No Free Bread

Certainly, no-one in A Little Life has ever eaten at Olive Garden. Although two main characters are meant to come from outside the novel’s affluent New York social scene, both of them are from specific and dramatic types of poverty. One was, famously, raised in a pederastic monastery, followed by almost literally every other setting for sexual abuse of a boy one could imagine (spoilers for A Little Life). The other was raised on a farm by Danish immigrants; we hear few details except for the template one imagines of what it would be like to be raised on a farm by Danish immigrants. Very few rats appear. I am sympathetic to the romance of the rolling yellow prairie bowed under the weight of a Midwestern snow, but something is funny to me about the fact that nobody in this novel ever smoked pot at a fast food job or watched Naruto in a dilapidated farm house while his single father worked the fields for rent.

Well—you can’t get everything in. What I mean perhaps is that nobody in this novel has bad taste, and it feels that the novel couldn’t stand to be otherwise; it would interfere with the premise that all people, including men raised in extremely traumatic circumstances that shatter them at a profound developmental level, are basically, at the centre of their being, upper-class New York art school students.

(I don’t often insert warnings about content, but self-harm and suicide are discussed at length and in considerable emotional detail in the rest of this essay. I never attempted, myself, and am now many years on from consistent or serious suicidality; allow that to influence my credibility as you like.)

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