Young Mungo, A Little Life
I covered new coastline recently, from Miami to Charleston and then farther up to Elizabeth City North Carolina. The pavement of the 95 blended in with nature and a gas stop in no-mans-land had me walking through an abandoned fast food restaurant to use a sour bathroom. Buc-ees on billboards, Spanish moss, shallow water with tan grasses, and a dinner involving several martinis, oysters, fried chicken clean and pure, black-eyed pea salad, a delicate and elegant serving of scallop potatoes, and some hush puppies landed me first in Charleston. As I headed farther north, several days later, I was determined to finish this essay and the book that has been keeping me from moving forward.
On my mind since August has been these next two books, I went into Barnes and Noble for A Little Life but walked out with Young Mungo by Douglas Stewart. It was on the first table and as I read the back and flipped through the pages catching lines I left with it instead. I remember, like many who connected with Harry Potter, dreaming of escaping the trapped parts of myself however hard to define. That’s why I looked out of my window at night for blue cars, why I was captivated and non-forgetting of Corrie and David, and why my body undergoes an intense release when those who are trapped escape. I think this is why Young Mungo was such a cathartic experience, when I reached the final pages I had been suffocated; when an escape route presented itself the hope of getting out was intense. I turned those final pages aggressively in fear that Mungo would lose those moments in the bathtub, helping care for the birds and most of all James who’d been beaten half to death, and so I began crying heavily when Mungo was saved by his brother. Young Mungo found the trapped pieces lodged inside me, gripped them, squeezed them, and then released extracting metastasized buildup from not crying enough in my life. For an hour or so after I let myself cry around my apartment, shaking and breathing heavily.
Rooms with windows that cannot open, the burning church scene in The Patriot, turning the flashlight off at a cave’s end in a tiny suffocating hole with my sister and her friend, the reason I prefer the last row of a plane, thirteen-year-old Christian Bale frantically riding his bike to escape the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong all come to mind when I think of Mungo running to the bus stop where he is not alone. Young Mungo was an unexpected flashlight and a delicate tool for current and future emotional operations.
A Little Life was different, the same internal pieces ignited, and squeezed, though not so exorcising in its little redemptive ending. It took me almost six months to finish this 814-page book, not because of its dense and academic content but because of its relentlessly abused main character: Jude. Worthy of its awards, and stunning observations of the modern man this book was agonizing as it was richly laid out.
My first observation was the descriptions of the interior spaces throughout the novel, beginning with a classic New York City shit hole on Lispenard Street and a new word crenellation. As the characters grow, so do their spaces, unfolding in a home I enjoyed creating in my imagination: the Lantern House. With each newly revised blueprint for Greene Street, hallways have materialized and then vanished, and the kitchen has grown larger and then smaller, and bookcases have gone from stretching along the northern wall, which has no windows…
Hanya Yanagihara is diligent in creating the interior space of the book itself, describing the subjects of JB’s art and creating the titles and plots of movies for Willem to exist in. A Little Life is not filled with one-liners that stand alone, but is instead full of paragraphs that serve the same fulfillment. In the following paragraph, she presents the progression of JB’s breakthrough in his artwork while making observations of modern emptiness in the substance of culture.
So he lazed from canvas to canvas, doing paintings of people on the street, of people on the subway, of scenes from Ezra’s many parties (these were the least successful; everyone at those gatherings were the sort who dressed and moved as if they were constantly being observed….) until one night, he was sitting in Jude and Willem’s apartment… watching the two of them assemble dinner.
JB goes on to sketch his friends cooking on various evenings, capturing them in candid moments of everyday life, and then one night after having dinner out, the four friends are walking home in the snow. Here JB observes that his friends, without speaking, have adapted to a certain style of walking; the coordinated movement’s source: Jude. This moment was the first note I made towards the novel’s purpose, to capture intimate insight into the small pieces of life and mark the source of gravity present in every community. A lesson in gravity: all that is not said will pull people close in proximity which will no longer exist when they are separated, all that is said will pull people close but physical distance will not matter.
I’ve found myself writing about the character I wasn’t very focused on and one who is not the prominent figure of the novel yet JB is the only one who outlived all of his friends and the one who served as the historian. In my notes, I unearthed the other necessary roles of the village: Malcolm the builder of shelter and holy spaces, Willem the heart and source of love, and Jude the disruptor and conduit of the spiritual.
Though not without a little amount of redemption the novel’s end is not a release. The only moment I experienced some relief was when Jude lost his legs, the legs taking on the external manifestation of his abuse and when he lost them something suppressed felt liberated. I then had the thought that I would feel better if his whole body was redone because after the neverending battleground of Jude’s body, the only way out was for it to be replaced for him to live. I quickly moved on to the realization that these trapped pieces of us are not held by the external rules, and so the whole body amputation was not the cure I was looking for.
To close a novel in suicide is realistic, yes, but realism is not a sure way to keep the reader for life. I cannot say that I will not read this book again, there was plenty in it that I loved and may crave to return to, but committing to an 800 page novel for a second time given its gruesome conclusion is hard to justify. Even harder so, when you can see before you all the little beautiful moments these characters share only for the source of gravity to feel it was not enough.
and they leave the house’s every window, every door open, the ceiling fans spinning, so that at night, when they finally seal it shut, they trap within it the fragrance of meadows and trees.
