what you made of it, that it was logical vs. biological. When I started exploring my own vanity and going to the gym and working out and paying attention to my body, it was when I started dating a guy and seeing a naked man for the first time, and that comparison and this brotherhood … it all happened exactly when it was supposed to happen. And then when I didn’t feel like I was really being myself and I didn’t know the type of gay man I wanted to be, I went out and dated women again.