What does Veeky Forums think of A Little Life?

I mean for example when a protagonist rapes and it doesn't become a central moral issue. Rape and abuse is very much the central moral issue of A Little Life.

I'm really talking about some booktuber video posted here a few month ago where a girl panned Stoner because Stoner apparently rapes his wife (ambiguous).

Cons:
Flat, middlebrow prose. No excuse
Ridiculous portrayal of male characters' psyche and friendship, clearly done by an NYC dyke.
Extremely long
Token black is just that, and badly developed.
Starts out as "Friends", and then the author obsesses on one character for the rest.
Disabled hating homosexual psychopath

Pros
The length and effort and depravity the author goes to in order to draw out suffering from one character is awe inspiring
The feels one gets from said suffering
The novel itself is one of the most feels inducing novel ever
The character of Willem is excellent
The length is justified

>I cannot read novels outside my worldview
Not only that, but your criticism isnt justified. The characters live in their own bubble. There is no effort for social justice or hatred of men or love of liberalism even though the characters are gay. There is just sustained misery.

Also
This

Honestly thank you for this review i wouldn't want to read that. I hate the bourgeois left. I also hate the working class right.

Don't listen to him. There's nothing bourgeois left about the novel. It is apolitical except that it contains some gay characters

youtube.com/watch?v=PkRJzErnRmY

>bourgeois left
>working class right

what a strange timeline

Maybe I shouldn't have said "left" but it is very difficult for me to enjoy anything written from a bourgeois perspective. I feel that their mindset is a drain on culture and life itself. To me, nothing can be gained from exploring it. i would honestly prefer to read something by someone with genuine conflict in their life. When we read it isn't passive, much less if we purchase a book.

Ugh man The offspring are really bad.

>someone with genuine conflict in their life

The book is about a character who was sexually abused as a child

I know I know. Hard to find solace these days. I'm reading through Norton's postmodern American lit anthology and every one of the author bio includes how they went to a pricey private college no one in my income bracket has ever heard of. And they push this narrative that "white men" have all the privilege when in reality we are divided inexorably by class, still. And the white men instead of recognizing their respective places have embraced a victimization narrative with the full populism it entails. I want to hear from the third world, from the underclass but the only time they get a voice it is as an outsider, a totemistic object of feint praise or if they have been thoroughly imbued with the narratives of their oh so politically correct oppressors.

What mindset/lack of suffering are you talking about. The book is about the lifelong effects of a boy sodomized by a monk and hundreds of pedophiles across the midwest and then being sodomized by his best friend and then being physically abused by every person he runs into while he wastes away from a mysterious disease despite a small group of companions that try unsuccessfully to tell him that life is worth living

I was sexually abused as a child but what has fucked me up more in life was being born into poverty and the funereal procession of deprivation that entails. I recognize that people who live in the third world, refugees, people who aren't in our bubble of concentrated wealth have ongoing, massive problems which me having a dick in my six year old ass can't even compare to. It is sad to face abuse, all the shame it creates, but it would be worse to watch your child starve as people do in Venezuela now.

>tell him life is worth living
This is the bourgeois mindset that I'm referring to. It is somewhat like Foucault's description of lepers in the Middle Ages, they are given a seperate place, sanctified in their exclusion and so on; this book sounds to me like a pornographic exploitation of suffering.

Aside from your childhood trauma and marxist leanings which I have alternatively felt bad for and laughed at and prepared pic related in regards to,

>a pornographic exploitation of suffering.

This is an excellent critique, which the NYRB called her out on:

nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/03/striptease-among-pals/

Very good book

>Marxist leanings
The problems of class and poverty and exploitation are not exclusive to Marxism and I despise all utopian thinkers. If anything I support criminals, insurgents and generally any spontaneous, violent moment directed at the rich or the police. Ideology is pointless, it is completely ironic. I have committed such acts in the past. Essentially though my politics are focused on ephemeral things, and I doubt if it would ever amount to saving the world.

>Feint praise
I know this is a typo but I'm going to pretend you coined this phrase and I will use it myself.