A Little Life

Jude’s entire adult social circle is made up of extremely wealthy people. Malcolm, JB, and Willem all rise to the top of their artistic fields; Harold is not just a professor at an Ivy League university, but a famous and popular author as well. The friends Jude makes early in his law career end up doing equally well for themselves. Jude himself procures a spot at a top New York City law firm in his thirties. They are people who can afford to buy multiple houses in multiple cities, traveling between them as need or whim dictates. They can take lavish vacations at a moment’s notice. They give each other expensive gifts for celebrations and anniversaries. Jude and Willem even have their own signature scents; Willem contracts a perfumer in Europe to create them and continues to buy them on special order until his death.

On one level, the extraordinary success of this group is not entirely surprising; people tend to make friends with people who inhabit similar socioeconomic worlds as themselves. However, it does stretch plausibility that so many people who were not fabulously wealthy when they met all became fabulously wealthy later. One reason Yanagihara may have for parading this lavish wealth in front of the reader is to underline that some trauma is too profound to recover from, even with extravagant riches to expend on the effort.