glad i came to this book late and missed the "is this tragedy porn? is this pro-suicide? is this a black comedy? does yanagihara want us to hate jude too? is yanagihara a fujoshi?" tumble dryer of online book discourse. i do not care, and this is stuff that matters a hell of a lot more in nonfiction; this story is not purporting to be real (looking at you, nasdijj). you know what's actually interesting about this book? its remove to what is practically a secondary world.

like all rich new yorkers, the characters here can ignore the entire planet beyond the northeast megalopolis. no hideous american mass culture touches them, except for gossip media, and only occasionally. nearly all films and plays and paintings are made by the same handful of friends and their friends and their friends. everyone probably lives within walking distance of two artisanal cheesemongers (one romantic, one germanic). they experience places like "the west" and "philadelphia" as traumatic pre-gatsby memories where nothing can be made, only lost or destroyed; they experience "morocco" and "italy" and "beijing" as a string of high-dollar vacations and work engagements with zero sense that they've changed cities, let alone countries. even their own precious NYC is coldly inventoried by street names, restaurants, galleries, theaters, a few well-appointed apartments, and a poverty-cosplay shitty one.

just as nothing of the place really changes, there's a snowglobe quality its sense of time. i got no feeling of the passage of decades outside the changes in the characters' inner lives and their parodistic careers, which must have taken decades, because they certainly age...current events? what current events?

example: jude's childhood groomer-rapist seems to have a laptop computer, which would put his prepubescence in the late 90s at the earliest, which would make him about my age, which would put his suicide at maybe ten or fifteen years from now. the future! and it doesn't matter because every single year in a little life feels like 2007. maybe that's just how it's always been for rich new yorkers.